AGE OF ABORIGINAL AMERICAN RECORDS
The desire to preserve to future ages the memory of past achievements is a universal human instinct, as witness the clay tablets of old Chaldea, the hieroglyphs of the obelisks, our countless thousands of manuscripts and printed volumes, and the gossiping old story-teller of the village or the backwoods cabin. The reliability of the record depends chiefly on the truthfulness of the recorder and the adequacy of the method employed. In Asia, the cradle of civilization, authentic history goes back thousands of years; in Europe the record begins much later, while in America the aboriginal narrative, which may be considered as fairly authentic, is all comprised within a thousand years.
ABORIGINAL AMERICAN CALENDARS
The peculiar and elaborate systems by means of which the more cultivated ancient nations of the south recorded their histories are too well known to students to need more than a passing notice here. It was known that our own tribes had various ways of depicting their mythology, their totems, or isolated facts in the life of the individual or nation, but it is only within a few years that it was even suspected that they could have anything like continuous historical records, even in embryo.
The fact is now established, however, that pictographic records covering periods of from sixty to perhaps two hundred years or more do, or did, exist among several tribes, and it is entirely probable that every leading mother tribe had such a record of its origin and wanderings, the pictured narrative being compiled by the priests and preserved with sacred care through all the shifting vicissitudes of savage life until lost or destroyed in the ruin that overwhelmed the native governments at the coming of the white man. Several such histories are now known, and as the aboriginal field is still but partially explored, others may yet come to light.
THE WALAM OLUM OF THE DELAWARES
East of the Mississippi the most important and best known record is the Walam Olum or "red score" of the Delawares, originally discovered in 1820, and published by Dr D.G. Brinton in 1885. It consists of a series of pictographs designed to fix in memory the verses of a genesis and migration chant which begins with the mythic period and comes down to the advent of the whites about the year 1610. It appears to be genuine and ancient, although the written chant as we find it contains modern forms, having of course been reduced to writing within a comparatively recent period.
It is said that the Cherokee seventy years ago had a similar long tribal tradition which was recited by the priests on ceremonial occasions. If so, it was probably recorded in pictographs, but tradition and record alike are now lost.
THE DAKOTA CALENDARS
West of the Mississippi the first extended Indian calendar history discovered was the "Lone-dog winter count," found among the Dakota by Colonel Garrick Mallery, and first published by him in 1877. This history of the Dakota was painted on a buffalo robe by Lone-dog, of the Yanktonai tribe of that confederacy, and extends over a period of seventy-one years, beginning in 1800. Subsequent investigation by Colonel Mallery brought to light several other calendars in the same tribe, some being substantially a copy of the first, others going back, respectively, to 1786, 1775, and the mythic period.