M. de Lamothe. The Ottawas will reply that having received it you should remember it, but since this collar is dumb and has lost its speech I am obliged to be silent myself.
In the Diary of the Siege of Detroit (a) it is narrated that after receiving a belt of wampum from the commanding officer the Pottawatomi chief called it the officer’s “mouth,” and said that those to whom it was sent would believe it when “they saw his mouth.”
But wampum designs, besides being mere credentials, and thus like the Australian message sticks, and also mnemonic, became, to some extent, conventional. The predominance of white beads indicated peace, and purple or violet meant war.
On the authority of Sir Daniel Wilson (a) a string of black wampum sent round the settlement is still among the Indians of the Six Nations the notice of the death of a chief.
The Iroquois belts had an arrangement of wampum to signify the lakes, rivers, mountains, valleys, portages, and falls along the path of trail between them and the Algonkins, who were parties to their treaty in 1653.
On the authority of a manuscript letter from St. Ange to D’Abbadie, September 9, 1764, quoted by Parkman (a), Pontiac’s great wampum belt was 6 feet long, 4 inches wide, and was wrought from end to end with the symbols of tribes and villages, 47 in number, which were leagued with him.
In addition to becoming conventional the designs in wampum, perhaps from expertness in their workmanship, exhibited ideographs in their later development, of which the following description, taken from Rev. Peter Jones’s (a), “History of the Ojebway Indians” is an instance:
Johnson then explained the emblems contained in the wampum belt brought by Yellowhead, which, he said, they acknowledged to be the acts of their fathers. Firstly, the council fire at the Sault Ste. Marie has no emblem, because then the council was held. Secondly, the council fire at Mamtoulni has the emblem of a beautiful white fish; this signifies purity, or a clean white heart—that all our hearts ought to be white toward each other. Thirdly, the emblem of a beaver, placed at an island on Penetanguishew bay, denotes wisdom—that all the acts of our fathers were done in wisdom. Fourthly, the emblem of a white deer, placed at Lake Simcoe, signified superiority; the dish and ladles at the same place indicated abundance of game and food. Fifthly, the eagle perched on a tall pine tree at the Credit denotes watching, and swiftness in conveying messages. The eagle was to watch all the council fires between the Six Nations and the Ojebways, and being far-sighted, he might, in the event of anything happening, communicate the tidings to the distant tribes. Sixthly, the sun was hung up in the center of the belt to show that their acts were done in the face of the sun, by whom they swore that they would forever after observe the treaties made between the two parties.
In the same work, p. 119, is a description of a wampum belt that recorded the first treaty between the Ojibwa and the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy. It has the figure of a dish or bowl at its middle to represent that the Ojibwa and the Six Nations were all to eat out of the same dish, meaning, ideographically, that all the game in the region should be for their common use.