Georgian hay and the head of Lake Ontario,
while the Iroquois proper retreated to central New York. In 1535 (artier found the
shores of the river from Quebec to Montreal occupied by anlroquoian people, but on
the settlement of the country seventy years later the same region was found in pos-
session of Algonquian tribes. The confederation of the five Iroquois nation-, probably
about the year 1540, enabled them to check the Algonquian invasion and to assume
the offensive. Linguistic and other evidence shows that the separation of the Chero-
kee from the parent stock must have far antedated this period.
(5) Waaam Ohm (p. 18): The name signifies "red score," from the Delaware
walam, "painted," more particularly "painted red." and <,hi,u. "a score, tally-
mark." The Walam Olum was first published in 1836 in a work entitled"The
American Nations." by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a versatile and voluminous,
but very erratic, French scholar, who spent the latter half of his life in this country,
dying in Philadelphia in 1840. He asserted that it was a translation of a manuscript
hi the Delaware language, which was an interpretation of an ancient sacred metrical
legend of the Delawares, recorded in pictographa cut upon wood, obtained in 1820 by
a medical friend of his among the Delawares then living in central Indiana. He
says himself: "These actual olum were first obtained in 1820 as a reward for a
medical cure, deemed a curiosity, and were unexplicable. In 1822 were obtained
from another individual the soul's annexed thereto in the original language, hut no
one could be found by me able to translate them. I had therefore to learn