348 INDIANS. 



CHAPTEE XXXII. 



EMPLOYMENT. 



WHEN I first came upon the plains only a very few of the 

 Indians were possessed of firearms, and those were of the 

 most inferior kind. The bow was universal. Even the 

 Indians who owned guns still held on to the bow as 

 the more reliable weapon in close fight. All the time a 

 warrior could spare from the difficult task of furnishing 

 food for his family was fully occupied in keeping himself 

 supplied with materials for war or for killing game. A 

 good bow takes a long time and much care and labour in 

 its construction. The best wood is the Osage Orange 

 (bois d'arc of the old French trappers, corrupted into 

 ' bow dark' by plains Americans). This wood grows in 

 comparatively a limited area of country, and long 

 journeys are sometimes made to obtain it. Only the best 

 are selected, straight and as free as possible from knots. 

 The seasoning process is slow and very thorough. A 

 little cutting, shaping, and scraping with knife or piece of 

 glass, then a hard rubbing with buffalo fat or brains, and 

 the stick is put aside in a warm place, to be worked 

 at again in a few days or weeks. A good bow with fair 

 usage will last many years, but it is liable to be broken 

 at any time by accident. Each warrior therefore possesses 

 several sticks of bow wood in various stages of completion. 

 The strings are formed of closely-twisted fibres of the 

 sinews of animals. These sinews are cut out their full 

 length. Each is then subdivided longitudinally into 

 strings, and these picked and re-picked into fibres as fine 



