NATURAL RESOURCES IN THEIR RELATION TO MILI- 
TARY SUPPLIES. 
By Arthur D. Little. 
In the aboriginal clays, when the American Navy consisted of 
birch-bark canoes manned by Indians, the relation of the canoe to 
the birch tree was obvious. Even in that far-off and simple time, 
however, the problem of securing suitable material for the arrow- 
head with which the Indian tipped his shaft was by no means simple, 
and its solution frequently involved long journeys and the use of 
diverse materials. The Indians of what is now New England evi- 
dently^ used the black flint from Mount Kineo, but Middle West In- 
dians used obsidian, much of which probably came from the Yellow- 
stone district. Indians along the lower Colorado River made myri- 
ads of arrowheads from flint cobblestones, very like those which 
practically cover the surface of the ground between Kingman and 
the Grand Canyon. Florida Indians used colored silica, most of 
which is pseudomorph after oyster shells and coral, and in some 
parts of the West there may be found arrowheads of petrified wood. 
The southeastern part of the country abounds in heads made from 
white quartz or quartzite. 
In a word, the Indian on the warpath, like all other belligerents 
before or since, found his warlike activities conditioned and deter- 
mined by the natural resources of his environment and his own 
technical ability to make use of them. He fought with flint arrow- 
heads over beds of coal and iron ore because he knew nothing of 
smelting iron, and so, for his military purposes, the continental 
reserves of coal and iron ore were nonexistent. 
In the same measure that our present civilization exceeds in com- 
plexity the primitive life of the savage do the requirements of 
modern warfare bring new demands which strain all the resources 
of that civilization, and may even, as we have witnessed, strain them 
beyond the breaking point. In the last analysis the capacity of a 
nation to wage war is determined by the natural resources available 
to that nation and the technical ability and productive agencies 
which it can utilize in their conversion into military supplies. 
We all recognize the fundamental importance in this connection of 
such basic natural resources as coal and limestone and iron ore, but 
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