INDIAN COSTUMES KKIEGER 625 



ting Bull, Moses, and Joseph. One of the more recent accessions of 

 this character is the collection of General Heyl, United States Army, 

 from the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. This collection includes 

 the war shields of the famous Chiefs Black Kettle and Crazy Horse. 



Types of Indian dress; tailored and woven garments. — The prac- 

 tice of wearing robes fashioned from the tanned skins of animals 

 extends well back into the old stone age in Europe, Possibly the 

 cutting and fitting, or rather, tailoring of skin garments has in the 

 Old World an equally respectable antiquity. Woven fabrics, how- 

 ever, are a more recent product of man's inventiveness and accom- 

 pany such advanced arts as the practice of agriculture, domestication 

 of animals, and the invention of some form of the loom. 



The American Indian from early times possessed a knowledge of 

 weaving which he expressed in several ways, as in the making of 

 baskets, the weaving of nets and cloth. Not all Indian weavers of 

 baskets or makers of nets knew how to use a spun yarn in the weav- 

 ing of cloth on a simple frame or some more advanced form of the 

 loom. Practically all tribes fashioned nets of plaited basketry 

 splints or of twisted cord. The making of baskets was not practiced 

 by the tribes of Arctic America except in Alaska nor by those of the 

 northern woodlands and the western plains. 



The weaving of cloth and the wearing of the products of the loom 

 have a much more restricted distribution, being limited to the tribes 

 occupying the Pacific northwest coast, the region south of the Colo- 

 rado River, Mexico, Central America, and the South American high- 

 lands west of the Andes Mountains. Tribes occupying the tropical 

 lowlands of northern South America east of the Andes Mountains 

 had a knowledge of weaving and of spinning cotton yarn, but these 

 tribes belong to a geographical environment where but little clothing 

 was necessary, and consequently the art of weaving obtained but 

 little headway. 



The tanning of the skins of animals and the shaping of such skins 

 into the form of tailored garments likewise had a limited distri- 

 bution in native America. Indian tribes of the plains west of the 

 Mississippi, of the sub-Arctic in Canada and in Alaska, and the 

 Eskimo possess this art in common with Siberian tribes and the 

 peoples of northern Europe, Throughout the greater portion of 

 temperate America, both North and South, as in Patagonia and in 

 Chile, Indians of both sexes contented themselves with simple and 

 untailored skin robes. In North America this robe was uniformly 

 obtained from the pelt of the bison. We are not referring to the 

 so-called " blanket Indian," who is a product of the white trader, 

 but of Indians as they were dressed before becommg influenced by 

 the white man's trade goods. The comfortable, light-weight Hudson 

 Bay blanket was eagerly sought by the Indian and was readily 



