MALLERY. J PICTOGRAPHS ON BONE AND SKIN. 207 
Winter Counts, infra, Chap. x, Sec. 2, is one instance. Rawhide drum- 
heads are also used to paint upon, as by the shamans of the Ojibwa. 
The use of robes made of the hides of buffalo and other large animals, 
painted with biographic, shamanistic, and other devices, is also men- 
tioned in various parts of this work. A description of very early ob- 
servation is now introduced, taken from John Ribault in Hakluyt (a). 
The king gaue our Captaine at his departure a plume or fanne of Hernshawes 
feathers died in red, and a basket made of Palmeboughes after the Indian fashion, 
and wrought very artificially and a great skinne painted and drawen throughout 
with the pictures of diners wilde beasts so liuely drawen and pourtrayed, that noth- 
ing lacked but life. 
With the American use of pictographic robes may be compared the 
following account of the same use by Australian natives by Dr. Richard 
Andree (). 
The inner side of the opossum skins worn by the blacks is also often ornamented 
with figures. They scratch lines into the skin, which afterward are rubbed over 
with fat and charcoal. 
FEATHERS AND QUILLS. 
Edward M. Kern, in Schoolcraft (f), reports that the Sacramento 
tribes of California were very expert in weaving blankets of feathers, 
many of them having beautiful figures worked upon them. 
The feather work in Mexico, Central America, and the Hawaiian 
Islands is well known, often having designs properly to be considered 
among pictographs, though in modern times not often passing beyond 
ornamentation. 
Worsnop (op. cit.) mentions that on grand occasions of the ‘‘ Mindarie” 
(i. e., peace festival) the Australian natives decorate the bodies, face, 
legs, and feet with the down of wild fowl, stuck on with their own blood. 
The ceremony of taking the blood is very painful, yet they stand it 
without a murmur. It takes five or six men four to five hours to 
decorate one man. The blood is put on the body wet and the down 
stuck on the blood, showing, when finished, outlines of man’s head, face, 
feet, snakes, emu, fish, trees, birds, and other outlines representing the 
moon, stars, sun, and Aurora Australis, the whole meaning that they 
are at peace with the world. 
Mr. David Boyle (a) gives an account of a piece of porcupine quill 
work, with an illustration, a part of which is copied in Fig. 158. 
Among the lost or almost lost arts of the Canadian Indians is that of employing 
porcupine quills as in the illustration. Partly on account of scarcity of material, 
but chiefly, it is likely, from change of habits and of taste, there are comparatively 
few Indian women now living who attempt to produce any fabric of this kind. * * * 
The central figure is meant to represent the eagle or great thunder-bird, the belief 
in which is, or was, widely spread among the Indians over the northern part of this 
continent. * * * 
This beautiful piece of quill work was produced from Ek-wah-satch, who resides 
at Baptiste lake. He informed me that it had belonged to his grandfather, who 
resided near Georgian bay. 
