to all the tribes. Mr. Lee Morehouse of Pendleton, Oregon, formerly agent of the Umatilla Reservation, mentions the universality of this language as he discovered at Washington City. Indians of all tribes were holding a council, and the necessity of interpreting many times sentence by sentence, made the proceedings very tiresome. Suddenly the assembled Indians began using the .sign language, and Sioux and other eastern Indians were conversing freely and with great animation with those of the Columbia Valley. This sign language has been charted and is used very freely by the missionaries of the Nez Perces in preaching to other natives. It is of interest to find also that the Indian songs, or music, which Miss Fletcher has been reducing to written notes, is universal, the stick-bone gambling tune, which she took from a performance at Vancouver Island, British Columbia, being instantly recognized by Indians at Omaha, and by Nez Perces also, some of the latter being shocked to hear it on an organ.
While the language was not written, the next step, if it had not been reduced by missionaries to a phonetic form, would have been to a picture signifying the word; or rather, perhaps, a picture signifying an entire phrase or sentence. This is shown unmistakably in the names of men and women, each name often signifying a whole sentence. It is also shown in the verb, which often, by an inflection, indicates what we express by adverbs and prepositions. This also seemed to me well confirmed in the formation of plurals, as told me by a somewhat notable Indian, White Bird, or Peo-peo-otilikt, one of Joseph's band, who explained that "good dog" was expressed by "talts tsuk-am-tsuk;' but ten dogs by "putimt te-talts tsukamstuk," talts, or tahts, being the adjective good, and putimt the numeral ten; but the plural is not expressed in the noun, but in the adjective.
