SECTION 2.
DIRECTION BY DRAWING TOPOGRAPHIC FEATURES.
Fig. 451.—Micmac notice of direction.
Fig. 451 is a notice by Micmac scouts, which tribe was then at war with the Passamaquoddy, erected on a tree, to warn the rest of the tribe that ten Passamaquoddy Indians have been observed in canoes on the lake going toward the outlet of the lake and probably down the river. The Passamaquoddy tribal pictograph is shown and the whole topography is correctly drawn.
Notes in literature relating to the skill of the North American Indians in delineating geographic features are very frequent. The following are selected for reference:
Champlain (c), in 1605, described how the natives on the coast drew with charcoal its bays, capes, and the mouths of rivers with such accuracy that Massachusetts bay and Merrimack river have been identified.
Lafitau (d) says of the northeastern tribes of Indians—
Ils tracent grossierement sur des écorces, on sur le sable, des Cartes exactes, et ausquelles il ne manque que la distinction des degrés. Ils conservent même de ces sortes de Cartes Geographiques dans leur Trésor public, pour les consulter dans le besoin.
Sir Alexander Mackenzie, (a) in 1793, spoke of the skilled manner of chart-making by an Athabascan tribe, in which the Columbia river was drawn.
An interesting facsimile of a map with which the treaty of Hopewell, in 1875, made by the Cherokees, is connected, appears in American State Papers, Indian Affairs, I, 40.