102 INDIAN GAMES. 



Western Reservation. They used two rackets. In this 

 game the old men acted as judizcs. 



The game was ordinarily started by tossing the ball into 

 the air in the centre of the field. This act is represented 

 by Perrot as having been performed by one of the leaders 

 in the game, but it is more in accord witb the spirit in 

 "which the game was played, that it should have been done 

 by some outsider. Bossu says, "An old man stands in the 

 middle of the place appropriated to the play, and throws 

 up into the air a ball of roe-skins rolled about each other," 

 while Powers^^ says that among the Calitornian Indians 

 this act was performed by a squaw. The judges started the 

 ball among the Choctaws.^ Notwithstanding the differ- 

 ences in the forms of the goals, their distance apart and the 

 methods of play disclosed in all these descriptions, the 

 game can only be regarded as the same. The historians 

 who have preserved for us the accounts of the ancient 

 southern games from which quotations have been made, 

 are all Englishmen except Bossu, and he entered the coun- 

 try not by the way of Quebec but byway of New Orleans. 

 It is not strange, therefore, that we do not find in use 

 amongst them the name which the early French fathers 

 and traders invariably applied to the game. The descrip- 

 tion, however, given by these writers, of the racket used 

 in the south, corresponds so closely with the crook from 

 which the game took the name hy which it is known, that 

 we must accept the game as a modified form of lacrosse. 

 From Maine to Florida, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 

 we trace a knoAvledge of it. We have found it in use 

 among the confederate nations of the north and of the 

 south and among scattered tribes throughout the country. 



In the majority of instances the natural instincts of those 



»6Contribulion8 to North American Ethnology, Vol. ill, p. 151. 

 '"Catliu, Vol. 11, p.l'ij. 



