ESKIMO BOWS AND ARROWS. 645 



ESKIMO BOWS AND ARROWS. 



BY JOHN MURDOCH. 



WHEN we landed at Point Barrow, in 1881, it seemed as if 

 every Eskimo hunter had a pretty good rifle. There is a 

 law. against selling breech -loading arms and ammunition to "In- 

 dians," but it was no better enforced in Alaska than it was in old 

 times on the plains, when the Sioux used to butcher our soldiers 

 with rifles and cartridges made in the Eastern States. 



When we grew better acquainted with the natives, however, 

 we found that some of the poorer men were still obliged to de- 

 pend on the weapon of their forefathers, the bow and arrows. 

 Besides, every boy in the village had his little bow, which he used 

 for shooting birds and small animals. Now, these bows were per- 

 haps the most ingenious piece of bow-making in the world. 



As every one knows, the Eskimos, with very few exceptions, 

 inhabit a region which is perfectly treeless, or at any rate where 

 nothing grows but pines and spruces, whose soft, inelastic wood 

 is entirely useless for making bows. They have overcome this 

 difficulty very effectively by fastening along the back of the bow 

 twisted cords of reindeer sinew in such a way that each cord is 

 stretched when the bow is bent and flies back when the bow- 

 string is released. As far as we know, no other race of savages 

 make use of this ingenious contrivance. Some tribes of Indians 

 are in the habit of stiffening their bows by " backing " them with 

 strips of sinew, glued on, but the Eskimo backing is made of 

 cords and tied on. As old Martin Frobisher, the first English- 

 man who ever saw the Eskimos (in 1577), tells us, " Their bowes 

 are of wood of a yard long, sinewed on the back with strong 

 sinewes, not glued too, but fast girded and tyed on/' 



In some regions the Eskimos when first visited by white men 

 were still using bows with a very simple backing, merely twenty 

 or thirty strands of twine running from one end of the bow to 

 the other, twisted together tightly from the middle, and tied 

 down to the bow in two or three places. My friends at Point 

 Barrow and along the adjacent coast, however, had gone on im- 

 proving the bow until it was the best made by Eskimos anywhere. 



The body of the bow was made of a piece of good sound spruce 

 driftwood, from forty to fifty inches long, an inch and a quarter 

 wide, and three fourths of an inch thick in the middle. It was 

 very carefully and neatly made, trimmed down beautifully 

 smooth with the crooked knife, the Eskimo's universal tool, with 

 which he does such very clever whittling. Like all bows, they 

 were flattened on the " back " and rounded on the " belly " and 

 tapered off toward the ends, where they were worked into neat 



