OR THE INDIAN AND THE MAMMOTH BY H. C. MERCER NEW YORK & LONDON G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS The Knickerbocker Press 1885 COPYRIGHT BY H. C. MERCER 1885 Press of G. P. Putnam's Sons New York...

In claiming an impartial examination of so extraordinary a carving as the "Lenape Stone" at the hands of archæologists, the writer has had several difficulties to contend with. First , The fact that the carving is quite unique, it being the first aboriginal carving of the mammoth thus far claimed to have been discovered in North America. Second , That no "scientific observer" was present at the discovery. Third , That since its discovery the Stone has been several times cleaned, and that thereby

In the spring of 1872, eight years after the discovery of the famous mammoth carving in the cave of La Madeleine, Perigord, France, Barnard Hansell, a young farmer, while ploughing on his father's farm, four miles and a half east of Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, saw, to use his own words, a "queer stone" lying on the surface of the ground, and close to the edge of the new furrow. The plough had just missed turning it under. He stopped and picked it up; it was the larger piece of the fr

Let us picture to ourselves, as it occurred in ancient times, and when his customs and traditions were as yet uncontaminated by civilization, one of the great religious feasts of the Indian—a dance, in honor, perhaps, of the sun, or pipe of peace, or of the green corn. A wildly picturesque scene rises before us, as we read the descriptions of writers who have witnessed these ceremonies in later days; such a scene, as—in the language of Catlin: "not all the years allotted to mortal man could in t

On the writer's second visit to Hansell, the latter was at his father's farm. He stated that the photographs shown him were representations of the stone, and said that he considered that he had been cheated. He had had no idea of the stone's value, and declared that it was a "mean trick," the purchase of all his relics—the stone included—for $2.50. When it was explained to him that Mr. Paxon, the purchaser, had been as ignorant as he in the matter at the time, he seemed satisfied. On the third v

I remember Hansell telling me of his Indian relics at my father's office. I went to see him on a Sunday, and he showed me, in the wood-shed, a tobacco-box half full of relics, among them the large piece of the Lenape Stone. At the time I never realized what it was. It was covered with dirt, as were all the relics. There must have been about two hundred arrow-heads, broken and perfect, besides a broken axe and fragments of a banner stone, and one or two large spears and so-called "gigs." The ston

Young Hansell and his father were at my house on business (I am Justice of the Peace). They had rented a house. I think it was on a Saturday in '80 or '81, in the summer. The next day my son went to Hansell's and brought back a large number of Indian relics. He had invested two or three dollars in them. In the lot was one of the pieces of the stone. I remember saying that it was a pity he had not the other half. The lines were not cleaned out. I recollect the elephant. He emptied the relics on t

NOVEMBER 8, 1884. At the time of my first seeing the Lenape Stone, I observed an elephant or mammoth carved upon the fragment. I cannot now fix the date of my first seeing this piece. Probably it was some three years since, though it may not be two and may be four. I think it was before the Bucks County Bi-Centennial Exhibition. [Signed] JOHN S. ASH. Affirmed before   Elias Eastburn , J. P., Nov. 8, 1884....

I saw the stone first, I think, in November, in the fall of 1881, and a few days after Mr. Paxon had obtained the second piece. He had said to me that he had a curious stone which he wished to show me. I remember his mentioning the figure of a turtle, a snake, and an elephant carved on the stone, although he did not first mention the elephant figure or show that he appreciated the mammoth. It was not till he had read my article in the county newspaper that he came to know the value of the carvin

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

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 lin

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

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 zig-zag 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....

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

Fig. 19. —Carved "Gorget" 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 sho

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 cr

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 b

Schoolcraft, who has been more explicit than other writers respecting the picture-writings of the North American Indians, speaks of two distinct pictographic systems among the Algonkin tribes, called by them respectively Kekeewin and Kekeenowin . The first appeared to be their method of recording facts of every-day occurrence, and embraced the heraldic devices used upon the grave posts—the communications written upon birch bark, and the caution marks, itinerary, hunting, and war records inscribe

Another version of the big-buffalo tradition is found in Rembrandt Peale's pamphlet on the mammoth, published in Philadelphia in 1803. Notwithstanding the highly colored style of the translation the ideas expressed seem to be those of the Indian. It reads as follows: "Ten thousand moons ago, when naught but gloomy forests covered this land of the sleeping sun, and long before the pale men, with thunder and fire at their command, rushed on the wings of the wind to ruin this garden of nature, when

If the account of Cusic and the Lenape traditions concur in solving the mystery of the mound-builders, and proving their identity with the Allegewi of the Lenape tradition, the evidence is strengthened by the concurrent testimony of language, which, as Mr. Hale and others have shown, renders it probable that the conquered race, fleeing down the Mississippi, were received and adopted by the Choctaws and Cherokees, who thus became in part their descendants. Both the language of the Cherokees lying

JANUARY 8, 1885. While the foregoing pages were in course of publication, the carved "gorget" (fig. 23) was found on the Hansell farm, on Thursday, January 8, 1885. The circumstances of the discovery were as follows: Late in the autumn of last year—1884—the writer had caused an excavation to be made at a spot in one of the fields on the Hansell property, where the carved stone ( fig. 19 ) had been found. At this place the soil of the field, a yellowish clay, was very noticeably discolored as if