ABORIGINAL AMERICAN HARPOONS. 



223 



Indian tios two poles togothor near one end. sets them in deep water 

 near the shore, the bottoms a few feet apart; on this he sets a lotr, one 

 end resting on the shore. From this lishing station he harpoons the 

 black-backed salmon. The shaft is often 15 feet long; the head, a 

 joint of deer's bone, is 3 inches long, with socket to tit 

 on the end of the foreshaft and line tied about its mid- 

 dle. This head is driven (luite through the lish and 

 toggles on the other side. The reader can not fail to 

 recall the toggle heads of bone in the heart of Brazil. 

 The Yurok also spear salmon from liooths with tog- 

 gle harpoons.^ The Wintuns be- 

 long to Powell's Copehan family. 

 They are skillful arrow makers 

 and their women dainty weavers 

 of twined basketry. But the 

 abundance of the game as well as 

 its accessibility have acted here, 

 as in all other places, to deter the 

 inventive faculty. The thrusting 

 of a toggle quite through a tish 

 was indeed an eifective mode of 

 capture, but it did little to elevate 

 the mind of the captor. 



The head of the harpoon used 

 by the Nacum Indians of Califor- 

 nia was made cTt" deer's horn and 

 was about 2 inches long, with a 

 socket on one side that lifted into 

 the pole. When a tish was struck 

 the point left the pole, to which it 

 was attached by a sinew a foot or 

 more long. It has been observed 

 that the toggle harpoon so well 

 known on the Pacific coast of the United States 

 north of San Francisco, as well as British Colum- 

 bia and Alaska, made no advances as an inven- 

 tion. The Nacum Indians are too far inland to 

 have had the stimulus for improving an appara- 

 tu which demands sea room for development. 

 The Hupa and Humboldt Bay Indians con- 

 struct the toggle heads of their salmon harpoons as follows: A ])oint 

 of antler, bone, or metal from 2^ to 3^ inches in l(Migth, morc^ or less 

 flattened and sharp at the tips, is armed at its lower extremit}' with 



v;.''.' 





Fig. 16. 



BARBED HARPOON 

 HEAD. 



Seri Indian.s. 



Collections of the 

 Bureuu of Ethnol- 

 ogy- 

 After W J McGee. 



Fig. 17. 



TOGGLE HARPOON. 



Hupa Indians, California. 



Collected by V. H. Kay. Cat. No. 



126525, U.S.N.M. 



'Stephen Powers, Tribes of California, 1877. See his index, under fishing. 



