Nothing can well be conceived much more artless than some of the stone implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Yet it is worthy of note that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making are found. In the report of the United States Geological Survey for 1872, which embraces Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements of art, rude as any found in the drift, met by him during a survey of the Bridgers Basin at the base of the Unitah Mountains, in Southern Wyoming. “In some places the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[69] But with them are mingled implements of the finest finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region have no further knowledge of them than is indicated in their belief that they were a gift of God to their ancestors. But many are sharp, and fresh in appearance, as if recently worked from the parent block; and though others are worn, and decomposed on the surface, Professor Leidy does not assume more than a date of “centuries back” for the oldest of them. For, indeed, he found that the Shoshone Indians had in use a stone implement of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl. It consists of a thin segment of a quartzite boulder, made by striking the stone with a smart blow. It is called a _teshoa_, and is employed as a scraper in dressing buffalo skins.” Subsequently he discovered a precisely similar implement, together with some perforated tusks of the elk, in an ancient Indian grave. [Illustration: FIG. 53.—Texas Stone Axe, hafted.]