the
language since, by the help of Zeisberger, Heckewelder, and a manuscript diction-
ary, on purpose to translate them, which I only accomplished in 1833." On account
of the unique character of the alleged Indian record and Rafinesque's own lack of
standing among his scientific contemporaries, hut little attention was paid to the
discovery until Brinton took up the subject a few years ago. After a critical sifting
of the evidence from every point of view he arrived at the conclusion that the
work is a genuine native production, although the manuscript rendering is faulty.
partly from the white scribe's ignorance of the language and partly from the Indian
narrator's ignorance of the meaning of the archaic forms. Brinton's edition (q. v. ),
published from Rafinesque's manuscript, gives the legend in triplicate form — picto-
graph, Delaware, and Englishauthor lias chosen to assume, with Brinton and Rati-
nesque, that the Walam Olum reference is to the .settlement of the Dutch at New
York and the English in Virginia sunn after 1600.
(8) 1 > i Soto's route (p. 26): On May 30, 1539, Hernando de Soto, of Spain, with
600 armed men and 213 horses, landed at Tampa hay, on the west coast of Florida, in
search of gold. Alter more than four year- of hardship and disappointed wandering
from Florida to the great plains of the West and back again to the Mississippi, where
De Soto died and his body was consigned to the great river, 311 men, all that were
left of the expedition, arrived finally at Pdnuco, in Mexico, on September in. 1543.
For the history of this expedition, the most important