PREHISTORIC JASPER MINES. 



669 



and their work described, but the accounts of their white ques- 

 tioners have been vague, contradictory, and unsystematic. None 

 of them explain the quarry, the turtleback, or the cache implement. 



Caleb Lyon, who saw about 1860 a Shasta Indian arrowhead 

 maker at work, refers only to a slab of obsidian one fourth of an 

 inch thick, split from a pebble and flaked by blows. T. R. Peale 

 speaks only of hammering a mass of jasper, agate, or chert with a 

 round-faced stone and finish- 

 ing up the edges with a 

 notched bone, as a glazier 

 chips glass. School craft saw 

 an anvil of wood or some 

 hard substance placed on 

 the thigh, upon which a piece 

 of jasper was held at rest to 

 be hammered by something 

 undescribed. Captain John 

 Smith tells how the Indian 

 " quickly maketh an arrow- 

 head of splints of stone in 

 the form of a heart, with a 

 little bone, which he ever 

 weareth at his bracept." 

 Torquemada and Hernandez 

 briefly describe seeing Mexi- 

 cans sending off long flakes 

 of obsidian, with which certain Spaniards had their beards shaved, 

 by pressing a wooden punch on a nucleus of obsidian held between 

 the feet. 



Admiral Sir E. Belcher (about 1858-'60) saw Eskimos, Califor- 

 nia Indians, and Sandwich Islanders fracturing chert blocks with 

 slight taps of nephrite hammers, and then flaking the splinters 

 wedged in a spoon-shaped cavity in a log, with a point of deer 

 horn.* And so on. Lieutenant E. J. Beckwith and Catlin tell of 

 flaking small pieces and thin slabs of quartz and obsidian, by 

 direct pressure and indirect pounding upon a bone punch ; and 

 certain white men have recently made arrowheads out of curiosity 

 or to palm them off upon collectors ; but neither the conflicting ac- 

 counts nor the amateur experiments explain the leaf-shaped hoards 

 (Fig. 6), or the inchoate forms (Fig. 5) that litter the quarry refuse. 

 Evidently some of the chief underlying features of the first and 

 greatest of man's primeval arts have not been grasped. The liv- 

 ing Indians who remember the process must be questioned again. 



FIG. 7 (ABOUT i). NATURAL NODULK OF JASPER 

 FLAKED ON ONE SIDE. Long Swamp, Le- 

 high, Pa. 



* See for these narratives, except Beckwith (Pacific Railroad Survey, vol. ii, p. 43), E. 

 T. Stevens's Flint Chips, p. 67. 



