The native peoples of the Great Plains – the Kiowa, Arapaho, Lakota and Cheyenne – had an elaborate art tradition involving pictorial drawing on animal skins, which they used to record stories and information about the natural world around them. As their contact with Europeans increased in the 1800s, they discovered that “ledger books” and Western drawing materials (crayons, colored pencils, etc.) worked well for this task too, and today there are fascinating troves of “ledger-art” from the 1800s. Most of these drawings are anonymous, but they offer a wonderful window into the pre-European imaginative life on the Great Plains.
There’s a website that hosts some of these images. I find them really fascinating.
