urned up a clam, and after swallowing the contents
carried the shells to the mint. Gold and silver at the mouth of a mine
obtain their chief value from the labor it takes to get the metals;
wampum was the refinement by labor of a money substance free to all. The
redemption of wampum was perfect. To the Indians it was a seal to
treaties, an amulet in danger, an affidavit, small change, a savings'
bank, a wedding ring and a dress suit. To this day the belt of wampum is
the storehouse of Indian treasure. In the Six Nations, when a big chief
made an assertion in council, he laid down a belt of wampum, as though
to say, "Money talks." The Iroquois sent a belt of it to the King of
England when they asked his protection. William Penn got a strip when he
made his treaty. The Indians braided rude pictures into it, which
recorded great events. They talked their ideas into it, as we do into a
phonograph. They sent messages in it. White beads between a row of dark
ones represented a path of peace, as though to say: "Big chief no longer
got Congress on his hands." A string of dark beads was a message of war
or of the death of a chief, and a string of white beads rolled in mud
was equivalent to saying that there was crape on the door of Tammany
Hall. So you see that it was a combined post-office, telegraph,
telephone, phonograph and newspaper.

The Iroquois had a keeper of wampum--a sort of secretary of the treasury
without the task of keeping nine different kinds of money on a parity.
This old Indian financier had simple and correct principles. No one
could persuade him to issue birch-bark promises to pay and delude
himself with the belief that he could thus create money. He certainly
would have called them a debt, and would have paid them off as fast as
he could. Nor can we imagine him trying to sustain the value of the
white wampum after the Puritans started in to make it out of oyster
shells by machinery. Nor would he have bought it, not needing it, and
have issued against it his promises to pay in good wampum as fast and as
often as they were presented.

It was said that wampum was so cunningly made that neither Jew nor Devil
could counterfeit it. Nevertheless a Connecticut Yankee rigged up a
machine that so disturbed the market value of the beads that in a short
time the Long Island mints were closed to the free coinage of clams.
Wampum was demonetized through counterfeit, overproduction and
imitation; but when this occurred t