Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/312

300 either conquered or absorbed this semi-civilized people, we might be tempted to conclude that the knowledge of this peculiar invention was a bequest to these modern tribes from their more advanced predecessors—just as some of the arts of Roman civilization were inherited by the barbarous conquerors of the empire. It is not impossible, nor indeed very improbable, that such may have been actually the case in this instance. But further inquiry shows that this system had a wider extent and probably a far remoter origin than this suggestion would explain.

Crossing the Rocky Mountains, we find the shell-money in actual use among the tribes of the Pacific coast, down almost to our own day. Three kinds were known. In Northern California, in Oregon, and still farther north, a rare species of cylindrical univalve, the Dentalium, or tusk-shell, known in the Chinook "jargon" as the hiqua, or ioqua, was strung upon a string, and used as money. Its extreme rarity and its attractiveness as an ornament made, as with the pearl, its only claim to value. But farther south the genuine wampum, or disk-money, owing its value to the labor bestowed upon it, and to its importance in the social policy of the people, was in universal use. Full and interesting details on this subject are given by Mr. Stephen Powers in his instructive work on the "Tribes of California." Among the Nishinams and, as he believes, among all the tribes of Central and Southern California, the materials chiefly used are two species of sea-shell, found upon the coast. The most common is a thick white shell, the Pachydesma crassatelloides, from which is formed the money known as hâwok. This consists, he writes, "of circular disks or buttons, ranging from a quarter-inch to an inch in diameter, and varying in thickness with the shell. These are pierced in the center, and strung on strings made of the inner bark of the wild cotton, or milkweed (Asclepias), and either all the pieces on a string, or all in one section of it, are of the same size." The value of this money varies with the size of the disks. The larger pieces are rated at about twenty-five cents; the half-inch pieces at about half that value; and the smallest pieces at three or four cents, being usually rated by the string. "This," continues Mr. Powers, "may be called their silver, and is the great medium of all transactions; while the money answering to gold is made from varieties of the ear-shell (Haliotis) and is called ullo. They cut these shells with flints into oblong strips, from an inch to two inches in length, according to the curvature of the shell, and about a third as broad as they are long. Two holes are drilled near the narrow end of each piece, and they are thereby fastened to a string of the material above-named, hanging edge to edge. Ten pieces generally constitute a string, and the larger