Annual Report Of The Bureau Of Ethnology

Edwin Thompson Denig was assigned as the post bookkeeper at Fort Union on the Upper Missouri in 1837 by the American Fur Company. He spent close to two decades there and married into the Assiniboine. In the summer of 1851, Father Pierre Jean de Smet spent two weeks at Fort Union. He encouraged Denig to write a number of sketches of the manners and customs of the Assiniboine and neighboring tribes. Denig compiled additional information in response to queries by early ethnographers, including Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who were collecting ethnological information about Indian tribes in the United States.

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A pictograph is a writing by picture. It conveys and records an idea or occurrence by graphic means without the use of words or letters. The execution of the pictures of which it is composed often exhibits the first crude efforts of graphic art, and their study in that relation is of value. When pictures are employed as writing the conception intended to be presented is generally analyzed, and only its most essential points are indicated, with the result that the characters when frequently repeated become conventional, and in their later forms cease to be recognizable as objective portraitures. A general deduction made after several years of study of pictographs of all kinds found among the North American Indians is that they exhibit very little trace of mysticism or of esotericism in any form. They are objective representations and cannot be treated as ciphers or cryptographs in any attempt at their interpretation. A knowledge of the customs, costumes, including arrangement of hair, paint, and all tribal designations, and of their histories and traditions is essential to the understanding of their drawings, for which reason some of those particulars known to have influenced pictography are set forth in this book, and others are suggested which possibly had a similar influence.