448 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY t Bull. 137 



sharpened to keen straight edges — completed the list of scraping and planing 

 tools. (Gushing, 1896, p. 370.) 



CORDS, THREADS, AND TEXTILES 



Textiles presuppose cords and threads which were of either animal 

 or vegetable origin. The former were derived from sinews, skins, and 

 hair ; the latter from bark, grass, and a kind of native hemp. Of the 

 Indians of Virginia, Smith says : 



Betwixt their hands and thighes, their women use to spin the barks of trees, 

 deare sinews, or a kind of grasse they call Pemmenaw ; of these they make a 

 thred very even and readily. This thred serveth for many uses as about their 

 bousing, apparell, as also they make nets for fishing, for the quantity as for- 

 mally braded as ours. They make also with it lines for angles. ( Smith, John, 

 1907 ed., p. 103.) 



Strachey (1849, p. 74) uses much the same language in describing 

 the manufacture of fishing nets, but adds the manufacture of feather 

 mantles and "trowsers," presumably the native leggings, to the uses 

 enumerated by Smith. 



Lederer mentions "leather thongs" among the Siouan tribes, and 

 Lawson "the sinews of the deer divided very small" (Alvord, 1912, 

 p. 143; Lawson, 1860, p. 312). 



Leather thongs were in use throughout the region to lace up the 

 moccasins, and mention is made of these as early as 1540, since Ran- 

 jel, one of the De Soto chroniclers, noted that the Indians of Cofit- 

 achequi (probably Creeks) made "hose and moccasins and leggings 

 with ties of white leather" (Bourne, 1904, vol. 2, pp. 100-102). Du 

 Pratz says that Natchez moccasins were "joined in front by means of 

 a thong of bearskin, which extends to the ankle, and thus makes lace 

 boots" (Le Page du Pratz, 1758, vol. 2, pp. 194-195 ; Swanton, 1911, 

 p. 54). The native Indian boxes described by Adair (1775, p. 452) 

 were held together by means of "scraped wet buffalo strings," but 

 he speaks of deer's sinews in common use as thread. According to 

 an Alabama informant, thongs were made by putting the point of a 

 knife in the middle of a piece of skin and cutting round and round 

 spirally. 



Jackson Lewis described this as the way in which bowstrings were 

 made from the thick skin on the neck of a deer, and we have abundant 

 testimony to the employment of deer hide for this particular purpose, 

 going back to Garcilaso de la Vega (1723, p. 7). Laudonniere says 

 that Florida bowstrings were made of "the gut of the stag or the stag's 

 skin." (Laudonniere, 1586, p. 7 ; French, 1869, pp. 170-171 ; Swanton, 

 1922, p. 356.) Of Powhatan bowstrings, Percy remarks merely that 

 they were made of "leather," but Strachey specifies "deer's hide scraped 

 and twisted" (Tyler, 1907, p. 17; Strachey, 1849, p. 104). Among 

 the Natchez, Du Pratz found that steeped and twisted sinew as well as 



