Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 311, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1918 — AN EXTINCT AMERICAN RACE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

AN EXTINCT AMERICAN RACE

By R. W. JONES.

Gradually the life of the Arickara Indians of the Dakotas is being

traced out and studied in detail by W. H. Over of the University of South Dakota. What sort of people were this now extinct race? How did they Jive? What was their religion? What degree of culture had they attained? During a period of years Mr. Over visited camp sites

and village sites, burial grounds and battlefields of the Indians, collecting and studying the relics of these first settlers —or were they first, after all? A find of hammer stones, arrow heads and charred hearth stones in an old soil layer two to six feet beneath the surface last summer indicates earlier Inhabitants than the Arickara.

When the Indians followed the buffalo over the Dakota prairies, long before the white man came, there were fifty or more populous villages along the Missouri river. The early tribes of Arlckaras in the Missouri valley, like Dakota farmers today, grew corn and pumpkins, for the Arlckaras were farmers. They built lodges of poles and willow thatch, daubed thick with mud to keep out the searching fingers of the blizzards. Their clothing was made of buffalo skins. The shovel with which they dug their fields and the trpwel with which they spread the mud plaster on the walls of their bouses were made from the shoulderbjafoe ..of the buffalo. Their arrow points and knives were of flint or bone. This was the life of the Arlckaras before the first white traders came, before the Sioux (or Dakotah) Indians pressed by white settlers from Canada, poured in from the north and east. It was the stone age, when to make a hammer required days of grinding and working on some boulder found in the creek bed, with an outline like that of the tool to be made.

Fine Collection of Relics. More than sixty skeletons of the Arickara tribe have been unearthed and are in the university museum. Hundreds of hammer stones, arrow heads, beads, bone tools and bone ornaments are also in the university collection of the Airckara relics. Even the national government has not nearly as good an Arickara collection. The only two Arickara tobacco pipes evfer found In a grave are In the university collection. There\are many fragments of the earthenware pots or bowls used by the Indians in cooking, and two entirely undamaged bowls, which show the kind of pottery work the ancient Indians made. The age of much.of the material found is problematical, but that a igreat deal of it dates baapk to the period before 1750 is certain, for at about that time the Sioux or Dakota Indians ibegan driving the Arickaras relentlessly up the Missouri and to the westward. The other Arickara village sites (Show no trace of contact with the whites. No article of metal can be found in the most ancient locations. Farther west, and up the Missouri river, the excavations yield scraps of copper obtained from the first traders, from which the Indians made ornaments and, hy twisting the thin sheet copper into cones, arrow heads shaped Kke funnels which slipped over the end of the shaft of the arrow. An occasional blue or red bead comes to light, or a brass bail, or bits of look*

ing-glnss, or a knife. One old knife, found in a cache hole where it had been placed a century or more ago, safely wrapped in a buffalo robe, was made in Sheffield and was one of the knives sent out by the early Hudson bay traders. The Indians sharpened a steel knife with a file, on one side of the edge. The whetstone was tod slow. The village sites farther west .are more recent. On the Missouri river, at the place described by Lewis and Clark in their diary of the exploration of the Northwest in 1805, “at the bend in the river where the river flows, west,” was a large village with more than one hundred lodges. In these more recent villages are found brass arm-bands and bracelets, ns well as an occasional steel ax or flint-lock gun. Their Domestic Life. The bones in the refuse heaps show the Arlckaras. lived on buffalo, -deer, antelope, elk, rabbit and wild fowl as well as on corn, beans .and pumpkins. Tarclied corn has been found in the lodges at every village site. Only a sunken circle of ground like an abandoned, circus arena, but far smaller, shows where one of the lodges .stood. A five-family lodge, built with big timbers, may yield part of a cedar post almost rotted away, despite the comparatively dry climate. Each family had its cache-hole, or primitive safety deposit vault. This was a jugshaped hole four to six feet deep, in which valuables were hidden when the family left home to avoid hostile Iro dlans or to go on a hunting trip. The mouth of the hole was cover<d with sticks and leaves, so as not tc be distinguishable from the surround ng surface.

The burial customs of the Ailckaras differed from those of the Sloe c. The Arlckaras buried their dead in the ground, while the Sioux left tile bodies of their dead, wrapped in skins, on scaffolds or in trees. The Arlckaras buried from one to six bodies in a grave, the body lying on the right side, with the head to the north. Digging was hard with the primitive implements these Indians had, so the graves were small?.and the bodies placed the knees* drawn up.‘ Scarcely any grave contains anything but the skeleton. Little or no paraphernalia was ever burled with the body, except an occasional bead or band of brass or copper, showing the contact wilh the fur traders. The earlier burial sites yield nothing but bones. The graves were three to six feet deep, and above the upper skeleton were placed slabs of cottonwood or ash or bundles of willow twigs, to keep wild animals from digging injto the grave. Other Indians used flat rocks for the same purpose. There are thousands of objects in the university’s collection of Arl-kara relics. The collection was begun in 1915, and as it grows the exact knowledge of the life of these early Dakotans increases.

W. H. Over.