1 10 l.\l)l INS 01 I HE PLAINS 



among the other tribes of the Plain-, the men made 

 extraordinary use of these charms or amulets, which 

 were, after all, little medicine bundles. A man rarely 

 went to war or engaged in any serious undertaking with- 

 out carrying and appealing to one or more of these small 

 bundles. They usually originated, as just stated, in the 

 dreams or visions of so-called medicinemen who gave 

 them out for tees. With them were often one or more 

 songs and a formula of some kind. Examples of these 

 may be seen in the Museum's Pawnee and Blackfool 

 collections, where they seem most highly developed. 



In addition to these many small individual and 

 more or less personal medicines, many tribes have more 

 pretentious bundles of sacred objects which are seldom 

 opened and never used except in connection with 

 certain solemn ceremonies. We refer to such as the 

 tribal bundles of the Pawnee, the medicine arrow- of 

 the Cheyenne, the sacred pipe and the wheel of the 

 Arapaho, the "taimay" image of the Kiowa, the Okipa 

 drums of the Mandan, and the buffalo calf pipe of 

 the Dakota. In addition to these very famous ones, 

 there are numerous similar bundles owned by individu- 

 als, especially among the Blackfoot, Sarsi, Gros 

 Ventre, Omaha, Hidatsa, and Pawnee. The best 

 known type of bundle is the medicine-pipe which is 

 highly developed among the Blackfoot and their 

 immediate neighbors. In the early literature of the 

 area frequent reference is made to the calumet, or in 

 i hi- case, a pair of pipestems waved in the demonstra- 

 tion of a ritual binding the participants in a firm 



