MINOR AMUSEMENTS 
From the recorded accounts, meager as they are, it appears that the 
Indians of North America had the same kinds of minor amusements 
and children’s plays as occur in other parts of the world and sur- 
vive in our own civilization. Thus, for example, Mr Nelson * gives 
descriptions of twenty-two” such amusements in addition to those 
of which accounts have been extracted for the present work. 
Rev. J. Owen Dorsey ° in the same way describes forty-one such 
plays, beside those mentioned in this volume, as existing among 
the Teton Dakota. Of these, thirty-one are readily classified as 
imitative and dramatic, twelve ’ of these referring to war and combat, 
six® to hunting, four’ to religion, and nine” to social customs and 
domestic employments; three" are ring games, similar to those of 
civilization, four’ are simple contests of action, and three’ may be 
classified as miscellaneous. 
According to Mr Dorsey, each of these games, and of the other 
children’s games which he enumerates, has its own special season or 
seasons and is played at no other time of the year. Children of one 
@The Eskimo about Bering Strait. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of 
American Ethnology, pt. 1, p. 387, 1899. 
»Rope jumping; blind man’s buff; hide and seek; tag; twin tag; ring around; tossing 
on walrus skin; tug of war; arm pulling; pole pulling; stick raising; finger pulling; 
foot pulling; neck pulling; head pushing; battering ram; wrestling; knee walking; high 
jumping; horizontal jumping; hurdle jumping; kaiak racing. 
¢ Games of Teton Dakota Children. American Anthropologist, y. 4, p. 329, 1891. For 
further information about Dakota children’s games, see Ogalala Games, by Louis L. 
Meeker, in Bulletin of Free Museum of Science and Art, vy. 3, p. 23, Philadelphia, 1901. 
¢4Running toward one another; taking captives from one another; how they are 
brought up (follow my leader); hide and seek; throwing stones at one another; they 
hit one another with earth; use mud with one another; throwing fire at one another; 
throwing chewed leaves into the eyes; they wound one another with a grass which has 
a long sharp beard, michapécha; wrestling; they kick at one another. 
¢ Hunting for young birds; egg hunting; trampling on the beaver: deer game; 
grizzly-bear game; goose and her children. 
? Ghost game; mystery game; pretending to die; playing doctor. 
?Courting the women; going to make a grass lodge; playing with small things; 
playing with large objects; they make one another carry packs; sitting on wooden 
horses; old woman and her dog; causing them to scramble for gifts; flutes. 
» Howi! howf!: snatching places from cne another; they do not touch one another. 
* Who shall get there first; hopping; jumping from a high object; they play neck 
out of joint (tumbling, somersaults). 
J Hoop that is made to roll by the wind; sport with mud horses; ball of mud made 
to float is thrown at. 
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