CHAPTER 6
MATERIAL CULTURE AND DECORATIVE ARTS
The tangible creations of Plains Indian people have been much admired for their ingenuity, color, and beauty. Indian houses, clothing, tools, weapons, crafts, arts, and other things made and modified for their survival and comfort have enjoyed a great deal of attention, and often non-Indians become interested in learning more about Indian cultures after an initial fascination with Indian material life. Besides appealing to the senses, Plains material items reveal a great deal about Indian people’s capacity for invention, their deep understanding of the natural world, and, because so many items have symbolic value, their sense of place in the social and spiritual worlds too.
DWELLING
The Tipi
It would be hard to imagine a dwelling better suited to its environment than the Plains tipi. Known to English speakers by the Dakota term combining t., “to dwell,” and the indefinite suffix p. (thus, roughly, “something to dwell in”), the conical tent formed from poles and a hide cover was the sole house type for nomadic groups and a secondary travel lodge for groups that lived in fixed houses. Forerunners of the classic Plains tipi are observed among native peoples of the circumpolar regions, such as the northern Canadian Indians and Inuits, the Saami of Scandinavia, and Siberian tribes, all of whom have conical dwellings, though smaller and sometimes covered with bark or vegetable fiber matting instead of skin. The early occupants of the Plains must have had tipis that were smaller than those known historically, since horses were needed to regularly drag the longer poles and heavier covers of large tipis, and arguably horses made it easier to obtain larger numbers of buffalo hides for bigger covers.
The size of a tipi may be spoken of in terms of the number of buffalo skins used to make the cover. Fourteen to 18 skins were used for the average lodge, though as few as 7 or, for oversized ceremonial lodges, as many as 22. Closely stitched together with sinew, the tanned hides were sewn flesh side out into a shape that wrapped perfectly around the supporting poles.
Initially, the builders made a foundation by lashing together a cluster of three or four poles at one end; this assembly was stood with the lashed end up, and the loose ends spread apart on the ground. The choice between the tripod and four-pole foundation was standardized by tribal tradition. Groups using three poles included the Crees, Gros Ventres, Assiniboines, Tetons, Mandans, Ankaras, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Poncas, Otoes, Wichitas, and Kiowas. The Sarsis, Blackfoots, Shoshones, Utes, Omahas, and Comanches preferred the four-pole base. (These preferences usually, but not always, reflect obvious linguistic and historical connections.) Once the foundation was set, several more poles were laid in the crotch formed by the base poles to create a conical framework. Depending on whether the foundation is three or four poles, how the additional poles rest and project above the crossing point varies: a tripod base produces a tidy swirl of pole tips, while the four-pole base causes the tips to lie in two bunches. Thus, a knowing observer might be able to tell, say, a Ponca from an Omaha lodge at a distance by the appearance of the tipi top. The kind and size of the poles used were also distinguishing. Peoples living on the northwest Plains, near the Rocky Mountains—most notably the Crows—had access to lodgepole pine, which produced timbers in excess of 30 feet. Crow tipis therefore have a particularly graceful hourglass appearance as the poles extend a good distance up beyond the crossing point. Elsewhere, other long, straight, and light timbers were used, such as yellow pine in the northwest, tamarack in the northeast, and white and red cedar.
Two people could put up this framework in a matter of minutes. Normally women owned the tipi components, largely the product of their labor, and were the ones to put it up. In another few minutes they could raise the cover into place with a lifting pole and lace it closed around the frame using hardwood pins; the lacer climbing up to do her work on rungs temporarily lashed between two poles, or standing on the shoulders of her companion. In joining the cover edges, parts of the seam were left open as a chimney at the top and a doorway at the bottom. At the top of the seam, the loose cover formed two lapel-like flaps. These were fitted with poles that allowed them to be closed or opened in varying ways from the ground outside, in order to direct the airflow inside the tipi, catching a breeze or drawing out smoke. The door might be a simple flap made by hanging a blanket or hairy skin from a lace pin, or a well-crafted oval of hide stretched over willow, with paint and beadwork. At the ground level, the cover was stretched and held taught with hardwood stakes or rocks. During hot spells, the cover could be rolled up from the ground to let air in along the floor. Drainage trenches or even snow fences made from brush were sometimes added around the tipi base for long stays in inclement weather. The tipi was usually set up so that the doorway faced east, away from the prevailing wind and in sacred alignment with the rising sun. To add more significance, the cover was often painted with colorful animal figures and patterns derived from the sacred dreams of the master. Generally, the finished lodge was about 15 feet in diameter and 15–25 feet high, standing elegant and ready for any condition.
Inside the tipi were a number of furnishings that helped create a comfortable living space. An important interior wall was formed by a “dew cloth” of skin tied to the frame from ground to about shoulder level, protecting the inhabitants from rain and condensation that would run down the poles. The liner also provided insulation and helped direct air flow. A fireplace was made on the floor near the center (actually west of center, directly beneath the smoke flap opening—the tipi cone tilts somewhat into the prevailing westerly winds, and the cone’s footprint is not perfectly round but egg-shaped). Depending on the tribe, the fireplace might be on the ground surface or in a pit, and was normally small, only for heating—cooking was done outside whenever possible. A pile of buffalo chips or sticks was kept nearby to feed the flames. The floor was otherwise covered with sage and furs. Around the inside wall were the sleeping places. There might be a simple pallet and blanketing of buffalo robes, directly on the ground, or cots formed by suspending rawhide on low pegs. Beds were tucked into the angle of the cone and well below the smoke.
More comfort was provided with backrests. Ingenious in their portability, backrests were made from many willow rods strung together horizontally; they were suspended from stick tripod frames at the ends of the beds for sitting, and rolled up for travel. Around the lodge, other kinds of gear were hung from the poles or set on the floor. Large collapsible rawhide envelopes called parfleches, painted with bold geometric patterns, stored clothing and meat. A cylindrical rawhide case held the man’s war bonnet. From the rafters, such items as a quiver and a green buffalo paunch water bag were hung. There were bowls, cups, and spoons made from wood, horn, and turtle shell. Various beaded bags and pillows stuffed with hair or grass completed the furnishings. Surrounding all within, the liner might be decorated with colorful scenes depicting the exploits of the lodge master.
Tipi residents and their visitors observed several points of etiquette that brought an air of respect and order to home life. While an open door permitted the unannounced entry of friends, a closed door required a polite request and an invitation to come in. It was correct for men to move around the north side and women the south, taking care not to pass between a seated person and the fire if possible. Kinship terms were used when begging pardon. The owner’s place was opposite the door, with a place for an honored son or guest to his left—his heart side. Making and tending the lodge fire were activities governed by a sense of what was proper; for example, in keeping a wood fire the sticks were fed in endwise in a manner that regulated the heat and light carefully. Often a small square of ground west of the fire was kept clear as an altar with cedar, sage, or sweet grass incense. The circular floor of the tipi, with this ritually cleared ground within, represented an orderly cosmos and a reverent attitude.
By 1900, canvas wall tents, log cabins, and frame houses had replaced the tipi as primary dwellings in most Plains Indian communities. Tipis were still valued for travel, ceremonies, and summer encampments, though canvas and muslin replaced bison skin and these materials required design changes such as sewn loops for the bottom pegs. Later tipis are generally a little larger than earlier ones, in the range of 20 feet across or more, because cloth is lighter than buffalo skin, making larger covers practical. The availability of cars and trailers in the twentieth century, with their better ability to transport long poles, plus the wider access to pole lumber they afforded, also contributed to the development of bigger lodges. Today, a trip to Crow Indian Fair south of Billings, Montana, during August to view the thousands of lodges will confirm the continuing importance of the design as both habitation and cultural icon. Perhaps the most interesting modern development has been the revived role of the tipi as a canvas for Plains painting. Traditional artists have recreated and reinterpreted patterns known from tribal history. In this way, the tipi, both architecture and art, lives on as a classic of form and function.
The Earth Lodge
In contrast to the light, portable tipi, the earth lodge of the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Ankaras, the Pawnees, and some Southern Siouans (Poncas, Otoes, Missourias) was a large, stationary structure meant for sedentary life. An earth lodge might last 15 years before the tolls of nature would require rebuilding, in which case a new lodge could be erected more or less on the same spot, if the villagers did not want to relocate to a better garden site.
Earth lodge construction plans and techniques varied even within tribes, but all were generally similar. Teams of women did the work, though the floor plan might first be laid out by some medicine men. A rawhide rope was set down to delineate a circle 30–90 feet in diameter, and the ground within was cleared. A dozen or more upright posts, about 6 feet high and thick as telephone poles, were placed around the circle, and more logs were added horizontally or vertically to form an outside wall. At the circle center, four to eight more heavy timbers, connected with cross members either lashed or joined in place, composed a framework about 10 feet high. Rafter poles connected the center frame to the outside wall, and the entire skeleton was packed with willow branches, sod, grass, and dirt in order to form an artificial hill-cavern. By excavating the ground a few feet as the circle was first cleared, headroom could be added and a ledge was formed just inside the outer walls that served as a bench. Most earth lodges also had a low entrance extension, similar to the entryway of an Inuit igloo, though square rather than domed in cross-section, which prevented wind and rain from blowing directly into the house. Entrances often opened to the east or southeast, like a tipi door. An unlined pit about 3 feet around at the center of the floor contained the fire, and there was a sizeable hole in the center of the roof to let the smoke escape.
Within the central frame and around the fire was a bed for elders, seats for honored guests, and places for grinding and cooking. The main floor area was mostly open but could be divided with screens formed by upright logs. The spaces between the outer support posts formed bays dedicated to different functions: bed areas with platform cots enclosed with skin; pottery vessels and storage of food, firewood, or tools; an altar with ceremonial items such as a buffalo skull or medicine bundle, set up opposite the door; even corrals for horses. Some four dozen people, an extended family, plus their animals, could be housed in an earth lodge.
Villages of earth lodges were made up of houses built within feet of each other. These settlements typically featured enclosing defensive walls built up from sod, and numerous bell-shaped cache pits located among the houses to hold surplus from the harvest. Early photos often show many inhabitants sitting on top of their homes. The tribes living in earth lodges used tipis too for hunting trips.
The Grass Lodge
The grass lodge of the Wichitas and Kitsais was the third main dwelling type on the Plains. This distinctive house has been likened to a haystack or old-fashioned beehive. Predecessors of the Caddoan grass house dwellers on the plains built earth lodges, and it has been proposed that the grass lodge is an adaptation of the earth lodge design using different materials and techniques. Grass lodges were more graceful and symmetrical, standing about 30 feet high. A doorway so small that those entering had to stoop opened directly into a spacious but dark interior. Sometimes a smoke hole was located near the top. Other times no hole permitted the smoke of the central fire to escape; instead, it wafted into the eaves and seeped through the grass. The interior floor was packed with dirt. In the upper reaches of the structure, cross-poles supported stores of corn and pumpkin.
Erection of the grass lodge required many builders, mostly women, working together over a period of days. A square framework of logs similar to that used in the earth lodge center was built as basic support. Tapered poles, quite thick at one end, were set in the ground forming a circle around the base structure (“round like the sun,” according to a Wichita origin myth) and their tops bent and lashed together with elm bark, somewhat like a curved tipi frame. To these vertical poles were lashed thinner horizontal members all around at intervals from the ground up, forming a basket-like frame, with the builders climbing their way up to lash each successive rung, sometimes with the help of a notched-log ladder. Next, they added bunches of little bluestem or buffalo grass in enormous quantity, held in place with light rods lashed to the framework. The bunches were overlapped like shingles. Like the earth lodge, the grass lodge was intended for long-term occupation by an extended family. After several years, as the grass rotted and became infested with insects and rodents, the lodge would simply be burned and a new one built.
The Wigwam
The term “wigwam” is sometimes used interchangeably with “tipi,” but the two words refer to notably different structures. The wigwam, though found in various shapes and sizes, always involves a squat wooden framework of vertical and horizontal lashed poles covered with plant fiber matting, bark, or skins. It is characteristic of the eastern Woodlands of North America, and on the Plains it was used by some of the tribes with more recent eastern ancestry—mostly in the east-central Plains. The Osages, Iowas, Kansas, and Quapaws used the wigwam as their main dwelling. The Poncas, Otoes, and Missourias used the wigwam secondarily to the earth lodge, and the Plains Ojibwas sometimes built wigwams instead of tipis. Most of these groups built both round and rectangular styles of wigwam, from 30 to 100 feet long. Some preferred walnut, cypress, or elm bark, and others, hide or woven rush covering. The wigwams making up a village could be arranged regularly or not, and sometimes tribes built log palisades around the grouping. Often cache pits were dug directly in the wigwam floor rather than outside among the lodges to store supplies.
FIGURE 6.3 Photo of Wichita settlement in Indian Territory, circa 1890, labeled “Ska-wa-cer’s home,” showing grass lodges, log cabins, arbors, storage platforms (some with canvas covers), wagons, and surrounding gardens. More grass lodges are visible on the far horizon, showing the dispersed nature of Wichita communities.
Other Structures
Regardless of the main house type, a village would also include other structures. Brush arbors or shades of various designs were common to all the tribes, set up adjacent to the main dwellings. Shades open to the breeze on one or more sides were more comfortable for working or napping in the heat of summer. The Crows favored a round arbor with a conical roof. On the South Plains, shades were made with uprights about 7 feet high and a flat roof of boughs, or a sapling hoop framework. The sweat lodge was a small dome also made from saplings and covered with brush and old hides. Six or so men huddled within around a pile of rocks that had been heated in an outside fire and rolled in with large forked poles. Water was poured on the rocks to produce an intense steam for fitness and ceremonial purification. The sweat lodge was often built near a creek so that the participants could plunge into cool water after sweating. Similar small huts were built for women in which to seclude themselves during their menstrual period. Menstruating women were considered extra powerful and had to avoid contact with other people (see Chapter 5). Special tipis were erected solely for ritual, to house sacred pipes or accommodate curing ceremonies or peyote meetings, and occasionally long “medicine tipis” were built by joining two or more tipi frames and covers. The last notable structure type in pre-reservation times was the lodge built for the Sun Dance, which is described in Chapter 10.
Despite the persistence of grass houses in Oklahoma well into the twentieth century and the continuing special use of tipis, once reservations were established, Plains Indian people quickly adopted wall tents and cabins, and then frame and brick houses. These forms have posed difficulties for those adopting them. First of all, imagine how inconvenient it would be to talk about non-Indian architecture in an Indian language. A Comanche-Spanish dictionary published in 1865 shows the same Comanche word for wall, ceiling, and door, which makes perfect sense in a conical house, but not when the house is cubical. Rectangular spaces violate traditional ideas about the natural harmony or sacredness of circles. And, in practical terms, for people living in remote areas, non-Indian house types are expensive to build and maintain. Nevertheless, in Indian areas of Montana or southwest Oklahoma today one finds single-story brick homes built to Department of Housing and Urban Development specifications. These homes are small and crowded by non-Indian standards. Storage space is often a problem, necessitating sheds around the yard. The houses normally have electricity and indoor plumbing, though again it is hard to keep these features in working order. Indian domestic customs are carried on within the restriction of the modern structure. Occupants may prefer to use the house’s side door rather than front door if it faces east, or line their closets with cedar to preserve their regalia, using the traditional material for pest control. An arbor or tipi may be set up nearby for sleeping to allow brick house dwellers some relief from the summer heat.
TOOLS AND WEAPONS
Garde Tools
In discussing material culture as in other matters, it is important not to forget the heritage of horticulture that enabled pioneering of the region by several of the long-standing Plains tribes. The basic gardening tool kit has been mentioned in Chapter 3. Women turned the soil with hoes made from buffalo shoulder blades. Sharpened sticks were enough for planting seeds and digging up roots. The digging stick was useful in gathering wild plants as well as cultivated ones. Rakes were fashioned from antlers mounted on handles. The Upper Missouri tribes built timber scaffolds upon which to dry corn, threshed the corn with hardwood flails, and pounded the grains with heavy wooden pestles in wood mortars.
Basketry and Pottery
Basketry and pottery are best considered in relation to gardening. These crafts may be useful to populations surviving on gathered plants, but they become more prevalent in societies relying on harvested surpluses of cultivated foods.
While tribes of the Southwest, California, and Northwest Coast are renowned for superbly woven fiber baskets, some so tightly made that they can hold water, others completely covered in gorgeous woodpecker scalps, only a few Plains groups had baskets and they devoted relatively little care to their construction. The Mandans, Hidatsas, Arikaras, and Pawnees made a distinctive style of burden basket for carrying corn at harvest. These were large, deep containers of willow bark, plaited to form geometric designs, on a framework of U-shaped bent sticks, complete with carrying strap. Small coiled basketry trays were made by the same tribes and some of their nomadic neighbors for gambling—dice made from stones or fruit pits were shuffled in them. The weaving of plant fibers to form mats, bags, and ropes can also be considered along with basketry, but these practices were similarly restricted. The Pawnees and Iowas made multipurpose reed mats; the Blackfoots made a kind of rope from bark fiber. Otherwise, no plant fiber weaving was found among the Plains tribes, except those Shoshones and Utes of the western margins who partook in the sophisticated basketry traditions of the Great Basin.
The ceramics of the Plains were also simple in comparison to those of neighboring culture areas. Influences in the design of earthenware came onto the Plains mainly from the Woodlands and only very tentatively from the Southwest. Again, it was the semi-sedentary peoples of Siouan and Caddoan background who relied on this technology. Pots were molded by hand from lumps of clay, not built up of clay coils or spun on a wheel. They tended to be collared, globular cooking vessels with no handles or a pair of small ear-like grips near the rim. Decoration was minimal, consisting at most of linear or triangular patterns pressed in the wet clay with cordage or a sharp stick. Tribal oral traditions and archaeology both support the notion that the quality of pottery on the Plains diminished after the Late Prehistoric Period, as horse culture and manufactured trade goods spread through the area.
It stands to reason that basketry and pottery skills would not be refined among horse cultures. With the dietary focus on buffalo, the kinds of plant processing aided by basket use became less important to many groups. A surprising number of nomadic peoples around the world do use pottery, but even so it is not very practical or efficient for nomads to drag or carry their surplus food in heavy breakable containers. Rawhide containers served better for food transportation on the Plains, or surpluses were simply cached and returned to later. Pots were not essential for cooking, since lighter animal paunches worked well as cooking vessels. Moreover, once contact was made with non-Indians, metal cookware became widespread—not so light as skin vessels, but more convenient, and more durable than clay pottery.
Cradles
In mobile societies the safe transportation of babies is a major concern. Plains tribes used several kinds of cradle to carry and protect young ones. While referred to as cradles, these devices were primarily carriers rather than beds.
The simplest design, called a cradleboard, consisted of a single plank somewhat wider and longer that its passenger. The baby was tied to the board with buckskin bands or cloth sashes wrapped around the plank. A hole near the top center accepted a thong for hanging the board. Cradleboards often included a small wooden shelf serving as a footrest, wooden side rails, and a face guard of squared or arched wood. The guard or “bow” allowed a cover to be draped over the baby’s face to prevent sunburn, and from it dewclaw rattles or trade bells might be suspended to entertain the child. A soft animal pelt was added as cushioning. Though uncomplicated as a piece of equipment, the board held precious cargo and so was invested with spiritual power: Pawnee cradleboards were cut from the heartwood of a living tree and decorated with a carving of the sacred Morning Star to preserve the child’s life. The board style of cradle was characteristic of the woodland east and so, in addition to the Pawnees, was found among the Southern Siouans.
Other cradles consisted of a leather container for the baby with an internal wooden support. In the style preferred by the Blackfoots, Crows, Nez Perce, Shoshones, and Utes, a roughly elliptical board stretched and backed a buckskin pocket that held the baby. The exact shape of the board varied; for example, Crow cradles had squarer tops than those of neighboring groups. Other types had multi-piece frames. Instead of a board, the Arapaho cradle employed an inverted U-shaped outer frame spread with a cross-piece to support the leather container. Wichita cradles used the U-shaped outer frame backed with two dozen vertical willow rods, the whole assembly held together with sinew. Apache models featured an oval outer frame filled in with horizontal wooden slats and a wide awning over the baby’s face made from two bows joined by vertical slats.
Kiowa, Comanche, and some Sioux examples, known as lattice-backed cradles, utilized external frames made from two large planks joined by two cross members and set wider at the top than at the bottom. The pieces were joined not with nails or glue, but by burning small holes through them and tying them together with buckskin. A buckskin container resembling a giant shoe was tied onto the frame, laced up and down with the baby snug within. The pointed ends of the main planks projected several inches beyond the container top to protect the baby’s head.
Various means were used to funnel off or absorb the baby’s waste. Moss was the usual diaper material. After a day in the cradle, the child was unbound and dressed with bear or buffalo grease and powder made from decomposed cottonwood or dried buffalo dung.
The mother carried the cradle on her back by means of a strap around her upper arms and chest or with a tumpline around her forehead. But the cradle was especially handy for the mother when riding or doing chores in camp. Jean Louis Berlandier, a Swiss scientist observing Comanche ways in Texas around 1828, noted,
Comanche cradles are packed on horseback on long journeys and the way they are carried is strange indeed. … When a rancheria [Indian camp] is on the march you may see the women on horseback with their babies swinging from the pommels of their saddles. … When they reach the day’s campsite the mothers may swing the cradles from the branch of a tree, or prop them against a convenient rock, and so they nurse their babies.
(Berlandier 1969:85–86)
The Comanche cradles described in Berlandier’s report are actually cradleboards, suggesting that this tribe used more than one kind of cradle, a possibility with many of the groups.
At night Comanche babies were placed in a stiff rawhide tube, like the baby carrier container but without a frame. The rigid night cradle protected the baby should its parents roll over as it slept between them. Another sleeping contrivance for young ones was a small hammock suspended between trees or house posts, used by several tribes.
Much care was invested in cradle construction. Usually relatives of the parents were called upon to supply this item. Among the matrilineal Pawnees, the father’s family made the cradle as an expression of mutual concern for the child. Normally a small, unadorned cradle was made for a newborn; if the infant survived the critical early months, another cradle of subsequent size was built, this one heavily decorated. Many larger cradles had casings entirely covered with quills or beads in an intensive labor of love, and the projecting planks of lattice-back cradles were embellished with brass tacks in an hourglass pattern and red and blue paint. A fancy baby carrier was kept long after the child was grown as a family heirloom.
Boats and Rafts
On the open Plains, Indian people did not face the need to navigate large bodies of water, and voyaging on the rivers of the region was seldom a practical alternative to land travel. Crossing large streams with livestock or other belongings was sometimes necessary. Good descriptions of the Indian process for river crossing (and similar procedures of non-Indian cavalrymen and cowboys) were recorded by non-Indian observers. Swimming horses across the larger streams could be a harrowing undertaking during the springtime swells. Individuals were swept a long way downstream as they crossed, and it might take many anxious minutes for all members of a party to make the crossing safely. Generally, though, crossing on foot or horseback was sufficient.
Under these circumstances, only the most basic forms of watercraft were ever necessary. The typical Plains vessel was the bullboat built by the Mandans, Hidatsas, Omahas, Kansas, and Assiniboines and less regularly by most others. This was a buffalo-skin boat with a simple framework of cross-lashed willow sticks; it was not a canoe, but round, with a flat bottom, like a tub. In structure the bullboat was very similar to the sealskin coracle used in the British Isles from ancient times into the twentieth century, although there is no historical connection. While the larger bullboats (about 5 feet in diameter) could contain a person, and were paddled by leaning over the rim and pulling the boat forward, many were smaller—enough to hold cargo but no passenger—and were pushed or towed by swimmers, usually women. If a bullboat was not available, as when men were away from home on a raid, a raft of sticks and hide could be improvised to keep weapons dry or transport a wounded warrior.
War and Hunting Gear
Among weapons, none was more essential than the bow and arrow. The same type of bow was used for both hunting and combat. It was relatively short—about 3 feet long—so as to be more easily handled from horseback. Some bows were straight, forming a simple arc when strung, while others had forward curves built in to produce more spring.
Any man was able to make his own bow, although among the Omahas and probably other tribes there were those known as specialists who built weapons for their companions in trade for tobacco and other goods. When fashioning a bow, the maker chose from a number of designs and materials. The so-called self-bow was made from a single piece of material, but it was also possible to glue and bind together different pieces for strength and flexibility to make a composite or “compound” bow. While only self-bows are found in the Woodlands and Mexico, the compound design is characteristic of western North America, suggesting that the concept diffused from Asia, where composite bows are the norm, but only part way. Both kinds were found on the Plains.
Wood was the usual bow material, and the species preferred on the Plains were ash and Osage orange (also called bois-d’arc, pronounced “bow-dark,” French for “bow wood”), with other woods such as chokecherry finding secondary use in some areas. (Other trusty bow woods like hickory and yew were not native to the Plains, and obtained only infrequently.) Each of these woods had a good combination of requisite qualities: availability, strength, flexibility, shape memory, and workability with simple stone and metal tools. Long, straight, knotless sticks had to be found. They were seasoned, polished with fat or brains, and scraped into the desired profile. Sections of horn from the mountain sheep or elk could also be joined to make small elegant bows, though horn bows were not common, mostly found among the tribes near the Rockies, such as the Crows, Shoshones, and Nez Perce. Laminated horn-wood bows are found as well. To prevent cracking and perhaps to improve flexion, a bow stave was often wrapped with sinew chord or backed with a layer of sinew glued against it, and many or most Plains bows included this feature. The sinew was dressed with fat or paint made with mica or colored clay. Bowstrings were also made of sinew, normally from the buffalo, carefully rolled, twisted, noosed, and fortified with an application of thin glue.
Men took similar care in making their arrows. All knew how to do so, but old men with accumulated skill were highly respected, and a young Arapaho man might invite several elders to his tipi for a day of arrow making. Well before it was time to assemble some arrows, a maker looked for straight shoots growing off of dogwood, ash, plum, cherry, hackberry, mulberry, or serviceberry trees. These woods were tough but also had some flexibility, so that if a shot animal rolled over on the arrow it might spring and thrust itself more deeply instead of snapping. The shoots were collected, bundled, and dried in the lodge of many months. After seasoning, the blank shafts were cut and shaped. The maker determined the shaft length in relation to his body, for example, by measuring against his arm, combining the length from elbow to middle finger tip with the length from his wrist to the big knuckle of the middle finger. Thus, arrows were typically about 2 feet long.
The shafts were straightened with a bone tool resembling a box wrench or donut with a hole just big enough to work the shaft through, and then they were sanded to roundness using a pair of grooved sandstone slabs. Next, lengthwise grooves were scraped into the shafts. The Comanches reportedly used a tool like the arrow straightener, but with a sharp burr on the inside circumference, to cut arrow grooves. Different tribes employed distinctive groove patterns, but in general they were said to represent lightning, a magical appeal to power and fatality. Grooves may also have imparted spin to the arrows, improving accuracy, or sped the flow of blood out of the arrow’s victim, although some modern archery authorities have questioned these explanations. Paint in some distinctive combination might be applied to identify the arrow with its owner. The shaft was then carefully fletched with two, three, or four rather long pieces of split feather, which helped the arrow to fly correctly. The shaft was grooved slightly to receive the feathers and they were fixed with glue and sinew thread. Feathers from wild turkey, owl, turkey vulture, hawks, or eagles were preferred; owl and vulture feathers were especially desired because they did not matte when wetted with blood. The feather end of the shaft was then notched for nocking, and the arrowhead glued and lashed to the other end. Most arrowheads during the Historic Period were iron or steel rather than stone, obtained in manufactured form from non-Indian traders or made by the Indians from barrel hoops and frying pans.
The frontier observer Colonel Richard I. Dodge noted that even a skilful arrow maker could not hope to complete more than one arrow in a day’s work. A man could use the product of an entire month of arrow making in only a brief skirmish or buffalo chase. Accordingly, arrows were very precious; they were not easily left behind in the field, and a good set of arrows might equal a horse in trade.
Arrows were housed in a quiver, which could be a simple tube of rawhide or an elaborate container made from the entire skin of a wolf, otter, or mountain lion. The fancier quivers had alongside the arrow compartment a separate, long narrow compartment of soft skin for storing the unstrung bow. Also stored within was a stick of dried hide glue, ready to be softened with hot water, to make repairs to the bow and arrows while in the field. The quiver had a strap and could be worn on the back for drawing arrows over the shoulder, but was often rested flat across the horse’s back behind the rider, with the strap around his waist. The bowman drew, nocked, and shot his arrows very rapidly, such that until the advent of repeating firearms, an Indian archer could get off several accurate arrow shots in the time it took a gunman to reload and aim once. He held the bow at a tilt or almost horizontally, and pushed forward as the string was drawn back, in a quick, smooth motion. In battle or buffalo charge, he clutched extra arrows alongside the bow while firing.
Skill with the bow was acquired from an early age. As Colonel Dodge explained,
The first childish plaything of which [an Indian boy] has recollection is the miniature bow and blunted arrows placed in his hands by his proud father, when he is scarcely four years old. Practicing incessantly, he is, when nine or ten years of age, able to bring in from his daily rambles quite a store of larks, doves, thrushes, sparrows, rabbits, gophers, ground-squirrels, and other “small deer,” for which he is greatly praised, particularly by his mother, to whose especial delectation they are presently devoted. When sufficiently familiar and expert with this weapon as to warrant the experiment, he is furnished with arrows with iron points an epoch in his life ranking with the day of possession by the white boy of his first gun. He now quits the companionship of the smaller boys, and in company with lads armed as himself, makes wide excursions after larger game, sometimes being gone from his lodge for several days.
(Dodge 1882:415–416)
Archery practice continued throughout a man’s lifetime. He sharpened his skills with games, such as firing off a batch of arrows as quickly as possible and shooting at a rolling wooden hoop target.
Along with his bow and arrows, a man placed great value on his shield. He selected the hide from the neck or shoulders of a bull buffalo, as that was the thickest available. The green hide was dried and shrunk using heat, cut in a circle about 2 feet across (measured to the width of the maker’s body), and formed with a slightly convex or concave profile. The result had a texture and strength not unlike fiberglass. A single piece of hide thus prepared might be an inch thick and was all that was needed to make a basic shield. Sometimes multiple layers were laced on a wooden hoop frame. Buffalo hair added between the layers made the shield even more resilient, and in later days paper served this purpose. Texan colonist Stephen Austin relates in an 1822 letter how his party of settlers was detained by some Comanches north of Laredo. The Indians surrounded them and seized all their possessions. In a while the Comanches released them to go on their way, and returned all their property except for a few items, including Austin’s grammar book. Austin seems puzzled by this transaction, since the Indians did not read, but one reason for their liking books is apparent. Texas rancher Charles Goodnight found a complete history of Rome inside one Comanche shield.
The shield was reportedly tough enough to actually deflect arrows and low-velocity bullets fired from a distance. The warrior wore it strapped on his left forearm, leaving his hand free, and deftly angled it against incoming shots. Men practiced these moves by firing blunt arrows at each other.
A Comanche man set his shield on a tripod standing outside his lodge door and rotated it periodically throughout the day so it would continually face the sun and absorb its power. More power was endowed by attaching feathers, scalps, small medicine bundles, and the skins of small birds and animals around the rim, and painting the face with a visionary image such as a thunderbird, water monster, stars, or bear’s paw. Especially powerful shields were stored far away from camp and the polluting influence of menstruating women, which would render the shields powerless and leave their owners in danger. To retrieve a distant shield, its owner approached it and returned home in a circular path analogous to the intact shield itself. The value of the shield was indicated by the high degree of ceremony attached to its decoration and storage. It is perhaps both ironic and understandable that, in a culture celebrating men’s prowess as raiders above all else, the most valued material culture object was a defensive weapon.
Other tools of the warrior’s trade were firearms, knives, lances, clubs, and tomahawks. Guns were obtained through trade, as battle trophies, and as implements handed out on the reservations to support subsistence hunting, scouting, and police work. Contemporary accounts and the holdings of museums confirm that many kinds of firearms were employed, including flintlock muskets and rifles of Spanish, French, English, and American manufacture, Sharps and Spencer carbines, an early German breechloader called a needle gun, elegant Ballard sporting rifles, and the famous repeating lever-action rifles made by Spencer, Henry, and Winchester. After the Civil War the better rifles were fairly well distributed, and revolvers were in wide use also.
Indians typically modified a long gun by cutting down the stock and filing off the end of the barrel to shorten it for better handling while riding, and the stock was adorned with brass tacks in decorative patterns. Guns might be housed in cases similar to those made for bows, carried across the saddle in front of the rider. A Comanche word for rifle, pia eet., literally “big bow,” gives some sense of how firearms were viewed and valued. Fancy guns became prestige possessions.
Notwithstanding their popularity and the high degree of Indian ingenuity applied to their maintenance, guns were not wholly practical. Ammunition was scarce and expensive, and any group was likely to have a mixture of different gun types, making it hard to stay supplied. Some Indians had the tools and materials to mold their own bullets and load cartridges, but lead and powder were not always dependably available. Indian ammo was often makeshift, with loose power and balls substituted for the proper fixed rounds, or shells reloaded again and again with powder accumulated from numerous broken percussion caps. Though repairs to a gunstock could be made with rawhide and sinew, the fixing of metal parts was not something easily done in an Indian camp. In addition to these drawbacks, any advantage in firepower of the gun over the bow was dubious during most of the horse era. Even someone adept at reloading at full gallop could not get shots off as rapidly as a bowman, and the effective ranges of bow and gun were not much different until the advent of buffalo guns in the 1870s. Thus, the bow remained in favor all through the horse period and was often carried along with the gun even by enthusiastic gun owners.
Men and women both carried knives in scabbards. The knife was a basic, indispensable tool for many routine tasks, from skinning and butchering game to carving wooden tipi pegs. Though not a weapon of choice, if a man found himself locked in close combat he might resort to the knife, attacking with downward thrusts while parrying with his shield or tomahawk; the knife was also needed for scalping. Early knives were sharpened pieces of stone or bone; with the non-Indian trade came metal blades, either made by Indians from scrap or obtained whole. Leather scabbards, worn around the neck with a tether or on the belt, were typically large in relation to the blade they stored, and they received profuse ornamentation with quills, beads, and brass tacks.
Beside knives, other essential cutting tools were the implements used for scraping fat and loose flesh from the inside of hides as they were stretched and dried. In one version, the heavy cannon bone of a bison was toothed and sharpened at one end for scraping. Another kind of flesher resembled an adze, with a flat stone or metal blade mounted at right angle to a bone handle, allowing the tool to be drawn with both hands down a vertically mounted hide.
The lance was another bladed weapon. Indian lances were meant for thrusting and parrying and were only thrown as a last resort. Lances shorter than a man were wielded in hand-to-hand combat on the ground, while longer ones—7–12 feet or more—were thrust from horseback. These weapons consisted of a thin wooden shaft, decorated with fur or leather wrappings and feathers and tipped with a round point made from bone, stone, or iron (available in trade) or a blade made of a salvaged knife or sword. The Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches favored a lance composed of a long, somewhat flexible yucca-stalk shaft with a saber blade. Lances were employed in hunting bison and bears as well as in battle.
Fearsome war clubs were made in several ways. Some terminated in a heavy wooden ball and others were shaped like a gunstock, either type sometimes having one or more metal blades projecting. Simpler clubs involved a rawhide covered stick as a handle, to which was lashed a rock or pair of horns. Rock heads could be lashed to swing freely from the end of the stick like the medieval European weapon called morning star. Clubs had leather wrist straps and were swung with great agility and effectiveness. Tomahawks were metal hatchet heads distributed by non-Indian traders and joined by the Indians to wooden handles, often with elaborate decoration. Swung or thrown, they were deadly as weapons, though often they were more valued as ceremonial items, exchanged as gifts, and buried to symbolize truces. In keeping with these ceremonial functions, some of the hatchet heads distributed by traders had a pipe bowl opposite the blade, such that the tomahawk handle also served as a pipe stem. Colonel Dodge suggested that clubs and tomahawks grew less important as actual weapons over the course of the 1800s, perhaps in relation to the spread of guns.
CLOTHING
The full-feathered headdress or “war bonnet” is perhaps the single most recognizable icon of Plains Indian identity. These headdresses are associated with chiefs, and indeed someone who deserved this role would qualify to own one, but they were considered appropriate wear for any accomplished warrior. The feathers signified important deeds, so that the bonnet was like the man’s résumé. War bonnets were worn only in ceremonies or donned just prior to charging into battle. Other times they were rolled up tightly and stored in a tubular rawhide case that could be slung from one’s horse or tipi rafters.
The bonnet was formed around a buckskin skullcap, or later, the crown cut out of a store-bought felt hat. To this base were added the tail feathers of the immature golden eagle, characteristically white with dark brown tips. Such feathers, the most highly regarded of all types, were attached securely in a radiating pattern around the edge of the crown by adding rawhide loops to their quills (or simply looping the quills) and tying them in with sinew and red yarn wrapping, somewhat loosely so that they would rake back and appear in dynamic motion as the wearer strode or rode. A long white plume of eagle down, receptive to the slightest breath of air, was placed amid the other feathers at the crown. For the man of many accomplishments, more feathers were added along one or two trailers of fabric down the neck and back. On some bonnets the trailer runs as far as the wearer’s heels. Beadwork or quill-work banding was added around the forehead, and the temples were decorated with beaded medallions or hanging ermine (winter weasel, white with black-tipped tail) skins or ribbons of rawhide or fabric.
Every element of the bonnet held some significance. The main symbolic themes were the sun’s rays and the lightness of the breeze, evoking ideas of spiritual strength and inspiration and agility in battle. Also, the feathers were decorated using a kind of code to indicate particular war deeds. The feather tips were decorated with dabs of paint or glued tufts of horsehair or eagle down, or cut with notches in various patterns. A feather with horsehair might count a stolen horse. Another coup indicator was the ermine skin hung from the temples of the hatband in some headdresses; among the Crows an ermine meant a captured enemy gun. Tribal affiliation is sometimes also shown in the bonnet’s style. The feathers on Blackfoot bonnets are set more rigidly, forming an erect tube—this apparently the earliest form of the full-feathered headdress; on Crow bonnets, the feathers lay back very flat.
A similar kind of bonnet, though more rare and confined to certain tribes including the Sioux and Cheyennes, was made by attaching animal horns on the skullcap instead of the full complement of feathers. Entire or split buffalo horns were most common, and antelope horns are sometimes seen. On these hats, the trailer feathers are usually the long, uniformly dark wing feathers of the eagle rather than tail feathers. This horned bonnet is distinguished structurally from yet another kind of horned headdress, which was made simply by wearing the whole horned scalp and shoulder fur of a buffalo. Such headdresses were more typical among the Comanches than feather bonnets during pre-reservation times. In fact a range of other animal head and back skins were worn in this manner all around the Plains. Wolf, coyote, and bear were most common, the animal’s snout projecting over the wearer’s brow, assimilating him to his animal counterpart.
A favorite hat style of the Central and Southern Plains tribes was the open-topped turban made from a band of otter or beaver fur, with a trailer made from the animal’s tail or cloth, both sections decorated with beadwork medallions. The Southern Siouans liked to add a large rawhide triangle projecting to one side of the turban. They also made cloth turbans. Through the twentieth century, the turban was considered a dignified look and part of formal dress in the south. Another headpiece of wide adoption in later years was the crest of stiff porcupine or deer tail bristles worn on the middle of the head, called a roach. An elaboration of the lock of hair left when the head was shaved in the style of Woodlands Indians like the Mohawks, the roach was introduced by tribes with eastern affiliations such as the Pawnees, Osages, Omahas, Poncas, and Tetons. The hair of the roach was spread and secured with a bone or metal plate called a roach spreader, tied around the chin with a thong. The spreader also might have a receptacle for the stem of one or two plumes. Roaches were sometimes accompanied by a cloth turban or headband. The Stereotypic headband with a single feather standing from the rear was not part of Plains dress, though many people tied one or more loose feathers in their hair in lieu of any hat. Manufactured top hats and cowboy hats became very popular as soon as they were available, as many old pictures show, and Indian people develop their own styles for wearing these, refraining from adding creases and instead attaching feathers and beadwork or metal bands. While all the hat styles described were for men, contemporary Southern Plains women sometimes wear the turban in dances and there are photos from around 1900 showing Sioux women donning war bonnets.
Women’s dresses exhibit several basic patterns. The simplest was a one-piece wrap-around skirt of deerskin, seen among the Pawnees, Osages, Caddos, and some other central and southern tribes. Simple open sleeves made from another skin could be worn above the wraparound in a style called “jumper,” of old and wide distribution, known among the Assiniboines, Plains Crees, Ojibwas, Blackfoots, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Dresses were also made from two skins sewn together horizontally (top and bottom, as among the Cheyennes, Eastern Sioux, and Plains Crees) or, more commonly, vertically (front and back, among the Shoshones, Crows, Blackfoots, and Upper Missouri tribes). In some instances the two vertical pieces were joined at the neck and shoulders by a narrow third section, or yoke, through which a neck hole was cut. This yoke could be formed by folding the top part of the back piece forward or sewing in a separate third piece. In parts of the central and southern Plains (among the Tetons, Poncas, Pawnees, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Utes, Kiowas, Comanches), the yoke developed as a large, third component, resembling a poncho or blouse, that was loosely laced to the two skirt pieces, or not joined to the skirt at all. Neck hole and sleeve cuts distinguished one tribal style from another. In sewing hide pieces together for clothing, the maker poked holes through the skins with an awl and then threaded a sinew strand through them, keeping the sinew end moist and pointed with her mouth.
Cloth, cotton thread, and eyed steel needles were used for dressmaking by the mid-1800s. At first stroud cloth, a woolen trade fabric, was the standard. Initially strouding was available only in dark red and dark blue, so these were the common dress colors and are still regarded today as traditional. Later other colors of strouding were available, along with lighter calico and sateen fabrics. The cut of cloth dresses is somewhat boxier than that of skin dresses and may use separate gussets or side-pieces in addition to front and back sections. When modern dresses are made from buckskin, they often follow these cloth dress patterns rather than earlier skin dress forms.
Three other beautiful traditions of cloth craft emerged as Plains women adopted manufactured fabric, and, later, sewing machines. The first, ribbon appliqué work, is widespread, but most highly developed among the Osages and neighboring peoples along the eastern edge of the Plains area and, like many traditions there, reveals Woodlands influence. In this craft, women’s shawls of dark-blue strouding are trimmed with borders composed of multiple overlain bands of colored satin ribbon, trimmed in ways that create diamonds and other shapes. A similar tradition of women’s cloth dance shawls developed on the Southern Plains in the twentieth century. In this case large polyester rectangles are ornamented with appliqué geometric and naturalistic designs of felt or other fabric, and commercial chainette fringe. The shawls are required vestment for women as they join in powwow dancing, and the cumulative effect is a riot of color and motion. The corollary for men on the Southern Plains is the “red and blue,” a blanket half in each color, worn over the shoulders during the Gourd Dance and peyote ceremony; these were originally stroud cloth but now employ materials and techniques like those used to make women’s shawls. A third Plains cloth tradition is the sewing of “star quilts” (owinj., “quilt”) among the Lakotas. Diamond-shaped patches in many colors of commercial cotton are combined in an eight-pointed starburst pattern, which forms the large central element of the quilt. Polyester batten is used to make the blanket warm but lightweight. Though the basic idea likely came to the Sioux through white missionaries, the Indians associate the quilted star with the Morning Star and cardinal directions of Native cosmology. Shawls and quilts function importantly as gifts at births, naming ceremonies, marriages, funerals, and memorial services as well as clothing.
In the old days men preferred to dress as lightly as circumstances would allow, often with only a breechclout and moccasins. The breechclout was a rectangle of deerskin or trade cloth about 1 foot wide and 6 feet long. The cloth was placed between the legs and drawn up and over a thin leather belt front and back, making two apron-like flaps that covered the man from his waist to about his knees. The length of the flaps overall and relative to each other was influenced by personal preference and tribal style. If more leg protection was desired, the man added leggings, separate tubes of deerskin or dark trade cloth hung with straps from the waist belt and covering thigh to ankle. Leggings were cut and stitched in different ways according to tribal practice, some having flaps or fringes, and with seams running up the front or side.
Plains men’s shirts have gotten much attention in books and museum displays but they were not everyday garb, rather special items worn by leaders in ceremonies only. Deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep were regarded as the only hides comfortable enough for wearing as shirts. From one of these skins, the section from the ribs back, including the hind legs, was cut to form the shirt-front; the two shoulder and foreleg parts of the skin were detached and sewn to either side of the front to make sleeve fronts. An identical fabrication was made as the shirt back and sewn to the front. Then a neck opening was made and on some shirts a decorative tab created below the neck front, both of these elements varying in shape by tribal custom. The erstwhile hind legs and (if left on) the tail of the animal hung below the wearer’s waist, but otherwise the shirt stopped around his waist.
Shirts were variously dyed, painting with symbolic pictures, fringed, and decorated with long beadwork or quillwork bands running from the shoulders down the chest and sleeves. Most striking was the addition of ermine skins, plugs of horsehair, or numerous bunches of human hair, representing, respectively, stolen guns, captured horses, and scalps taken in battle. Shirts thus decorated are frequently called “war shirts” or “scalp shirts”; the shirt became another display of the man’s war record, akin to the war bonnet.
Whereas earlier skin shirts preserve much of the natural contour of the donor animal and have only semi-closed sleeves, through the 1800s shirts become more tailored, reflecting non-Indian influence. Once calico and flannel, and ready-made shirts of these materials, became available from traders in the mid-1800s, cloth shirts were adopted and mated with other newer and older style items of clothing. Indian photo portraits from the late 1800s typically show a Victorian collarless, pinstripe cotton shirt along with cloth leggings and leather moccasins.
Footwear included moccasins and a type of boot derived from the moccasin. Moccasins occur in two main types: those in which a sheet of soft buckskin wraps the foot entirely, creating a soft sole; and those in which a separate hard rawhide sole is sewn to a soft buckskin upper. The soft-soled moccasin is found in the Woodlands, while the hard-soled form comes from the Southwest; both types occur on the Plains. The Assiniboines, Blackfoots, Crees, Crows, Gros Ventres, Sarsis, and Shoshones made their soft-sole shoes by cutting a single piece of skin according a pattern that would fold around the whole foot and sewing it closed around the toes and along the outside. Groups such as the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and Tetons made their hard-soled versions by first tracing the foot on a stiff, flat piece of rawhide. This sole was joined to a soft upper cut on a tribally distinctive pattern. A tongue was made by slicing the upper in one of several ways or added as a separate piece. Slits around the ankle took a thong for lacing. The Comanches added a cuff around the ankle, short fringe in a line on the instep from ankle to toe, and long fringe trailing in a bunch from the heel. Cheyennes sometimes added a bison tail or beard on the heel. There is thus some truth to the notion, inspired by Hollywood westerns, that the footprint left with a moccasin allowed a tracker to guess the wearer’s tribe. Sewing was done with the pattern turned inside out and the finished shoe then reversed on itself, to better protect the stitched seam.
In a variation on the soft-soled style, several tribes made moccasins of buffalo skin with the hair turned inward for winter wear. Winter shoes were cut oversized to allow wrapping the feet with cloth or stuffing extra hair or straw insulation, and they were thoroughly greased for waterproofing. Another trick for water repellency was to make the shoes from the top of an old hide tipi cover, which had been exposed to smoke for endless hours. Northward from Montana and North Dakota, women sometimes wore boots. Also, the Comanches are credited with originating a form of women’s boot in the south, worn year-round, combining the ankle-height moccasin with leg extensions, an outgrowth of the practice of women sometimes wearing leggings under their dresses. Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Ute women also wore this style.
PERSONAL ADORNMENT
Body decoration supplemented dress in enhancing personal appearance. Much effort was devoted to hair styling, tattooing, painting, piercing, and the wearing of jewelry.
As a part of the body that grew continually, the hair was considered indicative of a person’s life force or health of body and spirit. One’s hair was ideally black and lustrous. Hair to shoulder length or longer was generally favored, and much attention was paid to grooming and styling it. Husbands and wives aided each other in keeping their hair free of lice and well groomed. Yucca root and other herbs were employed to make sudsy shampoos, some of which were thought to keep the hair black. It was brushed using a dried buffalo tongue, porcupine tail, or bunch of fibers, greased with bear oil, buffalo fat, or beaver oil, and perfumed with herbs. Sometimes artificial extensions were added, made from horsehair or the hair that a woman had cut off in mourning.
Women typically wore the hair parted in the middle and either loosely around the head or in two braids. A red ochre line was often painted down the part. Some tribes had distinctive men’s coifs, so recognizable that they are drawn in pictographs to indicate tribal identities. The Blackfoots, Shoshones, and some Siouans wore a patch of bangs trimmed straight across the brow. The Crows similarly cut the hair over their foreheads short but pushed it upright in a “pompadour.” Crow men grew their back hair so full and long that it might reach the ground. Or, to achieve the same length, they assembled elaborate falls by gluing strands of horsehair or discarded human hair together with globs of resin. Wichita men are shown in paintings from about 1828 with the front top of the head shaved and a horn-like lock curving back from the top center. This style was also reported for the early Pawnees. More familiar for the Pawnees and the Southern Siouans was a style in which both sides of the skull were shaved to leave a brush of hair in the center from front to back. From this center patch might emanate a long braided lock, as if to challenge enemies seeking scalps. Men of the Cheyenne, Brulé Sioux, and several other groups wore their hair parted either loosely or with two braids, not unlike women, but with a scalp lock also. Kiowa and Comanche men wore their braids wrapped in beaver or otter fur so that they resembled long furry tubes; the Comanche word for otter, papiwuhtum., literally translates as “hair wrapper.”
Except among some people in the south, where Mexican admixture was common, facial hair was considered undesirable. Indian men have relatively little facial hair to begin with, however, so shaving was not necessary to prevent beards and mustaches; they removed their scant whiskers by plucking. Both women and men plucked out their eyebrows also. They used pairs of mussel shells as tweezers, or in latter days, metal springs. For someone not used to seeing it, it is memorable to watch a person “shave” by rapidly and deftly running a spring over his face.
Tattoos were created by making numerous punctures in the skin with flint, cactus spines, porcupine quills, or steel needles, and rubbing charcoal into each wound. Healing produced a pattern of bluish-black bumps. Single dots, stripes, circles, triangles of multiple dots, and occasionally solid lines were applied to the forehead, cheeks, chin, chest, back, or arms of both men and women. Also, men with significant battle scars liked to highlight them with a tattooed outline. Tattooing was practiced throughout the Plains—among the Crees, Crows, Hidatsas, Comanches, Kiowas, and others—though the Wichitas and Southern Siouans relied most heavily on this form of expression. Nineteenth-century portraits show Wichita women covered with patterns on the face and around their breasts, and accordingly the Wichitas called themselves “Raccoon Eyes” and were called Panis Piqués (“Pricked Pawnees”) by the French, while the Omahas and Osages displayed cosmological star and earth symbols on their foreheads and chests.
Body and face painting, though only temporary, was more prevalent than tattooing. Men’s face painting is often referred to as “war paint,” but preparation for combat was only one reason for desiring such embellishment. Painting oneself was a way of renewing the person and dedicating to some special situation, be it a battle, religious ceremony, or rite of passage. Red, yellow, blue, black, and green pigments mixed with grease were applied in vibrant patterns, creating pleasing symmetry in some cases, jarring transformations in others. Multiple stripes were applied to the face and body with the fingers, either by adding paint to the bare skin or by covering the whole surface in pigment and then subtracting some of it. Full handprints and spots were additionally common designs, as were the silhouettes of animal spirit patrons. Animal spirits were also brought to mind by painting the entire face in a mask-like pattern. Each color and shape was chosen with care to stand for some element of nature, perhaps revealed in a dream or vision, that inspired and blessed the person.
The wearing of rings in pierced ears was widespread. Multiple rings in holes all around the outside ear are frequently seen in old photos of adults. Ear piercing was done to both sexes in childhood and might be a casual practice or a ceremonial occasion. The Crows pierced babies’ ears shortly after birth, the Cheyennes and Arapahos at about age five. Piercing often coincided with the formal bestowal of a personal name and was viewed as an act that conferred true human status on the child. It might be done at the Sun Dance. It was considered propitious for a medicine man or a distinguished warrior (who would recite a valiant deed during the operation) to do the piercing. The fresh holes were plugged with bits of rawhide so they would heal open. The child’s family then gave away gifts in reciprocation.
Prior to trade with non-Indians, jewelry in the form of ear pendants and necklaces was fashioned from bison bone and shells. Men were fond of wearing the claws of the grizzly bear, as a single item in the hair or strung in number on a necklace. Dentalium shells, narrow white tooth-shaped shells from the Pacific, and elk teeth were prized as dress ornaments and were sewn in rows across the front of a dress, increasing the value of the garment significantly. In later times, as elk became scarce, cowry shells gotten through trade were substituted for elk teeth, since they resemble them from a distance. Another decorative element from natural material was the hair pipe, a tubular white bead about 4 inches long and tapered toward both ends. Originally fashioned by the Indians from bone, hair pipes came into wide use when manufactured for trading by a company in New Jersey, which made them from the central columns of Caribbean conch shells that had been used as ships’ ballast. Later, cow bone was used, and today they are made from plastic. As the name indicates, hair pipes were tied in the hair for decoration, but they were also strung end to end to make chokers, or in two long dangling rows to form a man’s breastplate.
FIGURE 6.7 The cloth dress of this Arikara girl displays decoration of elk teeth and lazy stitch beadwork. Photo by Edward S. Curtis, 1909.
Metalwork
The Plains region is noteworthy for its absence of metals, and true silver, as used in the crafts of the southwestern Navajos and Pueblos, is not mined on the Plains. Silver in raw form and in finished trinkets was common in the trade between whites and eastern Indians during the 1700s and was also prevalent in Mexico, so some of this material made its way to the Plains. Brass kettles, brass and copper wire, and coins also furnished a lot of the raw material for early Plains experiments in metalworking. Simple armbands, bracelets, and rings were easily fashioned from wire. One of the earliest ornaments to become standardized on the Plains was the concha or cupped disk. These are commonly known on the Plains as hair plates because they were often arrayed in diminishing sizes on the long hair queues that men wore, though they were also worn on belts and sewn to clothing. Another typical early ornament was an exaggerated crescent worn as a chest pendant or earring. This design was derived from horse bridle decorations like those introduced through early French trade. Also derived from bridle parts was the pectoral, a decorative plate in a roughly cloud or bird shape and with pendant crescents, about 6 inches across, worn by men on the upper chest. Large metal crosses worn on the chest were popular as well, inspired no doubt by missionary gifts or raids on Mexican churches.
Out of these earlier efforts, a distinct tradition of jewelry making in German silver emerged on the Southern Plains beginning in the 1860s. German silver, also called nickel silver, is a silvery alloy of nickel, copper, and zinc that became available in sheet form from white traders. Indian artisans found this material tough but malleable, and thin sheets could be pounded, cut, filed, and engraved (they did not melt or mold the metal). Along with the trade metal came hammers, files, and iron nails that could be used to engrave the metal. German silver techniques and designs developed around the same time as the peyote religion (see Chapter 10), and although earlier forms such as conchas and pectorals were continued in the newer material, emblems of the peyote religion became so characteristic that the craft is also known as “peyote jewelry.” The shapes and engraving portray crosses, feathers, fans, water birds, tipis, and other things evocative of the peyote ceremony. These shapes give form to brooches, hatpins, earrings, combs, and crowns, which may be worn as badges of affiliation with the Native American Church. During the twentieth century a number of Oklahoma Indian metal-smiths became widely celebrated for their mastery of German silver work, including Julius Caesar, Pawnee (1910–1982), and George Silverhorn, Kiowa (1911–1969).
DECORATIVE AND FINE ARTS
Quillwork and Beadwork
Perhaps the most widespread and typical decorative art of the Plains was the adornment of skin clothing and containers with colored quills and beads. Quillwork was done earlier, though some work in quills continued after beads became commercially available, and is still done by some specialists today.
Prior to white contact, split bird quills were often sewn to clothing for decoration, but this practice faded and little is known about the bird species used. Porcupine quills became more prevalent, maybe because they are larger and easier to harvest in numbers. Bird quills absorbed Native plant and mineral dyes much better than porcupine ones, so richly colored early quillwork was likely done using bird quills. To create dark lines in the days before commercial dyes made it possible to stain porcupine quills darkly, blackish maidenhair fern stems were used as embroidery elements along with the quills. Grass and cornhusk were also substituted for quills, especially by the Cheyennes. Involved quillwork was most characteristic of the Upper Missouri and Central Plains. Although at least today porcupines are found as far south as Texas, they are generally more common in the north, and quillwork did not develop among the Southern Plains tribes.
One porcupine will yield 30,000 quills of different sizes, but a fair amount of work is necessary before quilling can begin. A creature has to be found, treed, and shot; quills are carefully plucked; then the quills are cleaned and sorted by size, the sharp tips are cut off, and the quills are boiled with dyes to color them. Imagine how a plastic drinking straw can be flattened and folded back on itself to create rectangular and triangular sections, and you can envision basic quilling technique. Indian women flatten the quills by drawing them through their teeth, one at a time. Then they fold the flattened quills in the desired pattern and stitch them in place on the skin surface to be decorated. Rows of stitched quills can readily cover large surfaces. Quills can also be woven together with only minimal sewing to cover three-dimensional surfaces such as the narrow bands of leather that are created by slitting a piece of hide.
FIGURE 6.8 Omaha man, circa 1914, wearing eagle feather war bonnet, beaded pipe bag, stroud leggings, beaded moccasins, and holding an eagle feather fan and a pipe decorated with quill work wrapping.
Native bead making would have been similarly laborious. The archeological record shows that Indian people did make and trade their own beads. But the time, effort, and precision needed to shape and drill small pieces of natural glass (sand fused by volcanic heat or lightning), wood, bone, shell, or stone made beads very precious. It is easy then to understand the appeal of manufactured glass beads to Indian people. White traders found a huge demand for glass beads imported from Italy or Bohemia and distributed through New York City, and rapidly factory beads replaced quills and native beads in much of the decorative work on the Plains.
The earliest trade beads were relatively large—more that ¼ inch in diameter—and were most suitable for stringing on necklaces. There are several kinds of early beads, such as the single-colored “Crow bead” and two-colored cornaline d’Aleppo. Large brass beads were also traded early on. During the early 1800s “pony beads” appeared, so-called because of the way they were transported by traders. These still relatively large beads were the first employed to cover skin surfaces en masse and are usually found in combinations of blue or black and white, though sometimes other colors appear. (Black, blue, and white have always been the cheapest colors for glassmakers to produce, so traders kept a higher profit margin by stocking these colors.) Pony beads lent themselves to bold contrasting patterns. Around 1830–1850 smaller beads became increasingly common. They may be tubular (“bugles”), donut-shaped (“seed beads”), or faceted (“cut beads”) and come in over 80 colors and many sizes. Work in the tiny sizes like 16/0 (“sixteen ought”) is especially prized.
The techniques used in beading, aside from simply stringing one or more beads in a necklace or pendant, have been termed sewing, netting, and weaving. The sewing techniques include overlay and lazy stitch. The former involves tacking or spot-stitching long strings of beads onto the surface to be decorated, and is especially useful in making curvilinear designs like floral decorations with stems and leaves. In the lazy stitch pattern, short strings of perhaps seven beads are tacked continually alongside each other on a flat surface, producing bands that may stand alone or lie adjacent to other bands in a larger design. The lazy stitch lends itself to geometric patterns and allows large surfaces to be covered with relatively less labor than the other methods. The netting technique is commonly known as the gourd stitch, in which an initial row of beads is sewn to the leather or cloth foundation, but the succeeding rows are sewn to each other, one bead at a time, forming a network of interlocking beads. If sewn in with the proper tightness, the beads lie flat against the decorated material and cover it in mesh. The final row of beads is again sewn to the foundation to secure the mesh at both ends of the covered surface. This method is useful for covering curved surfaces such as the handles of rattles and fans, and is known as the gourd stitch because it is seen on gourd rattles. Weaving involved the square weave method on a simple loom. The loom could be a curved piece of springy horn or metal with several warp (standing) threads spread and tensioned from one of its ends to another. Weft (filler) threads containing beads are then interwoven at right angles using a needle. A band of beadwork several inches long can be created this way. The band is then stitched to a strip of cloth backing for stability, which in turn can be sewn on a belt or shirt for decoration. Weaving also lends itself to geometric patterning.
Watching skilled bead workers is a marvelous experience because they show great dexterity, but more so because often they achieve very complex color and shape patterns not by planning them in advance, but by making a continuous series of tiny decisions—bead by bead—so that the patterns unfold in unpredicted yet perfectly beautiful and symmetrical ways. It is customary for bead workers to include one tiny mistake in their work, an act of humility that reflects the idea that nothing made by humans is really perfect.
Over time, tribally distinctive styles of beadwork evolved. Sioux beadwork is characterized by large expanses of covered surface with a white background and patterns of small triangles and lines made with darker colors; only four or five different colors are usually employed together. Cheyenne beadwork is generally similar to that of the Sioux. These patterns are best executed in lazy stitch and show a clear derivation from quillwork. The Crows like to combine lots of different colors in pleasing matches to make large triangles and rectangles reminiscent of the designs painted on parfleches. Often the Crows enclose these designs in white borders in which the beads run in a different direction. For such patterns they prefer the overlay technique, and their method of overlay is referred to as “Crow stitch.” The Blackfeet and their neighbors in the northwest practiced another distinct style, also in overlay, but with a lot of stripes formed from rectangles, and marked color contrasts evoking the look of early pony beads, even when seed beads are used.
Abstract floral patterns of vines, leaves, and tulip-like blossoms betray a Woodlands influence and can be found in a number of tribes from north to south. The Plains Crees and Plains Ojibwas, with their obvious Woodlands heritage, prefer floral designs and have sometimes influenced their northern neighbors to the west across the Northern Plains. In the Central Plains, the Omahas, Osages, and Poncas adopted floral patterns under the early influence of the Otoes, Missourias, and Iowas, and that of more recently displaced easterners like the Delawares and Sauk and Fox.
Under the influence of these same tribes in Oklahoma, the Kiowas too adopted a liking for floral designs, though theirs have a somewhat different look in the coloration and shape of the elements. More typical of the Kiowas and their Southern Plains neighbors the Comanches, however, is a spare, elegant style in which narrow lanes of lazy stitch create borders of decoration. If the large surfaces of buckskin in between the borders are decorated at all, they are pigmented with bright yellow or pale verdigris green rather than beaded. The exceptions to these practices are Kiowa and Comanche moccasins and cradles, which are sometimes fully beaded with lazy stitch.
A look at the products from any tribe shows that each group has a finite vocabulary of acceptable beadwork design elements. There is a limited (though sometimes large) number of line and shape combinations which may be characterized by their makers as feathers, trees, dragonflies, arrows, mountains, crosses, whirlwinds, buffalo paths, tipis, and so on. Tribal color preferences are also obvious. Yet there was no total agreement about the pattern names and no common symbolic code of shapes and colors. The inspiration of the individual artisan was most important, and usually that remained private. Thus, in an exhaustive study of Arapaho beadwork patterns, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber was sometimes able to elicit explanations like the following about a pair of fully beaded moccasins:
The white represents snow. The green … grass-covered earth. The blue and yellow figures consisting of three triangles represent the heart and lungs. The white stripe … is a dragon-fly. Groups of three light-blue squares near the instep were described as halves of stars … small green rectangles … represent caterpillars. The design on this moccasin was embroidered as it was previously seen in a dream.
(Kroeber 1983:46)
Yet despite this kind of exactness about particular beaded and painted items, Kroeber concluded that overall “… there is no fixed system of symbolism in Arapaho decorative art. Any interpretation of a figure is personal. Often the interpretation is arbitrary” (Ibid.: 144).
In addition to abstract linear and geometric designs, figurative representations are sometimes found in Plains beading beginning around the reservation period of the 1880s. Warriors on horseback, for example, are shown in pictures similar to those drawn in ledger book art. American flags are another common motif in late-nineteenth-century pictorial beadwork. The meanings of this American flag imagery are complex, reflecting contradictory feelings about allegiance to the tribe and the nation state as well as efforts, in some cases, to relate to non-Indian buyers of craftwork.
During the twentieth century a number of trends conspired to ensure that Plains Indian beadwork traditions would continue to flourish. Indian fairs, Wild West shows, and tourism at reservations and national parks all brought Indian craftsmanship to the eye of the general public. Non-Indian hobbyists and collectors provided a ready market and many bead workers even began filling orders by mail. The single biggest stimulus has been the intertribal powwow (see Chapter 7). The bulk of beadwork done today—and there is much of it—goes to decorating men’s and women’s dance outfits. But this most Indian of decorative forms is now also applied playfully, though with a serious message about the permanence of Native ways, to baseball caps and tennis shoes.
Carving in Wood and Stone
Three-dimensional carving in wood and stone was part of the Plains repertoire, though a minor art compared to what was done in the eastern forests. One of the more common items was a form of dance stick with one end curving and carved as a horse’s head. Men carried these sticks, usually augmented with little horsehair manes and leather bridles, to honor the animals they lost in battle. Men also carried quirts or “war whips” with handles shaped like gunstocks, notched to tally battle deeds, while dancing, and mirrors set in carved wooden frames. The gunstock shape was used as well for a kind of hickory war club 21/2 feet long and about an inch thick. Ball-headed war clubs were made in the eastern Plains areas adjacent to the woodlands; the Otoes were known for a type carved in the shape of an otter. Humanlike figures carved from wood and representing spirits, often called “dolls,” were wrapped in medicine bundles and treated by some tribes as fetishes at the Sun Dance. Miscellaneous decoratively carved wood items included bowls, drum stands, awl handles, and hair roach spreaders. Antler and bone were sometimes carved too to make handles and spreaders.
Wood and stone carving came together in the making of tobacco pipes known as calumets or peace pipes, which whether owned by individual men or venerated by an entire society, were considered among the most important of possessions. Their value was as instruments for establishing relations between people and between humans and the spirits. The ceremonial smoking of tobacco in calumets was part of every formal greeting and deliberation and a precursor to many rituals; and, pipes were solemn gifts bestowed on visiting strangers as a token of goodwill. The attention given to pipe making underscores their worth.
Pipes were formed from a wooden stem some 2 feet long and stone bowl segment of about 4 or 6 inches. The pipe owner carried these parts uncoupled in a special skin bag, and by joining them he consecrated the pipe, making it come alive spiritually. Stems were fashioned from a piece of green ash, sometimes round but more often flattish, carved in a spiral or with shallow-relief animal forms, or decorated with feathers or quillwork. The narrow stem had to be bored carefully with a red-hot poker. The bowl needed to be made from a stone that would not crack from the heat of the burning tobacco but which was soft and consistent enough to be shaped and drilled using hand tools. Calcite, limestone, and black steatite or soapstone fit this need, but the most widely favored material was the pink to brick-red soapstone called catlinite.
Catlinite, named for the frontier artist and explorer George Catlin, who described its use in 1836, was found in only certain locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Today the major source is protected at Pipestone National Monument in southwestern Minnesota. Here the red stone runs in narrow sheets under layers of earth and hard quartzite several feet below the surface, partly exposed through four centuries of quarrying. Although Dakotas controlled this area during the early Historic Period, access to the quarry was generally open to many tribes, members of which made trips there akin to pilgrimages. By tradition miners were only supposed to take what they could use for themselves, so although catlinite products were coveted trade commodities through much of the Plains and into the northeast, a big market in raw stone never developed. Even so, the seams have been depleted and today only Indians are permitted to dig or sell catlinite. Tribes living away from the catlinite sources came to depend on other stones. According to the Northern Arapaho elder Sage (circa 1843–1944), his people never used catlinite but liked black stone instead.
The pipe bowl segment was T-or L-shaped, with a horizontal section that mated to the stem and a vertical bowl like a smokestack. This piece was carved in the shape of a large animal, or a human face or figure in repose looking back at the smoker, accompanied by small animals such as birds, turtles, or otters. Occasionally the bowl stone was inlaid in a geometric pattern with other stone of differing color or lead. Regardless of these common elements, distinctive local and individual traditions of pipe making developed, for while Indian artisans were inspired by outside examples and borrowed materials and tools, they did not slavishly copy the work of others, nor did they think it polite to teach each other the “correct” way of making things. Thus, there are definable styles and sometimes pipes in different museums can be compared and confidently attributed to the same maker even when his identity has not been recorded.
Like many other traditional Indian arts, pipe making lives on in the work of some modern masters. One premier pipe carver and pipestone sculptor is Robert Rose-Bear, who is of Chippewa descent but conversant in Plains techniques and motifs. Rose-Bear digs catlinite himself from the famous quarry and shapes it with hand tools as well as power tools like the Dremel Moto-tool. Well versed in time-honored icons and the creation of miniature animal scenes, Rose-Bear also adds amusing innovations of technique, symbol, and theme. His works are thus identifiably his, in the manner of fine older pipes, and conventional yet contemporary, delighting traditionalists and art collectors alike.
Painting and Drawing
The oldest pictorial art on the Plains is found painted or scratched on rock. The terms used in dealing with such pictorial images have varied. Pictograph has been used to mean any pictorial expression of an idea, though in the context of rock art it has come to refer specifically to a painted image. Petroglyph has been used for any rock art image, but now normally means an image that is engraved (pecked or scratched) rather than painted. Regardless, Indians used a variety of natural mineral and plant pigments and stone gravers and chisels to leave their thoughts for others.
Some rock pictures were no doubt temporary messages for fellow travelers—images of game or foes, sometimes along with tally marks that might indicate number of enemies or days of travel. Hunting scenes are prevalent. Other pictures commemorate important events such as battles and were probably intended as permanent historical or biographical records. Still other pictograph panels portray abstract linear or geometric designs along with spiritual beings, relating mythic episodes or prescribing ritual. Such images were sometimes left in difficult to find places. In these cases the very act of painting could have been a ritual reenactment or a consecration of the locale.
Rock art is found widely across the region, sometimes as a single image on an isolated stone, more frequently in continuous arrays along cliff faces. Plains sites of notable size are most prevalent in the northwest, from Alberta to Wyoming and South Dakota (around the Rocky Mountains and Black Hills), and in Texas. Since much of the rock art on the Plains dates to prehistoric times, art of the historic era is sometimes not discussed in connection with it, but the historic tribes did create pictographs, often next to or directly over more ancient pictures. The Historic Period in general is indicated by the inclusion of horses, guns, mission churches, and white men (recognizable by their brimmed hats).
Along the Milk River in southern Alberta is the site known as Writing-on-Stone, the densest concentration of rock art on the northwestern Plains. The site is preserved as a provincial park and visitor access to select pictures is allowed. Present here are 93 separate image clusters, including many prehistoric works and a huge, complex war scene, composed of roughly 350 distinct figures and thought to commemorate an 1866 battle near the river. There is a mystical character to the landscape at Writing-on-Stone, suggested by its caves, secretive alcoves, and fantastically shaped eroded sandstone formations called hoodoos. The prevalence of artwork at the site can be tied to the spiritual atmosphere that is created by its unusual geography. Even today, members of the Blackfoot tribe go to this place to seek visions.
A similarly remarkable concentration of rock pictures on the Southern Plains is found at the dramatic syenite outcroppings known as Hueco Tanks, 22 miles east of El Paso, Texas. Though strictly speaking in the desert southwest, Hueco Tanks was often visited by Kiowas, Comanches, and Plains Apaches, and these people left images amid pictures painted by earlier Puebloan and Mescalero Apache occupants. The Plains images are often clearly historic and include guns and horses, in contrast to the kachina spirit masks of the earlier Puebloans. For all the tribes, Hueco Tanks was undoubtedly an important refuge and a sacred landscape. Precious rainwater was stored naturally in hollows in the stone (hence the name), making the place a curious oasis, and the towering boulders offered both hidden passageways and inspiring views of the surrounding country. Like Writing-on-Stone, Hueco Tanks illustrates how rock art activity was often tied to spiritually significant places and notions of medicine power. Hueco Tanks is now a state park and it is possible to view some of the pictographs there.
In recent times anthropologists studying Plains rock art have proposed classifications similar to those used for artifact assemblages in archaeology, groupings that recognize stylistic conventions and imply a common time period and ethnic origin. The classification process also involves making sense of the meanings of recurring drawing elements. At present there is much controversy about the validity of rock art classifications and the reliability of modern explanations about rock art purpose and meaning. Experts argue whether the symbolic meanings of images were standardized and whether they can even be known today. Sometimes contemporary Indian people are enlisted to interpret prehistoric pictographs. Their input is not always conclusive, however, since it may be difficult to be sure that the meanings they report are really a continuation of ancient knowledge. When historic rock art is analyzed, judgments of meaning can sometimes be made more confidently, since there may be independent historical records that seem to match the events portrayed, or recorded Indian explanations of the pictographs or similar designs done in other media. Yet, even in the Historic Period, as we have seen in the case of beadwork designs, artistic meaning was variable and individualistic.
Despite these interpretive limitations, some recent rock art studies are not only convincing but also helpful in understanding Plains art more generally. One system, constructed by archaeologist James Keyser and Michael Klassen, has been developed for the northwestern Plains, though their classifications often account for art found over wider areas. Keyser and Klassen’s categories, which they call “traditions,” are summarized in Table 6.1. Note that these groupings can be defined according to distinctive features of the art, as well as dates, distribution, and in some cases the ancestral or historic tribes associated with exemplary sites. As such rock art classifications continue to be refined, they spur discussion that illuminates wider symbolic conventions. For instance, horseshoe shapes in historic rock art that are interpreted as signifying horses can be corresponded to similar signs used in the painting of war messages, tipis, and horses themselves (as when a warrior decorated his mount to proclaim how many horses he had captured).
TABLE 6.1 Rock Art Traditions of the Northwest Plai
Source: Keyser and Klassen (2001).
While rock art is foundational to an understanding of Plains painting, graphic art of the Historic Period made on bone and hide is in a sense more typical of Plains culture, if only because it was portable. Portable paintings and drawings have much in common with rock art. For instance, the Comanches scratched picture messages on buffalo shoulder blade bones, which they left behind at their campsites to communicate with the next occupants. These scapula drawings might indicate the presence of game or the size of enemy parties in the area and action taken against them. One such drawing contained warriors with shields and other devices that closely resemble the designs used in northwestern Plains rock art associated with the Comanches’ Shoshonean ancestors. Similar pictorial communications were also incised into the bark of living trees. Thus, when comparing pictures across various media, it becomes apparent that there was some standardization of a graphic language.
Painting done on bison, elk, and deer hides was even more widespread. This work included both geometric designs and representational pictures of individual men’s exploits and tribal history.
The tipi, whether made of hide or later cloth materials, presented an irresistibly large, portable “canvas” for proclaiming the head male occupant’s personal record in vision questing or war. Tipis destined for special ceremonial use were also likely to be painted. Subjects were thus analogous to those expressed in biographical rock art. While tipi painting was practiced at least occasionally in most tribes, the Blackfoots and Kiowas were especially known for elaborating the tradition. The lodge cover was painted by spreading it flat on the ground. Large eagles, thunderbirds, water monsters, buffalos, and bears emblazoned around the lodge cover announced the occupant’s guardian spirit or some mystical encounter he had with powerful beings. Animals with distinctive body parts like the bear were liable to alternate representation simply with pictures of claws or footprints. Such images were supplemented with colored stripes and shapes, symmetrically applied and representing elements of nature—earth, sky, rainbows, stars, vegetation, lightening, game trails—situating the occupant and his guardian alike in a balanced cosmos. Among the Blackfoots a large design called a “sun door” said that the occupant welcomed a visit from Sun during his daily travels. Every shape and color choice meant something. If the painter chose instead to show his war record, realistic images of himself, his foes, and horses unfolded across the cover to tell multiple episodes; feathers made up of black and white end-on-end isosceles triangles stood for coups. Tipi painting is one of the traditions from the horse era that was revived in the late twentieth century. Modern artists work on canvas covers in latex house paint.
Geometric painting reached its apex in the colorful ornamentation applied to parfleches. Women did most of this work. Their designs were not sketched out beforehand, but visualized or “dreamed.” They prepared earth and vegetable pigments using involved processes of collecting, heating, and mixing, stored them in turtle shell containers, established strait lines using willow stick rulers, and applied the colors using bone “brushes” or disk-shaped crayons of solidified pigment. As in beadwork, the symbolic meanings were highly personal, though some designs had conventional interpretations. Groupings of small black triangles on Arapaho parfleches were called “bear hands”; the Crows associated the diamond shape with the sand lizard, a good luck omen. The Sioux had patterns called the “bravery design,” with a red triangle standing for a turtle, a symbol of steadfastness, and another called the “distant view,” with blue triangles representing the sacred Black Hills on the horizon. Also, tribes maintained preferences of style governing color choices, the kinds of shapes employed, and how they subdivided the decorated space. Beyond any of these emblematic meanings was the pure aesthetic effect produced by colors and shapes in wondrous combinations.
Apart from parfleches, the most common decorated hide objects were large complete bison skins worn like overcoats and called “robes.” Paintings were therefore displayed across the wearer’s back. The three prominent robe patterns were: a large circle composed of many radiating small feather shapes made from paired end-on-end isosceles triangles, called “feathered circle” by art historians; a design made up of a heavy border around the edge of the hide, enclosing a central rectangle; and a similar bordered design with an hourglass shape in the middle. The feathered circle was exclusive to the Sioux and their neighbors, while the bordered rectangle was typical for the Central Plains tribes, and the rectangle for the south. Striped patterns are also found. There are many nineteenth-century examples of these designs in museum collections throughout the world.
Although, as we have seen, realistic paintings of individuals’ experiences similar to biographical rock art were sometimes rendered on tipi covers, they were also commonly done on robes, and such Native records painted on hide are referred to generally as “robe art.” Occasionally realistic drawings are found together with geometric designs on one skin, but more usually one or the other appears alone. Geometric decorative painting was normally the work of women; men were the painters of realistic scenes. Robe art examples feature one of three kinds of information, conveyed by showing human and animal figures along with such objects as tipis and wagons: biographies, essentially the personal war records of individual men; “calendars,” chronological histories of an entire tribe, found only among the Sioux and Kiowas; or portrayals of mystic visions.
After the mid-1800s, the same kinds of drawings were done on muslin, canvas, or paper rather than hide, often using pens, colored pencils, or crayons instead of paint. The cloth, paper, and pencils were obtained from traders, soldiers, and missionaries. Since much of the paper was lined paper from ledger books like those used by banks and stores, the style has become known as “ledger art.” “Ledger art” is akin to “robe art” and thus also to late forms of rock art in its basic style and intent. (To emphasize this point, Keyser and Klassen include a “Robe and Ledger Art” tradition among their rock art classifications—see Table 6.1).
The “Exploits of Sun Boy” is a pictographic biography in paint, ink, and pencil on muslin (size 86 x 75 inches) by the Kiowa artist Silverhorn, circa 1880. The work shows 12 war adventure scenes of Sun Boy, a Kiowa chief in the 1800s. He is pictured on the right (indicating that he was the victor in the fight shown) in all but one of the scenes. Each picture reminded the muslin owners of a detailed story that would be told orally. Following are examples of the images and their meanings as far as they are known (Young 1986):
Sun Boy killing an Osage warrior. The Osage is identified by his roach headdress and black moccasins. This scene may place Sun Boy at the 1833 Cutthroat Gap massacre, though more likely it depicts some other fight, perhaps an act of revenge for that attack. In 1833 a large party of Kiowas was camped in a notch in the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma when they were surprised at dawn and massacred by Osages. The victims were decapitated, their heads left in camp buckets. The Osages captured one of the Kiowa’s sacred idols, a grave humiliation. This event and related ones drew the U.S. military into the southern plains for the first time.
Sun Boy fighting the Pawnees. The Pawnees were traditional enemies of the Kiowas. They are indicated with various colored shirts. Sun Boy is shown wearing a black (indicating dark blue) surplus military coat and brimmed felt hat like the ones he wears in a historic photo portrait. He carries a lance with a flag attached. This scene may refer to a fight in 1851, when the Kiowas defeated some Pawnees who had stolen a flag from the Kiowa sun dance lodge.
Sun Boy encounters General Sherman. This scene refers to the Warren wagon train attack in Young County, Texas, in May of 1871 (see Chapter 12). It shows Sun Boy counting coup (touching, but not killing) a coach with an army officer inside. It represents Sun Boy’s presence when Kiowa warriors, led by Satanta and Dohate, lie in ambush on a hill over the Butterfield Trail. They let General William T. Sherman’s frontier inspection party pass unaware and unmolested. A few hours later the raiders swooped down on a wagon train, killing 7 of the drivers and capturing 41 mules.
FIGURE 6.9A Sun Boy Killing and Osage Warrior.
The calendars of the Sioux and Kiowas are among the most sophisticated of all Plains pictorial works. They contain icons in a sequence, each standing for an important event of a year. Calendars are therefore also known as “winter counts,” though the Kiowa versions have icons for both winter and summer of each year. Each icon prompted the calendar maker or his heirs to recall the key event as well as many occurrences surrounding it, so that the calendar functioned in the same way as the pictorial biography—as a mnemonic device to help perpetuate oral history.
The Sett’an Calendar is a pencil drawing on Manila paper by Sett’an (“Little Bear”), a Kiowa artist, circa 1892. This work records 60 years of Kiowa tribal history. Individual pictographs representing each winter and summer of the years 1833–1892, arranged chronologically in a spiral from the lower right corner to the center. Winters are indicated with a black bar, representing dead vegetation, and summers are usually indicated with a figure of the Sun Dance lodge. Icons are added to each of these marks representing the key event of that season. Following are some of the key events from Little Bear’s viewpoint (Mooney 1979). Notice how some of these episodes correspond to Sun Boy’s adventures.
Summer 1833. A Pictograph: Head with knife to neck, and blood. “They cut off their heads.” This image refers to the Cutthroat Gap massacre described above for the Sun Boy muslin.
Winter 1833–34. B Pictograph: Stars and child above winter mark. “Winter that the Stars Fell.” A spectacular meteorite shower before dawn on November 13, 1833, was witnessed across North America. The Kiowas, asleep in camp north of Red River, were awakened and frightened by the eerie brightness. Indians across the Plains liked to use this event as a starting point when counting time. Sett’an was born the preceding summer, and shows himself in the pictograph as a baby beneath the stars.
Summer 1849. C Pictograph: Man with limbs drawn up in pain by the sun dance lodge. “Cramp sun dance.” Kiowas called cholera “the cramp.” It appeared just after their June Sun Dance, brought by the forty-niners crossing the plains for the California gold rush. People died within hours of showing symptoms, and perhaps half the tribe perished. The great cholera epidemic ravaged all the Texas tribes, and the Kiowas considered it the worst experience in their entire history.
Winter 1866–67. D Pictograph: Man with head against tree, bleeding from mouth, above winter mark. “Winter that Apamadalte was killed.” Apamadalte was a Mexican captive among the Kiowas, whose Indian name means “Struck his head against a tree.” He was riding with a raiding party under chief Big Bow when they encountered troops or militia near the Butterfield stagecoach route in Texas. He was killed while trying to stampede the Texans’ horses.
Summer 1871. E Pictograph: Indian man with war paint and soldier with rifle. “Summer that Satanta was arrested.” The bold warrior Satanta (White Bear) helped lead the May 1871 Warren wagon train attack. He was soon arrested back on the Oklahoma reservation and stood trial in Jacksboro, Texas. Convicted of murder, he began serving a life sentence until paroled in 1873. After further raiding he was jailed again and committed suicide in the Huntsville, Texas prison in 1878.
Summer 1879. F Pictograph: Horse’s head over the sun dance lodge. “Horse-eating sun dance.” The Kiowas were permitted to go west from their reservation to hunt buffalo in Texas in the winter beginning 1879, but they found almost none. By summer they had to kill and eat their ponies to keep from starving. Here Sett’ an records the date of the disappearance of the buffalo from the Southern Plains, signaling the end of the free-ranging Plains Indian cultures in that region.
FIGURE 6.10B
FIGURE 6.10C
FIGURE 6.10D
FIGURE 6.10E
FIGURE 6.10F
In these samples of ledger art one can see many of the conventions of traditional Plains Indian painting. As the eminent historian of Indian art John Ewers pointed out, Plains realistic painting usually portrayed profile views of human and animal figures in flat colors, without backgrounds. The figures are done in outline and sometimes then filled in with a variety of colors, with a preference for primary colors. They are two-dimensional, having height and width but no depth or perspective. Colors are flat, without shading that would create a sense of roundness. When it is important to suggest perspective, it is shown in a shorthand way by placing the more distant element of a pair above the nearer one, but each the same size, rather than showing elements in different sizes to indicate foreshortening. Details of human and animal bodies like the shaping of the legs, use of dots for eyes, presence of horse’s tails, and lack of manes have some variation but also much uniformity within and across examples. Actions are clearly indicated, though again by convention: running horses have stiff outstretched legs rather than accurately bent limbs.
It is important to note that all of these features are artistic choices and habits, not evidence of Indian artists’ innate inability to deal with the devices of realistic coloring and perspective. These choices demonstrate that, even in representative painting, the overriding intent was to devote artistic energy to creating a narrative instead of replicating exactly what the eye sees. In fact, as Indian artists began drawing pictures that were intended for viewing by non-Indians as well as Indians, they readily employed more realistic figuration. This trend can be seen especially in Sioux, Cheyenne, and Kiowa ledger art created after reservations were established. Well-known examples come from the work of the Cheyenne and Kiowa artists who were among the 74 warriors and women rounded up by the U.S. Army in 1875 and imprisoned for three years at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. They made ledger drawings for sale to visitors, some of which use perspective to create panoramas almost like photographic souvenir postcards. The Fort Marion pictures also depart from the tradition of proclaiming war exploits, which is understandable given the prisoners’ circumstances, and instead document the journey to prison and sometimes even express feelings of being torn between two worlds, as in the Kiowa Wohaw’s drawing of himself standing between a buffalo and domestic cow, offering peace pipes to both.
Much more could be said of the painting styles that Plains artists executed after the reservation period. Increasingly artists from the region participated in the development of styles incorporating ideas from other Native American areas, notably the Pueblo southwest, as well as modern and postmodern trends of the non-Indian art world. The engagement of Plains tradition with southwestern and non-Indian fine art was pioneered by the famous group of painters called the Kiowa Five: James Auchiah (1906–1974), Spencer Asah (1906–1954), Jack Hokeah (1900–1969), Stephen Mopope (1898–1974), and Monroe Tsatoke (1904–1937). A sixth, female, painter, Lois Smoky (1907–1981), was also part of the group during its early days. As young people between 1914 and 1928, the Five studied easel painting with tutors in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and then at the University of Oklahoma. Steeped in tribal ways (Mopope was a nephew of Silverhorn and Ohettoint, a Fort Marion prisoner, and all the males were powwow contest dancers), the Five created sentimental watercolors of Indian camping, hunting, and dancing, taking care to preserve details of regalia and procedure in their pictures. Their human figures and animals, rendered in bold flat hues on a blank background, owe much to ledger art, but were modernistic at the same time.
The Kiowa Five earned international acclaim in the late 1920s and paved the way for subsequent artists of Plains cultural background, such as Acee Blue Eagle (Creek/Pawnee, 1907–1959), Dick West (Cheyenne, 1912–1996), Oscar Howe (Yanktonai, 1915–1983), and T. C. Cannon (Caddo/Kiowa, 1946–1978). Some of the later twentieth-century artists continued the style developed by the Kiowa Five and their contemporaries, which became known as “Traditional,” while others sought progressive, complicated integrations of their personal and cultural ideals with abstractionism and pop art. Thematically, later works often played with the acceptance, rejection, and even satirizing of established notions of what Indian art, and life, ought to be. Throughout the 1900s Indian painting gained widespread legitimacy beyond Native communities via promoting agencies like the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian Arts and Crafts Board and institutions such as the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Paintings deliberately testing the definition of “Indian art” have not always found ready acceptance in museums and shows, including those having an express mission of exhibiting Indian art. When Oscar Howe wrote to protest the rejection of one of his abstract paintings from the 1958 Philbrook annual show, curators were moved to rethink the criteria and allow a greater variety of styles. Such conversations about inclusiveness, boundaries, and definitions continue. Photography, photomontage, and installation art now join easel painting as media for the exploration of Indian identity. At the start of the twenty-first century, pictorial art by Plains Indians runs the gamut from the perpetuation of centuries-old techniques of hide decoration to works that are deemed cutting-edge in the fine art world while nonetheless nativist in viewpoint, subject, and technique.
Sources. Adney and Chapelle (1983); Anderson (2003); Barker (1924); Berlandier (1969); Berlo and Phillips (1998); Boorman (2002); Dodge (1882, 1959); Dyke (1971); Ewers (1939); Feder (1962, 1964a, 1982); Finerty (1890); García Rejón and Gelo (1995); Gelo and Zesch (2003); Hill (1995); Keyser and Klassen (2001); Kirkland and Newcomb (1996); Koch (1977); Kroeber (1983); Laubin and Laubin (1957); Lowie (1982, 1983); Mooney (1979); Morrow (1975); Nabokov and Easton (1989); Nye (1969); Oklahoma Indian Arts and Crafts Cooperative (1973, 1976); Orchard (1975); Penney (2004); Sutherland (1995); Wallace and Hoebel (1952); Wedel (1986); and Young (1986).
CHAPTER SUMMARY
The material objects and art made by Plains Indians are appealing to the senses and reveal their world view. Dwellings, including the tipi, earth lodge, grass lodge, and other structures, were ingenious adaptations to the environment. Other characteristic objects include cradles and weapons. Plains Indians developed distinctive forms of clothing and adornment, such as particular styles of dresses, moccasins, hairstyles, and metal jewelry; and the war bonnet has become emblematic of Indian identity. Skilled decorative arts included quill embroidery, beadwork, and the carving of stone pipes. Painting and drawing took several forms, including rock art, paintings on hide, geometric decoration of rawhide containers, and annual histories called “calendars.” Traditional pictorial art was meant to tell a story. Since the reservation era, Plains artists have explored new styles and media to contrast or reconcile Indian traditions with the standards of non-Indian art.
QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW
1. Select a Plains dwelling type. Note its distribution. Describe its construction, function, and suitability to the natural and human environment.
2. Select an object type such as cradle, bow, or moccasin and explain how the form of the object varied by tribe.
3. “Every element of the [war] bonnet held some significance.” Explain.
4. Imagine that you are a Plains Indian artist around 1920. What are some of the past and present artistic conventions that inspire your work?