The late Paul Kane is my authority for some of the details of intonation and gesture-language. He brought back with him a valuable collection of studies of the different races in British North America; and, by means of the jargon, he learned in a short time to converse without difficulty with the chiefs of most of the tribes around Fort Vancouver. But as an artist he was in constant use of his pencil; and, as he told me, he frequently appealed to it, sketching himself, or at times putting his pencil and note-book into their hands, with considerable success in thus supplementing less definite signs. The gesture-language furnishes Cheyenne, Dakota, Apache, and other signs for “paint, colour, draw,” and “write”; the act of writing or drawing being expressed by holding up the palm of one hand and moving the forefinger of the other over it, as if drawing. The jargon has also its word _pent_, “paint,” transformed to a verb by prefixing the word _mamook_, “to do, to make”; and its _tzum_, “painting,” or “mixed colours”; _mamooktzum_, “to paint.” In the gesture-language of the Dakotas and Apaches the equivalent sign is primarily indicative of daubing the face with colour; but the tribes of the Pacific coast paint their masks, boats, and houses in diverse coloured devices, with some degree of taste. There is, therefore, reason to look for terms expressive of the art in any language in use among them; though the habitual employment of signs may in some cases check the evolution of phonetic equivalents. But among many tribes gesture-language has been systematised into universally recognised pictographs, and so developed into a native system of hieroglyphics.
Among the Algonkin, Lenape, Iroquois, and other northern tribes, and in the region comprising New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and other south-western territory, rock-carvings and pictographs abound. Wherever large surfaces of rock, or slabs of stone, offer a favourable opportunity for such records, they are found, at times executed with great elaboration of detail. But less durable records are in use, dependent on the materials most available to the scribe. The Algonkins and Iroquois ordinarily resort to birch-bark; the Crees, Blackfeet, and other prairie Indians, substitute the dressed skins of the buffalo; while, as already noted, the tribes on the Pacific coast, as well as the Innuit and Eskimo, employ deerhorn and ivory. In the South-West, in the Sierra Nevada and Southern California, the sculptured pictograph, after being incised on the surface of a rock, or the wall of a cave, is frequently finished by colouring in much the same way as was the custom with the ancient Egyptian chroniclers.