60. _Hattanwulaton_ (the Possessor) was _sakima_, and all the people
were pleased.
61. South of the lakes they settled their council-fire, and north of
the lakes were their friends the _Talamatan_ (Hurons?).
Nothing could be more interesting to the lover of American archæology
than a study of this song--with the single exception perhaps of the
Lenape stone, the most remarkable Indian document in existence. The
latter part of the story here given, is even less suggestive than the
preceding portions, which we have been obliged to omit.
The generations of chiefs, which it recites in order, seem to include
thousands of years, and as we read its account of a creation and a
deluge, of the passage of a great water upon the ice, and an arrival
at a "Land of Firs," we almost pardon the extravagant speculations of
Rafinesque, to which it gave rise.
Both versions of the account tell the same story, yet there is one
striking difference between them. In the Heckewelder version the
allies of the Lenape are spoken of as "Mengwi" (Iroquois, _Mingoes_);
in the Wallum Olum as "Talamatan" (Hurons, called Delamattenos by the
Delawares); but the variance is reconciled when we consider that in
ancient times, as their language and traditions prove, the Hurons and
Iroquois were one closely allied nation, constituting one family or
linguistic stock.
We may doubt, however, whether the great river crossed in the
migration--"_Namaesi Sipu_" (Fish River) in Heckewelder, and
"_Messussipu_" in the Wallum Olum--referred to the Mississippi.
The Huron-Iroquois will tell us, when questioned, that at an early
period, and while the families were still united, his people, coming
originally from the northeast of Canada, migrated to the southward,
and had not come from the west across the Mississippi; he too has
traditions of crossing a river and attacking a race of mound-builders,
but the river of his account was crossed to the southward, and lay on
the north of the mound-builders' country. The Iroquois tradition is
given in a famous passage, supposed to refer to the mound-builders, in
the account of David Cusic, a native Iroquois, of the Tuscarora clan,
who wrote a history of his tribe. We give it here in the original,
uncorrected form, as published by Schoolcraft.
Referring to an early age of monsters, demi-gods, giants, and horned
serpents, when the Hurons and Iroquois were as yet but one people, and
they and other tribes, "the northern nations," possessed the banks
of the great lakes, "where there were plenty of beavers," but "where
the hunters were often opposed by the big _Snakes_," Cusic goes on to
say that "on one occasion the northern nations formed a confederacy,
and seated a great council-fire on the river St. Lawrence. Perhaps
about 2,200 years before the Columbus discovered the America, the
northern nations appointed a prince, and immediately repaired to the
south and visited the Great Emperor, who resided at the Golden City,
a capital of the vast Empire. After a time the Emperor built many
forts throughout his dominions, and almost penetrated the Lake Erie.
This produced an excitement; the people on the north felt that they
would soon be deprived of the country on the south side of the great
lakes. They determined to defend their country against any infringement
of foreign people; long, bloody wars ensued, which lasted about one
hundred years. The people of the north were too skilful in the use of
bows and arrows, and could endure hardships which proved fatal to a
foreign people; at last the northern nations gained the conquest, and
all the towns and forts were totally destroyed, and left them in the
heap of ruins."
It has been supposed that the upper St. Lawrence or Detroit River,
streams noticed by the Indians as abounding in fish, was the "Fish
River" of the Heckewelder tradition. Here, as we have seen according
to information collected from the Lenni Lenape, desperate battles had
taken place with the Allegwi, hundreds of whom were slain and buried
under mounds in that vicinity.[L]
Other considerations, too, induce us to suppose that the Lenape and
Huron-Iroquois invasion came from the northward and not from the west.
If we study the shape and position of the mounds themselves along the
southern shore of the great lakes, we find that they present often the
appearance of fortifications erected against the advance of an enemy
from the north, and suddenly abandoned after a long struggle. Also
the scattered implements and half-removed blocks of ore found in the
prehistoric copper mines on the south shore of Lake Superior, seemed to
indicate their hasty desertion by the miners upon the sudden inroad of
an enemy from that direction.
Again, the works of the mound-builders, though at some points
insignificant and hardly perceptible, extend considerably west of the
Mississippi, and probably would have been encountered by the advancing
Lenape before reaching that river, and had it been the stream meant it
would not have been spoken of as the boundary of the mound-builders'
empire.[M]
The Wallum Olum, however, with its hieroglyphics, does not end with
the brief extract given. Song five, consisting of fifty-eight verses,
recounts the details of the occupation by the conquerors of the Ohio
valley, and long wars with enemies denominated "_Father Snakes_,"
"_Stone Snakes_," and "_North Snakes_," whose pictograph in the
original manuscript is here given (fig. 18). They pass the Alleghenies,
and exploring the Chesapeake Bay and great rivers of "the large and
long east land," finally establish themselves on the Delaware, making
"_Maskekitong_," the rapids at Trenton, the centre of their dominions.
We have now reached the time of the coming of the whites, and the last
verses of the song speak in brief simplicity of a people who came from
somewhere, "and that which was white" (ships) "coming from the East
Sea."
[Illustration: FIG. 18.]
There is still another song--the sixth--continuing the chronicle and
recounting the melancholy story of the Lenape's contact with the
whites, and final westward journey to Ohio, where the records were
obtained. A narrative of sufferings and hard wrongs, whose recital by
the Indian had caused Heckewelder, as he said, "to feel ashamed that he
was a white man."
The symbols appended to the songs, and among which the forms of the
rectangle and circle frequently occur, end with the fifth song;
they appear very arbitrary, and it is certainly disappointing to
find that they bear no resemblance to the carvings upon the Lenape
stone, likewise, as we have supposed, productions of the Lenni Lenape
and dealing with the same subject. Yet we need not be surprised
when we consider the varied and often arbitrary methods of Indian
picture-writing.
In comparing the carvings on the reverse of the Lenape stone with the
Lenape and Huron-Iroquois traditions of their early migration and
struggle with the mound-builders, we have spoken only of probabilities.
Possibly these carvings may refer to the incantations of the prophets
and doctors, to songs for "medicine hunting," or charms against evil
spirits, and not to the history of the tribe, as recounted in the
Wallum Olum and the narratives of Heckewelder and Cusic. Possibly,
too, the modern Indians who have seen the carvings may have entirely
mistaken their subject, as similar signs are used in quite different
kinds of their picture-writing. Yet if we view the chief feature of
the Lenape stone--the mammoth picture--as an example of muzzinabik
or historical picture-writing, an attempt to explain the carvings on
the reverse of the stone as specimens of the same class of writings
does not seem extravagant. Viewed in the light of these legends, and
compared with the fragments of ancient Indian history which chance has
preserved to us, the carvings upon the Lenape stone vividly impress
upon our minds the reality of that dark period of our continent's past,
antecedent to the first coming of the white man, separated from us by
but a few centuries, yet where the boundary line between history and
geology becomes indistinct, when for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
years the Indian lived alone on the "great island," and while those
deep-rooted peculiarities of his character, which civilization has
failed to eradicate, were slowly growing out of his wilderness life.
The ancient presence of the Lenape is often remembered in the heart
of his former dominions. Along the shores of the beautiful river,
whose transatlantic name, applied also to his tribe, he resented, the
arrow-head and tomahawk, everywhere found upon sites of ancient camps
and fishing-grounds, tell of the long centuries of his possession. His
memory lingers in the name and poetry of our Indian summer; and in that
most delightful of autumnal seasons, when a warm wind blowing from the
abode of the Great Spirit stirs the fields of ripened maize, we may
see, where first the Indian's fancy must have seen it, a suggestion of
his head-dress of feathers in the graceful motion of the corn-stalks.
He is immortalized in richly melodious names of rivers, streams, and
mountains, and his memory is forever recalled in the yearly growth of
that noblest of American plants, the Indian corn.
In concluding here our view of the less distinct though not improbable
reference of the carvings on the reverse of the Lenape stone to the
ancient historical traditions of the Delawares, a brief review of the
subject of the foregoing pages may not be out of place.
We have seen that the stone was found at a spot situated in the ancient
territory of the Delawares, and where many articles of undoubted Indian
workmanship have been found,--among them two carved stones,[N]--that
similar aboriginal carvings of the hairy mammoth have been discovered
in Europe, and that a race of men, relics of whom have been found on
the Delaware river and in California, and who may or may not have been
the ancestors of the modern Indian, have existed in North America at
the time of the mammoth. Moreover, that as yet nothing is definitely
known as to the antiquity of the Indians' occupancy of our continent,
and that there is no geological evidence to prove that the mammoth
did not survive in America to a comparatively recent period. We have
seen further that the Indians in several of their traditions attribute
the mammoth bones seen by them on the Ohio to a great monster who was
destroyed by lightning, and that there is a similarity too strong to be
accidental between the Lenape tradition of the great Buffalo and the
carving on the stone; finally, we may see perhaps a reference in the
carvings on the reverse of the stone to the early Delaware traditions
of their migration to the eastward and wars with the mound-builders, as
detailed in Heckewelder's account, the "Wallum Olum," and David Cusic's
history.