Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/311

Rh are remembered, but a far greater number have been forgotten. Of the many hundreds, and indeed thousands, of belts which are known to have been fashioned during the last three centuries, each bearing its own device, less than fifty whose meaning can be explained are now known to exist.

 Wampum Belt, commemorating the formation of the League of the "Five Nations" (Iroquois). The lozenge-shaped figure represents a native hearth, and indicates the Onondagas, the central nation who kept the council-fire of the confederacy. The square inclosures represent the other nations, the Mohawks and Oneidas on the right (or east), and the Cayugas and Senecas on the left. The connecting lines denote the "peace-path" opened between the nations by the League. The belt is about two feet long and ten inches wide.

Shell-beads exactly resembling the wampum are found in great abundance in the graves of the mound-builders, and sometimes, along with them, the large conch-shells from which such beads were made. Messrs. Squier and Davis, in their well-known work on the "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," remark that "the number of beads found in the mounds is truly surprising; they may be counted in some instances by hundreds and thousands." They are described as resembling "sections cut from the ends of rods, or small cylinders, and subsequently more or less rounded upon the edge. Some are quite flat, and resemble the bone buttons of commerce; others are perfectly round. Their diameter varies from one fourth to three fourths of an inch. The size of the perforation is also variable, usually, however, about one tenth of an inch." No one doubts that these beads were used for the same purposes among this vanished people as among their successors. Dr. Daniel Wilson, in his admirable work on "Prehistoric Man," after referring to the fact that in the great Grave Creek Mound, evidently reared over the tomb of some notable personage, the shell-beads, such as constitute the wampum of the forest tribes, amounted to between three and four thousand, finds it "singularly consistent with the partial civilization of the ancient mound-builders that in such deposits we have the relics of sepulchral records, which constituted the scroll of fame of the illustrious dead, or copies of the national archives deposited with the great sachem, to whose wisdom or prowess the safety of his people had been due."

Indeed, when we consider that the tribes among whom the wampum currency and records were afterward used, in the particular form thus far described, were those which at first surrounded and