extent. The separate pieces were round and flat, about an eighth of an
inch broad and a sixteenth of an inch thick, white and black were strung
alternately, but the strings, though arranged with considerable nicety,
lacked wholly the finish and flexibility of the regular article. In
Virginia _roenoke_ was current. This consisted of small rough fragments
of cockle shells, which were drilled and strung. The last two varieties
were only used to a limited extent, even in the region of their
manufacture. Here, as elsewhere, the cylindrical wampum was the
standard, and the dearest to the Indian of all his treasures. Indeed
such was the value set upon it, that attempts were often made to
counterfeit it, an unallowed shell being fraudulently used in the
manufacture of the white, while the black was imitated from a kind of
stone. Yet the habitual caution and keenness of the Indian made it
difficult to palm off the spurious article upon him.

As wampum was made from marine shells,[8] it was naturally manufactured
by the sea shore tribes, and in localities determined by the abundance
of raw material. Here the shells were stored up in some convenient spot
during summer, to be worked out in winter when the rigors of the season
should deter the men from their ordinary out door pursuits.[9] Probably
but little was produced north of the Narragansetts [Rhode Island], as
the necessary shells were scarce beyond Cape Cod. The Narragansetts were
themselves great producers, and tradition claimed for their tribe the
honor of the invention of wampum. But the Long Island Indians were by
far the greatest producers along our northern coast. Their sandy flats
and marshes teemed with sea life, and, when the Dutch first came to New
Amsterdam, their island went by the name of _sewan hacky_, or the "land
of the sewan shell," so numerous were the sewan manufactories upon it.
Without doubt production was stimulated beyond its natural limits by the
demand from powerful tribes from the main land, who found it easier to
exact wampum as tribute from their weak neighbors, than personally to
engage in its laborious coinage. Hazard, in his collection of state
papers, states, that the Narragansetts frequently compelled large
tributes in wampum from the Long Island Indians. The Pequots also for
many years prior to 1637, exacted large annual contributions from the
same tribes while they were still further subject to the levies of the
imperious Mohawks. Thus the