Seneca War Chief Used A War Post to Talley Prisoners and Scalps
Jemison said that to commemorate great events and to preserve the chronology of them, the war chief in each tribe kept a war-post, a peeled stick of timber ten or twelve feet high erected in the town. For a campaign the chief made a perpendicular red mark about three inches long and half an inch wide ; on the opposite side of this, for a scalp, they made a red cross, thus X on another side, for a prisoner taken alive, they make a red cross in this manner ><, with a head or dot."* These hieroglyphics enabled them to represent with no little certainty the facts they wished to record.
