848 REPORT OF NATIONAL MU8EUM, 1897. 



And the same reiuaik is iiuule on ])iige -J88 in rej^ard to seal spears. 



Not only was stone su]>erseded by iron as a material for arrowpoiuts, 

 but the bow and arrow as a weapon was superseded by firearms. As 

 this was a greater change, so the i)eriod of transition might have been 

 longer, but that it would come sooner or later was inevitable. The 

 (piestion of civilization has but little to do with the adoption of a better 

 weapon. The wildest Indians in North America, having all the belong- 

 ings of savagery, might have, within the past twenty-live years, been 

 seen armed with magazine or breech-loading guns as fine and good as 

 those of our army moving against them. These Indians and their 

 guns represented the two extremes of civilization. The Indian was the 

 lowest stratum, his gun the final effect of enlightenment in man. 



Capt. John G. Bourke, of the United States Army, an accurate and 

 close observer, an interested archaeologist, a noted Indian fighter who 

 was in that service during the principal part of his life, and a valuable 

 aid and comrade of General Crook in some of his most celebrated 

 Indian campaigns, gave a sketch of the weapons, tools, implements, 

 domestic ntensils, amulets, etc., of certain tribes of Indians as they 

 were when he first met them, in a paper read by him before the 

 Anthropological Society at Washington, under the suggestive title of 

 "The Vesper Hour of the Stone Age." ' As resulting facts of his 

 observations, in the twenty-three or twenty-five years of his service, 

 since his first acquaintance with the wild tribes of the Kio Grande, 

 the Gila, and the Colorado, he has seen them "not only subjected to a 

 condition of peace, but notably advanced in the path of civilization, 

 their children trained in the white man's ways, and all traces of ear- 

 lier modes of life fast fading into the haze of tradition." Doubtless 

 the North American Indian had his myths concerning the arrow. 

 But these are cpiite difterent from the superstitions in the Old World 

 concerning the arrowhead; those were based on the belief in the 

 sui^ernatural origin and power of the object, and were inconsistent 

 with its character as a wea|)on. The myth in America might relate to 

 the arrow as a charm or for divination, to find lost objects, search for 

 game, etc., but it in no wise affected their knowledge of its having 

 been made by man, to be used as a weapon. 



On the subject of arrows as charms or amulets. Captain Bourke 

 says ^ that all the American aborigines used stones as amulets. And 

 he says instances of throwing arrows and stones "for luck" are given 

 by Koss, Mackenzie, Castaneda, Picart, and Gomara. As to the 

 myths of the arrow, he refers to Bancroft, Torquemada, Bascana, and 

 others, and says : ' 



Arrows fired under (urcumstances of special uote, those which had once killed ene- 

 mies or in the hands of the enemy had failed to kill the present owner, became tal- 



' American Anthropologist, III, p. 55. 

 -'Idem, III, p. 62; IV. p. 73. 

 3 Idem, III, p. 62. 



