Fire-making Apparatus in the U. S. National MuseumHough, Walter
History
Fire-making Apparatus in the U. S. National Museum
Hough, Walter
Firemaking; Indians of North America -- Implements
The Navajo fire-set looks very much like a mere makeshift. The hearth is
a piece of yucca stalk and the fire-holes have but a shallow side notch.
The drill is a broken arrow shaft, to which has been rudely lashed with
a cotton rag a smaller piece of yucca wood (fig. 15). This carelessness,
which it is rather than lack of skill, is characteristic of the Navajos
in their minor implements. They resemble the crude Apache in this. One
thinks of the Navajos only with regard to their fine blanket weaving and
silver working, so well presented by Dr. Washington Matthews in the
reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, and does not consider their arts in
other lines.[9]
[Illustration: Fig. 15. Fire-making Set.
(Cat. No. 9555, U. S. N. M. Navajo Indians, New Mexico. Collected by
Edward Palmer.)]
Mr. Thomas C. Battey, a Friend, long missionary among the Indians,
kindly gives a description of the Kiowan fire-making process, not now
practiced among them, but shown to him as a relic of an abandoned art:
A piece of very hard and coarse, rough-grained wood, perhaps 8 inches
in length, 2 in width, and three-fourths of an inch in thickness is
procured. In one side of this and near one edge several holes are
made, about one-half an inch in diameter by five-eighths of an inch in
depth, rounded at the bottom, but left somewhat rough or very slightly
corrugated. In the edge nearest these holes a corresponding number of
smaller and tapering holes are made, opening by a small orifice into
the bottom of each of the larger ones. These are made very smooth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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