It is replete with interest thus to turn aside from the Old World, with all its wealth of intellectual progress associated with the letters of Cadmus, and find that in the western hemisphere the human mind has followed the very same path in its struggle towards the light. Longfellow, in his “Song of Hiawatha,” has interwoven Algonkin and Iroquois legends into a national epic, in which the elements of Indian progress are all traced to this mythic benefactor, subsequently identified by Mr. Horatio Hale, in his Book of Iroquois Rites, with a wise Onondaga chief of the fifteenth century. But, tracing in legendary fashion the early steps of Indian progress, the poet represents the mythic reformer mourning how all things perish and pass into oblivion. Even the great achievements and the traditions of their people fade away from the memory of the old men. And so he inaugurates the method of recording events, which in reality we recognise as the natural product of the human mind in the exercise of that imitative faculty which the discoveries of comparatively recent years have revealed to us as in full activity among the men of Europe’s remote Post-Glacial era. With his paints of diverse colours he depicts on the smooth birch-bark simple figures and symbols, such as are to be seen graven on hundreds of rocks throughout the North American continent, and are in constant use by the Indian in chronicling his own deeds on his buffalo robe, or recording those of the deceased chief on his grave-post. The result is a simple process of picture-writing, readily translatable, with nearly equal facility, into the language of every tribe. Deeds of daring against Indians or white men are set forth by the native chronicler, and the rivals are clearly indicated by means of their characteristic costume and weapons. Headless figures are the symbols of the dead; scalps represent his own special victims; and in like manner incidents of the chase, or feats against the buffalo or grizzly bear, are recorded in graphic picturings, which are as intelligible as any monumental inscription of ancient or modern times. The description in Longfellow’s Indian epic of the celestial and terrestrial symbols, in actual use as Algonkin and other aboriginal hieroglyphics, would answer, with slight modification, for those still to be seen on the walls of Egyptian temples and catacombs: —
For the earth he drew a straight line,
For the sky a bow above it;
White the span between for day-time,
Filled with little stars for night-time;
On the left a point for sunrise,
On the right a point for sunset,
On the top a point for noontide;
And for rain and cloudy weather
Waving lines descending from it.