Part 5

In answer to your request, I put on paper a few thoughts in relation to the carved gorget of slate said to have been found in Bucks Co., Penna. It is needless to say that I have examined the stone with great care; for if it is a work of prehistoric times in America, it is a specimen of very great archæological interest. The first impression I received was that it was probably a fraud. This was of course natural, after having seen several gorgets with figures carved upon them which were unquestionable frauds. I therefore first of all examined the stone, and was sorry to find that it had been so much cleaned, and rubbed, and scrubbed, and probably oiled, that no evidence could be derived from the character of the lines cut upon the surface of the stone, or from the stone itself, bearing upon its antiquity. So far as the testimony of the stone itself is concerned, the lines may have been cut within a few weeks or many years ago. Throwing out of consideration all the facts you have given me in relation to the history of the stone as known to you, I am left with the character of the carvings alone upon which to draw conclusions. From a study of these I get the following results:

1st. The person who carved the stone must have been familiar with the appearance of an elephant or mammoth, either from having seen one or the other in life or represented in pictures. There is too much expression given to the details of outline of forehead, curve of back and belly, and position of the legs, representing the animal as walking, to be the work of one who only knew the animal from a general description handed down by tradition.

2d. Most of the other figures on both sides of the stone are of a character common to Indian picture-writing, but there are a few which, like the "mammoth," show an appreciation of details or ideas unlike any I can recall in Indian picture-writings. Take, for example, the fish on the edge of the small piece, and the long eel-like figure by the side of the bird--each of these have a few hair-lines drawn from the back as if to represent the rays of fins, in order to impress the character of a fish, although the rays are out of natural position. The figure of a man on his back under the foot of the "mammoth" is not drawn in the usual conventional manner, like the figure of the man with the bow.

3d. The idea of the heavens, conveyed by the figures of stars, moon, and sun, is probably not an unusual way of representing the sky or the heavens, but the mass of crossed lines near the sun, which are supposed to represent lightning, seems to me to be more the conventional symbol of the white man than the Indian.

Considering all these points I draw these conclusions:

1st. The carvings were made in ancient times by an Indian of superior artistic skill, who had seen a living mammoth, and who wished to preserve some myth or tradition relating to the animal, in picture-writing upon his gorget; or,

2d. The carvings were made by an Indian in comparatively recent times, with the same idea of preserving a myth about the "great beast," and he was aided in his work by some white man; or,

3d. That the carving is the work of some white man in very recent times, who may or may not have known of the myth and tradition of the Indians relating to the "mammoth."

An attempt to read the stone as a pictograph illustrating the myth of the "great beast" may be going too far, but if it can be shown to be a piece of Indian work beyond reasonable doubt, the interpretation of the figures in that connection is certainly legitimate from the remarkable coincidence between them and the myth.

I certainly hope you will bring every possible evidence to bear in your work, and that by a study of many pictographs you will be able to test the doubtful figures on the stone.

Yours very truly, [Signed] F. W. PUTNAM, Curator Peabody Museum.

Extracts from a report of an examination of the Lenape Stone by Dr. M. E. Wadsworth, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The answers are Dr. Wadsworth's.

Q. Are the carvings made by steel or flint instruments?

A. The depth and regularity of the carvings indicate that they were made by some dulled steel tool like an awl.

Q. Are the carvings later than the fracture of the ends and the middle?

A. Later--for the tool-mark can be seen at one end striking across the broken surface, and lines crossing the middle fracture do not match on both sides. On one side they pass down on the rounded and worn surface of the fracture, below their position on the other side. This is seen in all the marks (three only) crossing the line of fracture. One other line sinks down on one side, and ends against the fractured portion opposite. This appears to have been made after the fracture by holding the pieces together. It is very remarkable that the line of fracture should cross the specimen at the only place it could and intersect the minimum number of the lines of carving. Even in two of those cuts, the fracture breaks across the point where they cross one another. * * *

[Signed] M. E. WADSWORTH.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 17, 1884.

Extracts from a report of an examination of the Lenape Stone by Mr. J. P. Iddings, of the U. S. Coast Survey. The answers are Mr. Iddings'.

Q. Can it be decided beyond reasonable doubt whether the carvings were made with a steel or flint instrument--is there a great probability either way?

A. I do not know.

Q. Are the carvings beyond a reasonable doubt later than the fracture in the middle--(or other fractures)?

A. They appear to be later than the middle fracture; they do not lie at the same depth on the edges of both pieces. The small arrow's shaft does not appear to have been a continuous line. It is interesting to note that the middle fracture only crosses three lines on one side and none on the other side, and that in no other position could one happen without cutting half a dozen or more. The carvings appear to have been arranged with reference to the break.

[Signed] JOSEPH P. IDDINGS.

New York, March 24, 1884.

Letter from Dr. F. W. Putnam referring to the two carved stones (figs. 19 and 20) found on the Hansell Farm in the summer of 1884.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., Oct. 30, 1884.

DEAR MR. MERCER:

I have examined the two specimens you have placed in my hands from the Hansell Farm, Bucks Co., Penn., and see no reason to doubt their authenticity. The lines cut upon them seem to have been made a long time since, as exhibited by the weatherings within the incisions. One stone seems first to have been designed for a perforated ornament, but not completed, and was afterwards used as a rubbing implement, as shown by the notches on the edge. The other stone is of a natural form, in which two holes have been drilled, and on one surface a number of waves and zigzag lines were cut, evidently for the purpose of using the stone for an ornament.

Yours very truly, [Signed] F. W. PUTNAM.

* * * * *

The reader is referred to a series of articles mentioning the Lenape Stone in the Bucks County _Intelligencer_ of August 9, 23, and 30, and September 20, 1884, and headed, "Who Perpetrated the Forgery?" also to a personal discussion which took place in the columns of that newspaper between the owner of the Stone and Mr. H. C. Lewis, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, in which arise various questions of veracity as to the facts of an interview which had taken place between them--_i. e._, whether Mr. Lewis had or had not wished to buy the Stone, and how long he had been allowed the loan of it; whether he had or had not been permitted to take photographs; and whether he or Mr. Paxon had scratched the surface of the Stone "to see its inside structure."

After a fair consideration of every fact bearing upon the case, and with ample knowledge to judge of the particulars of this interview at the time it took place, personal considerations prevent the writer from discussing the merits of this controversy, purely personal in its nature and irrelevant to the question before us.

EVIDENCE OF AN HONEST DISCOVERY.

The first evidence to be certain of in a case of this kind is doubtless that deducible from the circumstances attending the discovery itself, and upon it, in the present instance, for the reason that the Stone has been cleaned, and all vestiges of the soil which originally clung to it unfortunately removed, we must chiefly depend.

The fact that several persons saw the first fragment immediately after it left Hansell's hands, throws back the period of possible doubt as to its authenticity to the nine years of his ownership, while the remarkable skill and archæological knowledge necessary to forge such a stone place him as the possible maker of the carvings above the slightest suspicion. The motive of gain must be eliminated from the possibilities of the case, when we consider the trifling sum received by Hansell for the relics, and the fact that the small piece was presented by him to the present owner, while the supposition that he could have been in collusion with any person unknown for the purpose of a practical joke is rendered impossible by his own honest simplicity and the conduct of his family and friends throughout. Again, no one clever enough to have made the relic could have been a neighbor of Hansell's and remained unknown or unsuspected, and it is quite absurd to suppose that some one from a distance, having entrusted the fortunes of so elaborate a practical joke to the fragments of this small stone, would have "planted" the results of his labor in Buckingham Township, Bucks County, where the chances were very strongly against its being brought to the notice of archæologists, even if discovered.

OBJECTIONS OF ARCHÆOLOGISTS.

From the _a-posteriori_ point of view--_i. e._, from the character and appearance of the carving, there are objections which have been considered important to the Stone's authenticity; these the writer has carefully noted, and will allow them to speak for themselves.

First, in the opinion of Messrs. M. E. Wadsworth, of Cambridge, and Joseph P. Iddings, of the United States Coast Survey, the carvings were made after the Stone was broken. The fact is proved, they say, by the appearance of certain lines crossing the fracture, as in the case of the lightning above the hole on the right, which, when exposed to the microscope, seem as they cross to descend into it.

Secondly, the fracture, they say, crosses the minimum number of carvings as if they had been arranged with reference to it.

Thirdly, the mammoth on the Stone resembles the La Madeleine carving.

As to the first point--the carving being later than the fracture,--Dr. F. W. Putnam (of the Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) observes, on the other hand: "It is possible that an Indian might have made his carving on a broken gorget, and there is no reason why he should have discontinued his work if the gorget were broken during the carving, a likely thing to happen,"--nor, we may add, need it be difficult to suppose that the Indian would have glued the pieces together or cleaned out the grooves crossing the fracture. In such a case the instrument would naturally have broken somewhat into the fracture--"sinking down," as Dr. Wadsworth says, "and ending against the fractured portion opposite," while the subsequent weathering and brushing might account for the slight difference in level of the lines on either side of the break. Again, supposing the mammoth carving to have been made before the fracture, the carvings on the reverse of the Stone, and the apparently meaningless scratch below the perforation, which, as it were, skips the fracture, may have been made long after it. As Dr. Putnam says: "The fact that a very large number of perforated stones are broken when found is worthy of consideration, and also that in most cases the fracture is through one of the holes." As regards the resemblance of the mammoth on the Stone to the La Madeleine carving, a point which after a careful examination of all the facts struck Professor Shaler, of Harvard, as suspicious, there is certainly in the outline of the tail and the indicisive drawing of the back a great similarity in the treatment of the two figures; while, on the other hand, as Dr. Charles Rau, of the Smithsonian Institute, supposes, the resemblance may perhaps be ascribed to accident, the drawing of the head, ear, trunk, and hair being, as he suggests, totally dissimilar. The seeming repetition of the outline of the back in the two figures may perhaps be looked upon as a suggestion of the mane-like ridge of hair, which, as seen in some of the reconstructions, extended along the back of the animal from the neck to the tail; and it may be observed that any two profile drawings of the same animal, as realistic as the above, would naturally possess striking points of resemblance. Dr. D. G. Brinton, of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, objects, in a letter above quoted to the Bucks County _Intelligencer_, that "no lines indicating shading or rounding are found in the aboriginal designs of pure native origin in the Eastern United States," that in these designs grouping was unknown, and that "any such triple arrangement as the brute, the human, and the divine groups standing in immediate relation to each other and forming parts of a picture, was far above aboriginal æsthetic conceptions," that "lightnings shooting from a central point (as from the hand of Jove) were unknown to the art-notions of the red race," and that "the treatment of the sun as a face with rays shooting from it, I also consider foreign to the pictography of the Delaware Indians; nor have I yet seen any specimens proved to be of their manufacture that present it. It is found, indeed, in Chippeway pictography, but there only in late examples."

To this we can only say that nothing is more common than "grouping" in the pictography of our modern Western Indians, while the more ancient pictographs of the pre-Columbian Indian, a study of which would be necessary in forming definite opinions, as to their character, have been almost entirely lost to us.

These were probably very rarely carved upon stone or made upon any thing but the most perishable materials, and few have survived the bigotry or indifference of the early settlers and explorers. Their character is, we think, not fully represented by the meagre data furnished us from the allusions of the early writers, the Chippeway bark records, the "wallum olum," or the rock inscriptions now within the student's reach, and from which we are left to draw our conclusions as to the evolution of "grouping" or "shading," or the ability of the Indian to treat the sun, moon, and stars, or lightning.

There could have been no great mental chasm, we think, between the æsthetic conceptions of the modern Sioux or Comanche, who pictures a buffalo hunt on his robe, and those of his pre-Columbian red brother, who, as Loskiel says, painted his "bedeutende figuren" on the trees of a Pennsylvania forest.

Domenich says, in the "History of North America," p. 426:

"We have seen painted upon bark the representation of a Chippeway emigration, passing through rivers, forests, and mountains, on their way from the borders of a lake to a more civilized country; above the river were creeks and trees, symbols of forests, and tumuli indicating mountains; finally, on top of the picture a dozen animals, totems of the Chippeway chiefs, each with a heart in his breast."

The same author says, again: "One seldom sees a garment on which there is not a drawing in black, yellow, red, white, or blue, representing guns, lances, heads of hair, arrows, shields, the sun, moon, men, horses, roads, etc., and sometimes mythological objects."

Possessed as we elsewhere find of a considerable power of delineation of which our present extremely insufficient vestiges can give us no adequate idea, and having already conceived the idea of a "brute, human, and divine group" in his numerous traditions of a great monster, the enemy of man, destroyed by divine wrath and lightnings, we can by no means think that the ancient Delaware would have found it more difficult than the Chippeway mentioned above, to express his conception in a rude picture involving such a triple grouping.

TREATMENT OF THE SUN IN INDIAN PICTOGRAPHY.

As to the "treatment of the sun," we find faces with rays, or divergent curves, in Schoolcraft, vol. i., p. 362, figs. 16 and 17, and p. 409, fig. 9; vol. iii., p. 493,--a circle with rays in the rock inscription (Delaware perhaps) on the Susquehanna near the Maryland line, a face without rays in the rock inscription (also Delaware, possibly) at Safe Harbor on the Susquehanna, and a face with rays, the counterpart of the carving in question, on a small broken tablet found near Akron, Ohio, in the collection of the late Mr. Dupont, of Philadelphia, who had no doubt of its authenticity.

LIGHTNING IN INDIAN PICTOGRAPHY.

The marks in the picture evidently representing forked lightning, and directed as in the language of the tradition at the forehead of the beast, are without parallel among the Indian pictographs within the writer's reach. The symbolic snake, or barbed zigzag of the Moquis--the only Indian lightning that the writer has been able to find--differs greatly from this, yet there seems no good reason why the Indian should not have sometimes represented lightning as he saw it.

LINES CUT BY STEEL AND FLINT INSTRUMENTS.

As to the steel-cut appearance of the lines, Dr. Brinton says: "The lines on the Lenape Stone are obviously cut with a steel instrument, making clean incisions, deepest in the centre and tapering to points, quite different from the scratch of a flint point"; and Dr. M. E. Wadsworth thinks that "the depth and regularity of the carvings indicate that they were made with some dulled steel tool like an awl." On the other hand Mr. J. E. Iddings does not know whether it is possible thus to distinguish the work of steel and flint instruments, and a series of experiments with the microscope and steel and flint points has induced the writer to believe that lines cut on a similar stone by "a dulled steel instrument" and a flint arrow-point cannot be distinguished after both have been washed and scrubbed.

The appearance of such lines would of course depend much upon the sharpness of the flint or steel point, the kind of stone used, and whether the lines were cut by one or by a series of strokes. The single scratch of a scissors point on a shale tablet of similar hardness makes an incision in shape like the letter V; that of either an awl or flint arrow-head one like the letter U; while any line made by either instrument and consisting of a series of strokes will have its bottom furrowed by parallel grooves, as in the case of the large lines on the Lenape Stone.

The fresh flint-cut grooves, however, when separately examined with the microscope, exhibit many faint scratches running along the furrow, not so conspicuous in the steel incisions, yet a few applications of soap, water, and a scrubbing-brush efface these scratches in both cases, and render the surface of the grooves indistinguishably alike and in appearance similar to the now polished incisions upon the Lenape Stone. In other respects the scratch of the arrow-head can be made of equal depth, clearness, and regularity, the flint point, if held carefully, not appearing to tear the edges of the incision more than the awl. Moreover, we can cause the flint-cut line to "taper to a point" or not, as we choose.

NEWLY DISCOVERED INDIAN CARVINGS FROM THE HANSELL FARM.

Strongly in support of the authenticity of the Lenape Stone and its honest discovery, are the two carved stones, figs. 19 and 20, recently discovered on the Hansell Farm, while the present paper was preparing, and proving that, however rare in other localities, small stones were not infrequently carved in this neighborhood. Dr. Putnam "sees no reason to doubt their authenticity," and Professor Shaler, of Harvard College, to whom the writer has shown fig. 19, says: "If, upon comparing the incised lines with those on the Lenape Stone, it appears that they have the same character--_i. e._, the same shape of furrow,--then you will undoubtedly add a good deal to the weight of evidence in favor of the antiquity of the other ornament."

Considering, however, the variety of lines which may be cut with a flint instrument, we would hesitate to assign great importance to this comparison. An examination with the microscope proves that the lines on the gorget, fig. 19, are not so neatly and deeply cut as those on the Lenape Stone, and that the bottoms of the grooves are more rounded. While most of the lines on the banner stone, fig. 20, "tapering into points," seem as deeply and clearly cut as those of the mammoth outline, the microscope shows few, if any, scratches on the surface of the grooves, which bear all the traces of long exposure to the weather.

OPINION OF INDIANS.

The writer has made several efforts to obtain opinions upon the Lenape Stone from modern Indians, particularly Delawares, in the West and in Canada. Mr. Horatio Hale, of Toronto, who kindly showed photographs of the carvings to several Indians in Canada, among whom were some very intelligent Delawares, says that "they thought that the Stone showed Indian workmanship, and would have been inclined to consider it authentic but for the mammoth, which perplexed them. They had never heard of such a creature, and, fearing a hoax, were shy of saying much about the symbols on the reverse side of the Stone; the pipes would naturally, they said, indicate a treaty; the snow-shoe, that some of the tribes concerned came from the North; and the tortoise, hawk, deer, etc., would be the marks or totems of the different tribes; with regard to the doubtful figures, they could give no explanation."

Of course, the value of these opinions would in each case depend upon the tribe to which the Indian belonged, and how far his former knowledge of a pictographic art or the traditions of his race may have been lost by many years of contact with the whites.

INDIAN PIPE-FORMS.

The strong resemblance of the pipe figure (_l_) to the modern Sioux calumets, made of catlinite or red pipe-stone from the famous quarry in Southwestern Minnesota, has been spoken of as another objection to the authenticity of the Stone. The form does not occur, as far as the writer can learn, in any of the ancient rock-writings of the eastern Algonkins, and no pipes of exactly the Sioux shape, which Mr. E. A. Barber, of Philadelphia, considers the most modern of Indian pipe-forms, have as yet been discovered in the ancient Delaware era, nor even in the mounds.

On the other hand, the profile of the Sioux form itself could not more closely correspond with the minute outline, which is too small, perhaps, to be taken very strictly, than does the _profile_ of fig. 21--a pipe now in the Archæological Museum, at Salem, Mass., and found by Dr. Putnam, in an ancient Indian grave near Beverly, Mass.

The other pipe figure on the stone might easily have been suggested by the form from the mounds, with a slightly curved base (fig. 22), now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass., and discovered in a mound in Ohio.

INDIAN PICTURE-WRITING.