Delaware language, which was an interpretation of an ancient sacred
metrical legend of the Delawares, recorded in pictographs cut upon
wood, obtained in 1820 by a medical friend of his among the Delawares
then living in central Indiana. He says himself: "These actual olum
were first obtained in 1820 as a reward for a medical cure, deemed a
curiosity, and were unexplicable. In 1822 were obtained from another
individual the songs annexed thereto in the original language, but
no one could be found by me able to translate them. I had therefore
to learn the language since, by the help of Zeisberger, Heckewelder,
and a manuscript dictionary, on purpose to translate them, which I
only accomplished in 1833." On account of the unique character of
the alleged Indian record and Rafinesque's own lack of standing among
his scientific contemporaries, but little attention was paid to the
discovery until Brinton took up the subject a few years ago. After a
critical sifting of the evidence from every point of view he arrived at
the conclusion that the work is a genuine native production, although
the manuscript rendering is faulty, partly from the white scribe's
ignorance of the language and partly from the Indian narrator's
ignorance of the meaning of the archaic forms. Brinton's edition
(q. v.), published from Rafinesque's manuscript, gives the legend
in triplicate form--pictograph, Delaware, and English translation,
with notes and glossary, and a valuable ethnologic introduction by
Brinton himself.
It is not known that any of the original woodcut pictographs
of the Walam Olum are now in existence, although a statement of
Rafinesque implies that he had seen them. As evidence of the truth
of his statement, however, we have the fact that precisely similar
pictographic series cut upon birch bark, each pictograph representing
a line or couplet of a sacred metrical recitation, are now known to
be common among the Ojibwa, Menomini, and other northern tribes. In
1762 a Delaware prophet recorded his visions in hieroglyphics cut upon
a wooden stick, and about the year 1827 a Kickapoo reformer adopted
the same method to propagate a new religion among the tribes. One of
these "prayer sticks" is now in the National Museum, being all that
remains of a large basketful delivered to a missionary in Indiana
by a party of Kickapoo Indians in 1830 (see plate and description,
pp. 665, 697 et seq. in the author's Ghost-dance Religion, Fourteenth
Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology).
(6) Fish river (p. 18): Namæsi Sipu (Heckewelder, Indian Nations, 49),
or Namassipi (Walam Olum, p. 198). Deceived by a slight similarity of
sound, Heckewelder makes this river identical with the Mississippi,
but as Schoolcraft shows (Notes on Iroquois, p. 316) the true name of
the Mississippi is simply Misi-sipi, "great river," and "fish river"
would be a most inappropriate name for such a turbulent current, where
only the coarser species can live. The mere fact that there can be a
question of identity among experts familiar with Indian nomenclature
would indicate that it was not one of the larger streams. Although
Heckewelder makes the Alligewi, as he prefers to call them, flee down
the Mississippi after their final defeat, the Walam Olum chronicle says
only "all the Talega go south." It was probably a gradual withdrawal,
rather than a sudden and concerted flight (see Hale, Indian Migrations,
pp. 19-22).
(7) First appearance of whites (p. 19): It is possible that this may
refer to one of the earlier adventurers who coasted along the North
Atlantic in the first decades after the discovery of America, among
whom were Sebastian Cabot, in 1498; Verrazano, in 1524; and Gomez, in