[Illustration: FIG. 142.--Plenty Buffalo meat. Dakota.]
Figure 143 is taken from Prince Maximilian’s Travels, _op. cit._ p. 352. The cross signifies, I will barter or trade. Three animals are drawn on the right hand of the cross; one is a buffalo (probably albino); the two others, a weasel (_Mustela Canadensis_) and an otter. The pictographer offers in exchange for the skins of these animals the articles which he has drawn on the left side of the cross. He has there, in the first place, depicted a beaver very plainly, behind which there is a gun; to the left of the beaver are thirty strokes, each ten separated by a longer line; this means: I will give thirty beaver skins and a gun for the skins of the three animals on the right hand of the cross.
[Illustration: FIG. 143.--Pictograph for trade. Dakota.]
The ideographic character of the design consists in the use of the cross--being a drawing of the gesture-sign for “trade”--the arms being in position interchanged. Of the two things each one is put in the place before occupied by the other thing--the idea of exchange.
Figure 144, from the record of Battiste Good for the year 1720-’21, signifies starvation, denoted by the bare ribs.
[Illustration: FIG. 144.--Starvation. Dakota.]
This design survives among the Ottawa and Pottawatomi Indians of Northern Michigan, but among the latter a single line only is drawn across the breast, shown in Figure 145. This corresponds, also, with one of the gesture-signs for the same idea.
[Illustration: FIG. 145.--Starvation. Ottawa and Pottawatomi.]
Figure 146, from the record of Battiste Good for the year 1826-’27, signifies “pain.” He calls the year “Ate-a-whistle-and-died winter,” and explains that six Dakotas, on the war path, had nearly perished with hunger when they found and ate the rotting carcass of an old buffalo, on which the wolves had been feeding. They were seized soon after with pains in the stomach, their bellies swelled, and gas poured from the mouth and the anus, and they died of a whistle, or from eating a whistle. The sound of gas escaping from the mouth is illustrated in the figure. The character on the abdomen and on its right may be considered to be the ideograph for pain in that part of the body.