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GAMES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS  [eru. ann. 24 
ALGONQUIAN STOCK 
Arapano. Wind River reservation, Wyoming. (Cat. no. 61722, 
Field Columbian Museum.) 
Four solid bones, 3 inches in length, smooth and yellow with age, 
two wrapped with cloth, black with dirt, the edges stitched with 
black thread. Collected by Dr George A. Dorsey in 1900. 
Arapano. Oklahoma. 
Mr James Mooney in his paper on the Ghost-dance Religion * gives 
an account of the gaqutit, or hunt-the-button game: 
This is a favorite winter game with the prairie tribes, and was probably more 
or less general throughout the country. It is played both by men and women, but 
never by the two sexes together. It is the regular game in the long winter 
bights after the scattered families have abandoned their exposed summer 
positions on the open prairie and moved down near one another in the shelter 
of the timber along the streams. . . . Frequently there will be a party of 
twenty to thirty men gaming in one tipi, and singing so that their voices can be 
heard far out from the camp, while from another tipi a few rods away comes a 
shrill chorus from a group of women engaged in another game of the same 
kind. The players sit in a circle around the tipi fire, those on one side of the 
fire playing against those on the other. The only requisites are the button, or 
ga’qai, usually a small bit of wood, around which is tied a piece of string or 
otter skin, with a pile of tally sticks, as has been already described. Each 
party has a “button,” that of one side being painted black, the ether being red. 
The leader of one party takes the button and endeavors to move it from one 
hand to the other, or to pass it on to a partner, while those ef the opposing side 
keep a sharp lookout, and try to guess in which hand it is. Those having the 
button try to deceive their opponents as to its whereabouts by putting one 
hand over the other, by folding their arms, and by putting their hands behind 
them, so as to pass the ga’qaii to a partner, all the while keeping time to the 
rhythm of a gaming chorus sung by the whole party at the top of their voices. 
The song is very peculiar and well-nigh indescribable. It is usually, but not 
always or entirely, unmeaning, and jumps, halts, and staggers in a most 
surprising fashion, but always in perfect time with the movements of the 
hands and arms of the singers. The greatest of good-natured excitement 
prevails, and eyery few minutes some more excitable player claps his hands 
over his mouth or beats the ground with his flat palms and gives out a regular 
war whoop. <All this time the opposing players are watching the hands of the 
other or looking straight into their faces to observe every tell-tale movement 
of their features, and when one thinks he has discovered in which hand the 
button is, he throws out his thumb toward that hand with a loud * that!” 
Should he guess aright, his side scores a certain number of tallies, and in turn 
takes the button and begins another song. Should the guess be wrong, the 
losing side must give up an equivalent number of tally sticks. So the play 
goes on until the small hours of the night. It is always a gambling game, and 
the stakes are sometimes very large. 
In the story entitled Split-Feather, Dr George A. Dorsey” relates 
that one day there was an invitation for the Star society to go to the 
head man’s tipi to play hand game. 
“ Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 1008, 1896. 
> Traditions of the Arapaho, p. 269, Chicago, 1903. 
