490 REPORT OB^ NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1899. 



the rectangular space constituting the middle portion. There are 

 thirty-seven upright healds or " heddle dents " and thirty-eight spaces. 

 The healds are not inserted into the wooden frame, but are a part of 

 it, and are about the twenty-fourth of an inch in thickness, the mate- 

 rial having been cut away on both sides so as to leave these as thin as 

 safety would allow. Each heald or upright piece is wider in the cen- 

 ter than at the ends and is there perforated with a small hole. The 

 whole frame is just 7i inches wide and the healds about 3 inches in 

 length. The points to be especially noticed in this example are, lirst, 

 that the apparatus is made from a single piece of wood; second, that 

 the Indians of the upper Great Lakes were taught by the earl}" set- 

 tlers from Europe to be weavers; and third, that the method of orna- 

 mentation, shown at the top and bottom of this specimen, is common 

 enough in Germany (figs. 8 and 9), but it is not common elsewhere 

 among American aborigines on such heddle frames. The healds and 

 spaces, together seventj^-five in number, make provision for seventy- 

 five warp thr'^ads in all. 



Mr. W J McGee, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, calls atten- 

 tion to similar heddle frames in use among the Masquakee, or Sauks 

 and Foxes, an Algonquin tribe in Iowa, and presents to the U. 8. 

 National Museum an excellent example of a weaving frame from that 

 tribe (fig. 2). 



Mr. W. H. Jackson says that the Sacs, Sauks, Saukies, or Osaukees, 

 as it has been variously written — a word meaning yellow clay — and the 

 Foxes, or Outagamies, or more properh^ the Musquakkink (red clay) 

 are now as one tribe. They were first discovered settled about Green 

 Bay, Wisconsin (after residence on the north shore of Lake Ontario), 

 but their possessions extended westward, so that the larger part was 

 ])eyond the Mississippi. They partly subdued and admitted into their 

 alliance the Iowa, a Dakota tribe. By 1804 they had ceded all their 

 lands east of the Mississippi and settled on the Des Moines River, 

 moving subsequently to the Osage (in Kansas) and, after 1842 [in 1845], 

 the most of these finally to the Indian Territory. In 1822 the united 

 bands numbered 8,000, but are now [1875] reduced to a little more 

 than 1,000, of whom 341 are still in Iowa, 430 in the Indian Territory, 

 !»8 in Nebraska, and about 200 in Kansas. The Sauks and Foxes of 

 the Mississippi in the Indian Territory have a reservation of 483,S4<> 

 acres. ^ 



The frame is made of walnut and is in its general structure similar 

 to the foregoing, but is much heavier and more elaborately finished. 

 It has forty-two healds, making provision for eighty-three warp 

 threads in all. The ornamentation, at the top especially, has been evi- 

 dently under the influence of whites in quite recent times. In this 



^ Report U. S. National Museum, 1885, p. 37. 



