614 GAMES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS  [£TH. ann. 24 
KE. D. Neill ¢ says: 
The favorite and most exciting game of the Dakota is ball playing. It appears 
to be nothing more than a game which was often played by the writer in school- 
boy days and which was called shinny. A smooth place is chosen on the prairie 
or frozen river or lake. Each player has a stick 3 or 4 feet long and crooked 
at the lower end, with deer strings tied across, forming a sort of pocket. The 
ball is made with a rounded knot of wood, or clay covered with hide, and is 
supposed to possess supernatural qualities. Stakes are set at a distance of a 
quarter or a half a mile, as bounds. Two parties are then formed, and, the ball 
being thrown up in the center, the contest is for one party to carry the ball from 
the other beyond one of the bounds. Two or three hundred men are sometimes 
engaged at once. On a summer’s day, to see them rushing to and fro, painted 
in divers colors, with no article of apparel, with feathers in their heads, bells 
Fig. 784. Santee Dakota Indian ball-play on the prairie, Minnesota; from Schoolcraft. 
around their wrists, and fox and wolf tails dangling behind, is a wild and noisy 
spectacle. The eyewitnesses among the Indians become more interested in the 
success of one or the other of the parties than any crowd at a horse race, and 
frequently stake their last piece of property on the issue of the game. 
Daxora (Yanxronat). Devils lake, North Dakota. (Cat. no. 
60362, 60395, Field Columbian Museum.) 
Stick of hickory terminating in a ring which supports a buckskin 
thong net, and a buckskin ball filled with deer hair. These 
specimens were collected in 1900 by Dr George A. Dorsey, who 
gives the name of the stick as chianyankapi, and that of the ball 
as tahpa. 
«Dakota Land and Dakota Life. Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, v. 1, 
p. 281, St Paul, 1872. 
