Note 679 — Chapter II

Schoolcraft wavered in his opinion. (Cf. Haven, 133.) He showed Gooding’s drawing to an Algonkin chief, who found in it a record of a battle of the Indians, except that some figures near the centre did not belong to it, and these Schoolcraft thought might be runic, as De Costa has later suggested; but in 1853 Schoolcraft made no reservation in pronouncing it entirely Indian (Indian Tribes, i. 112; iv. 120; pl. 14). Wilson (Prehist. Man, ii., ch. 19) is severe on Schoolcraft. On the general character of Indian rock inscriptions,—some of which in the delineations accompanying these accounts closely resemble the Dighton Rock,—see Mallery in the Bureau of Ethnology, Fourth Report, p. 19; Lieut. A. M. Wheeler’s Report on Indian tribes in Pacific Rail Road Reports, ii.; J. G. Bruff on those of Green River in the Sierra Nevada, in Smithsonian Rept. (1872); American Antiquarian, iv. 259; vi. 119; Western Reserve Hist. Soc. Tracts, nos. 42, 44, 52, 53, 56; T. Ewbank’s No. Amer. Rock Writing (Morrisania, 1866); Brinton’s Myths of the New World, p. 10; Tylor’s Early Hist. Mankind; Dr. Richard Andree’s Ethnographische Parallelen und Vergleiche (Stuttgard, 1878). It is Mallery’s opinion that no “considerable information of value in an historical point of view will be obtained directly from the interpretations of the Pictographs in North America.”