The Lenape Stone; or, The Indian and the Mammoth

by Henry C. Mercer

The Huron-Iroquois will tell us, when questioned, that at an early period, and while the families were still united, his people, coming originally from the northeast of Canada, migrated to the southward, and had not come from the west across the Mississippi; he too has traditions of crossing a river and attacking a race of mound-builders, but the river of his account was crossed to the southward, and lay on the north of the mound-builders' country. The Iroquois tradition is given in a famous passage, supposed to refer to the mound-builders, in the account of David Cusic, a native Iroquois, of the Tuscarora clan, who wrote a history of his tribe. We give it here in the original, uncorrected form, as published by Schoolcraft.

Referring to an early age of monsters, demi-gods, giants, and horned serpents, when the Hurons and Iroquois were as yet but one people, and they and other tribes, "the northern nations," possessed the banks of the great lakes, "where there were plenty of beavers," but "where the hunters were often opposed by the big Snakes," Cusic goes on to say that "on one occasion the northern nations formed a confederacy, and seated a great council-fire on the river St. Lawrence. Perhaps about 2,200 years before the Columbus discovered the America, the northern nations appointed a prince, and immediately repaired to the south and visited the Great Emperor, who resided at the Golden City, a capital of the vast Empire. After a time the Emperor built many forts throughout his dominions, and almost penetrated the Lake Erie. This produced an excitement; the people on the north felt that they would soon be deprived of the country on the south side of the great lakes. They determined to defend their country against any infringement of foreign people; long, bloody wars ensued, which lasted about one hundred years. The people of the north were too skilful in the use of bows and arrows, and could endure hardships which proved fatal to a foreign people; at last the northern nations gained the conquest, and all the towns and forts were totally destroyed, and left them in the heap of ruins."

It has been supposed that the upper St. Lawrence or Detroit River, streams noticed by the Indians as abounding in fish, was the "Fish River" of the Heckewelder tradition. Here, as we have seen according to information collected from the Lenni Lenape, desperate battles had taken place with the Allegwi, hundreds of whom were slain and buried under mounds in that vicinity.[L]

Other considerations, too, induce us to suppose that the Lenape and Huron-Iroquois invasion came from the northward and not from the west. If we study the shape and position of the mounds themselves along the southern shore of the great lakes, we find that they present often the appearance of fortifications erected against the advance of an enemy from the north, and suddenly abandoned after a long struggle. Also the scattered implements and half-removed blocks of ore found in the prehistoric copper mines on the south shore of Lake Superior, seemed to indicate their hasty desertion by the miners upon the sudden inroad of an enemy from that direction.

Again, the works of the mound-builders, though at some points insignificant and hardly perceptible, extend considerably west of the Mississippi, and probably would have been encountered by the advancing Lenape before reaching that river, and had it been the stream meant it would not have been spoken of as the boundary of the mound-builders' empire.[M]

Fig. 18.

The Wallum Olum, however, with its hieroglyphics, does not end with the brief extract given. Song five, consisting of fifty-eight verses, recounts the details of the occupation by the conquerors of the Ohio valley, and long wars with enemies denominated "Father Snakes," "Stone Snakes," and "North Snakes," whose pictograph in the original manuscript is here given (fig. 18). They pass the Alleghenies, and exploring the Chesapeake Bay and great rivers of "the large and long east land," finally establish themselves on the Delaware, making "Maskekitong," the rapids at Trenton, the centre of their dominions. We have now reached the time of the coming of the whites, and the last verses of the song speak in brief simplicity of a people who came from somewhere, "and that which was white" (ships) "coming from the East Sea."

There is still another song—the sixth—continuing the chronicle and recounting the melancholy story of the Lenape's contact with the whites, and final westward journey to Ohio, where the records were obtained. A narrative of sufferings and hard wrongs, whose recital by the Indian had caused Heckewelder, as he said, "to feel ashamed that he was a white man."

The symbols appended to the songs, and among which the forms of the rectangle and circle frequently occur, end with the fifth song; they appear very arbitrary, and it is certainly disappointing to find that they bear no resemblance to the carvings upon the Lenape stone, likewise, as we have supposed, productions of the Lenni Lenape and dealing with the same subject. Yet we need not be surprised when we consider the varied and often arbitrary methods of Indian picture-writing.