Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/503

Rh Another inquiry of interest relates to the time when wampum ceased to be made by the Indians. That the records are retained to this day among certain tribes is well known, though their use is slowly dying out. But the beads themselves are no longer made by the Indians. As regards the time when their manufacture ceased, very vague and some very erroneous ideas have prevailed. It is well known that for more than a century—in fact, for the greater part of two centuries—the wampum beads have been made by the whites for use in commerce with the Indians; and an opinion has grown up that this has been the case ever since the first arrival of the white colonists, and that most of the wampum records held by the Indian tribes have been woven from these modern machine-made beads. Mr. Holmes, however, gives the historical evidence which shows that this opinion has originated in error. He quotes Thomas Morton, of Massachusetts, who in 1630, writing of the New England Indians, tells us that "they have a kind of beads instead of money, to buy withal such things as they do want, which they call wampumpeak; and it is of two sorts; the one is white and the other is a violet color. These are made with the shells of fish. The white with them is as silver is with us, the other as our gold; and for these they buy and sell, not only among themselves, but even with us. These beads are current in all parts of New England, from one end of the coast to the other; and although some have endeavored by example to have the like made of the same kind of shells, yet none has ever as yet attained to any perfection in the composure of them, but the salvages have found a great difference to be in the one and the other, and have known the counterfeit beads from those of their own making, and do slight them." Nearly a century later the Carolina surveyor, Lawson, writing in 1714 of the same money, speaks of it as "all made of shells which are found on the coast of Carolina, which are very large and hard, so that they are very difficult to cut. Some English smiths," he adds, "have tried to drill this sort of shell money, and thereby thought to get an advantage, but it proved so hard that nothing could be gained." The introduction of the machine drill could not, in fact, have made much difference in this respect, as each bead must still be fashioned separately by a white workman, whose time was much more valuable than that of an Indian. That which finally gave the English beads an advantage was not the superiority or the cheapness of their workmanship, but the destruction of the Indian workmen. The quarter of a century which followed the publication of Lawson's book, from 1714 to 1740, saw the extermination of most of the Carolina tribes, and a great decline in the numbers of the Northern Indians from the effects of war and pestilence. It was during this period that the wampum-making industry seems