Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1895 — Skin Dressing by Women. [ARTICLE]

Skin Dressing by Women.

In her tanning and skin dressing work the savage woman’s problem was to remove the dermis from the hide, and leave the hair adhering to the epidermis, with only a thin proportion of the true skin. If the work were creditably done the surface of the robe, frequently more than thirty square feet in extent, had to be uniform in thickness throughout, and she should not cut through the epidermis once. The whole must be as pliable, too, as a woolen blanket; the problem was to reduce a hide of various thickness and twice too thick everywhere to a robe of uniform thickness throughout without once cutting through the outer part of the skin. Her tools for this varied with the locality. The Eskimo women scrape off the fat with a special tool made of walrus, ivory or bone and plane down the dermis with a stone scraper. The Indian women cut off bits of meat and fat and remove the dermis with a hoe or adze. In the good old days of savagery the Eskimo womau made her fat scraper of walrus ivory or antler; her skin scraper was of flinty stone set in a handle of ivory, wood, or horn, whichever material was easiest to procure. But later on, it may be, the whalers helped her with steel tools. The Indian woman had three tools, to wit: the stone knife for cutting away the flesh; the hoe shaped scraper for splitting the skin, and the grainer, a hoe or chisel like tool with serrated edge to roughen up the inner side of the robe and give it flexibility. Beside these, both Eskimo and Indian had hands and feet and teeth for pulling and pounding and breaking the grain. They had also a wonderful supply of pride in their work, and love of applause, which kept them up to the mark of doing the best that could be done with their resources.