610 GAMES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS [®TH. ann. 24 
When bending the end of the stick to the desired crook, bark string was used, 
connecting the latter to the straight part of the stick. Some Indians played 
with the strings still attached, thinking to get a better hold of the ball, but this 
was considered unfair. In some games all the players used crooks with nets 
similar to those of lacrosse sticks [figure 780d]. Often a guard stick was 
used to protect the ball from the players of the opposite party [figure 781]. 
Any person who touched the ball with his hands while playing went immedi- 
ately out of the game. Sometimes, to the amusement of the men, the women 
were persuaded to play the game. Within the last few years this game has 
fallen altogether into disuse. 
The Lower Thompsons had a ball game in which the ball was thrown up by 
one player. The player who caught it ran with it until overtaken by another 
player, who in his turn ran with it until a certain goal was reached. 
Another boys’ game was to take a pebble about 3 inches in diameter and coy- 
ered with skin, and roll it down a hillside. Other players with scoop-nets, 
about 1 foot long (including the handle), stood at the bottom, and each tried to 
eatch the bounding ball as it reached him. The nets were made of a pliable 
stick or wand, bent over the top so as to form a circle, which was filled with a 
netting of bark twine. A game similar to the last was played with a skin- 
covered ball, to which a short toggle was attached [figure 782a]. The players 
held a kind of hoop with handle [figure 782 6b, c], by means of which they tried 
to catch the ball by its toggle. 
Fic. 781. Stick for protecting ball; length, 28} inches; Thompson Indians (Ntlakyapamuk), 
British Columbia; cat. no. 748,, American Museum of Natural History. 
Tuomprson Inpians (NriaxkyapamMuk). Thompson and Fraser 
rivers, British Columbia. 
Mr Charles Hill-Tout ® says: 
They were fond of games, like their neighbors, and utilized the level, grassy 
river benches for various games of ball. One of these games, suk’-kul-lila’-ka, 
was not unlike our own game of football. The players were divided, as with us, 
into two groups, and at each end of the field was a goal formed by two poles 
planted several feet asunder. The play commenced from the middle of the field, 
and the object was to get the ball through the goal of their adversaries. The 
ball was made from some kind of tree fungus, cut round, and covered with elk- 
hide. I could not learn anything of the rules of the game; nor was my inform- 
ant certain whether the feet or hands, or both, were used in propelling the ball. 
SIOUAN STOCK 
Asstntporn. Fort Union, Montana. 
In a report to Isaac I. Stevens, governor of Washington Territory, 
on the Indian tribes of the upper Missouri, by Edwin T. Denig, a 
manuscript in the lbrary of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 
after a description of the game of shinny, occurs this passage : 
Another mode of playing the game is by catching the ball in a network at- 
tached to the end of the stick, over a small hoop a little larger than the ball. 
«Notes on the N’tlapamug of British Columbia. Report of the Sixty-ninth Meeting of 
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, p. 507, London, 1900. 
