wampum

How To Use wampum In A Sentence

• From the early 1620s, coastal Indians supplied wampum (sacred shell beads, polished and strung in strands, belts, or sashes) to Dutch traders who exchanged it with inland natives for beaver pelts.
• In our own time such words as papoose, sachem, tepee, wigwam and wampum have begun to drop out of everyday use; 11 at an earlier period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, supawn, samp and quahaug, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms. Chapter 2. The Beginnings of American. 2. Sources of Early Americanisms
• Washington sent a wampum belt and speech to the sachems of the Tuscaroras in August, “to assure you of our real friendship and love—and to confirm & strengthen that chain of friendship, which has subsisted between us for so many ages past.” George Washington’s First War
• The shells of these clams are used by the Indians as money, and make what they call their wampum; they likewise serve their women for an ornament, when they intend to appear in full dress. Camps and Firesides of the Revolution
• Smiling and bashful she stood there in her clinging skirt and wampum-broidered vest, her slender, rounded limbs moulded into soft knee-moccasins of fawn-skin, and the Virgin's Girdle knotted across her thighs in silver-tasselled seawan. The Hidden Children
• They were called wampumpeag, were sewed on deer or other fine skins, and the belts thus made were used to emphasize points in negotiation or in treaties, or in speeches. Folkways A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals
• Federal negotiators, in turn, received wampum, pipes, and sometimes weapons.
• About the neck were long wampum necklaces with _dentalium, unionida, and auricula, _ interspersed with beads. An Introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians
• This was nothing more nor less than strings of beads wrought out of clams, periwinkles, and other shell-fish, and called seawant or wampum. Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete
• Early Americans enjoyed clams with the same passion as we do today, and polished clamshells served as currency (known as wampum) from the 1600's to the end of the seventeenth century.