MarcH Io, 1906.] 


Fig. 1. The stick-and-groove method, used in the South 
Sea Islands. 
chiefs, the medicine men have lost their power.” 
You will remember that the old man was a 
Catholic. Yet I know that he had much faith in 
the Blackfoot religion, and believed in the effi- 
cacy of the medicine men’s prayers and myster- 
ies. He used often to speak of the terrible power 
possessed by a man named Old Sun. “There was 
one,” he would say, “who surely talked with the 
gods, and was given some of their mysterious 
power. Sometimes of a dark night, he would in- 
vite a few of us to his lodge, when all was calm 
and still. After all were seated his wives would 
bank the fire with ashes so that it was as dark 
within as without, and he would begin to pray. 
First to the Sun, chief ruler, then to Ai-so-pwom- 
stan, the wind-maker, then to Sis-tse-kom, the 
thunder, and Puh-pom’, the lightning. As _ he 
prayed, entreating them to come and do his will, 
first the lodge ears would begin to quiver with 
the first breath of a coming breeze, which gradu- 
ally grew stronger and stronger until the lodge 
bent to the blasts, and the lodge poles strained 
and creaked.. Then thunder began to boom, faint 
and far away, and lightning to dimly blaze, and 
they came nearer and nearer until they seemed 
to be just overhead; the crashes deafened us, the 
flashes blinded us, and all were terror-stricken. 
Then this wonderful man would pray them to go, 
and the wind would die out, and the thunder and 
lightning go on rumbling and flashing into the 
far distance until we heard and saw them no 
more.” 
All this the old man firmly believed that he 
had heard and seen. I cannot account for it, nor 
can you, except—if there be such a thing—the 
wily old magician hypnotized his audiences. 
WALTER B. ANDERSON. 
[TO BE CONTINUED. | 
FOREST AND STREAM. 


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Fig. 2._ The fire drill of America, Australia, Tasmania, 
India, Africa and elsewhere. 

Fire Making. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Starting a fire by friction with sticks— 
How many persons are there that have ever 
seen a fire started by rubbing two sticks to- 
gether, or how many are there that ever heard 
of its being done? And yet it was the way the 
Indians started fires long before flint, steel and 
tinder came into use for that purpose; for the 
red man knew nothing of steel until after the 
advent of the pale-face. 
Well do I recollect the first time I ever saw 

Fig. 8. Reproduction of an ancient Mexican painting, 
showing man using the fire drill. 
it done, and that was by an Indian when I was 
a boy. Afterward I was taught to do it, and 
many a time after that I did it during my youth- 
ful days. Perhaps the following story about it 
might be of interest to the readers of FOREST 
AND STREAM. 
When I was a lad about ten years of age, I 
went to call on a playmate who was very sick 
‘with the dysentery, and while there his mother 
handed me a 50-cent piece and a large black 
bottle and asked me would I go about two miles 
away to an Indian who had a hut near Mascraft 
Brook, and get him to fix up some medicine for 
her boy, as that Indian had the reputation of 
being a very skillful doctor in the aboriginal 
way with roots, barks and leaves. 
When I arrived at the hut I found him seated 

























Fig. 4. Another kind of fire drill, used by the Gauchos. 
on a log weaving a basket. Stating the case to 
him, he said, “Me make heap good medicine. 
Me cure him soon.” 
Taking a basket, a hatchet and a hunting 
knife, he started for the woods and I followed 
after. He dug up a root in one place, peeled 
some bark in another, cut some twigs in an- 
other, and gathered some leaves in another. 
What the rest of these ingredients were I am 
now unable to say, but one I well recollect was 
the soft pithy ends of the twigs near the terminal 
buds of vigorous young sassafras. sprouts. Com- 
ing back to the hut, he washed the roots in the 
brook that ran by his door, cut them, as well as 
the barks and twigs, into very small pieces, and 
putting the whole business into a large kettle 
nearby filled with water, he hung it upon a 
horizontal stick laid in two crutches over a bed 
of ashes; then taking a stick he poked among 
the ashes to see if there was any fire, and find- 
ing none, he said: ‘Fire all gone. Mus’ make 
some.” 
“Got any matches?” said I. 
“No,” he grunted. 
“How are you going to start a fire without 
matches?” I asked. 
“Boy don’t know; Injun does,” was his laconic 
reply. 
He then went into the hut and brought out 
three sticks; one some two feet in length and 
about as wide and thick as one’s hand, with 
notches cut along both sides; another stick also 
some two feet in length, and about as large or 
perhaps a trifle larger round than a broom 
handle, six-cornered and pointed at both ends; 
the third stick was a trifle crooked and between 
two and three feet in length. Taking a leather 
thong that resembled a whiplash, he made a bow 
of the crooked stick, and placing the flat one 
upon the ground with a piece of birch bark under 
one of the notches, he wound the whiplash 
once around the six-cornered one, and set it 
vertically upon the flat stick with the point near 
the angle of one of the notches, and, taking a 
knotty chip in his left hand with which to hold 
the vertical stick, he commenced see-sawing the 
bow back and forth, and in a short time the 

ee 5. Eskimo lighting fire by means of the thong 
rill. 
Fig. 6. The bow drill, used by Atlantic Coast Indians 
and according to Schoolcraft by the Sioux and the In- 
dians of Canada. 
PT alee 
_ Fig. 7. The pump drill employed by the Iroquois, and 
in southwestern America. 
