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Newspaper Page Text
'Try?"" 7Titwiwrg'"iRVAiy''j.'j The Indian Advocate. ioo This applies equally to their handling of the hoes, hatchets and knives of civilized man. They use their hoes the heavi est they can get as if weighted, like the wooden and bone hoes of antiquity, vertically, not horizontally. They use their hatchets or axes and knives more for hacking and scraping and chipping than for chopping, hewing, and whittling, and in such operations they prefer working toward themselves to working from thdmselves, as we work. Finally, their garments of calico and muslin are new only iii material. They are cut after the old fashion of the ancestral buckskin breeches and shirts, poncho coats of feathers and fur or fiber, and down or cotton breech clouts, while in the silver rings and bracelets of to-day, not only the shapes but even the half-natural mark ings of the original shell rings and bracelets survive, and the silver buttons and bosses but perpetuate and multiply those once made of copper as well as of shell and white bone. Thus, only one absolutely new practical element and ac tivity was introduced by the Spaniards beasts of burden and beast transportation and labor. But until the present century cattle were not used natively for drawing loads or plows, the latter of which, until recently being made of a convenient fork, are only enlarged harrowing-sticks pointed with a leaf of iron in place of the blade of flint; nor were carts employed. Bur dens were transported in pinniers adapted to the backs of burros instead of to the shoulders of men. The Zuni is a splendid rider, but even now his longest journeys are made on foot in the old way. He has for centuries lived a settled life, traveling but little, and the horse has therefpre-not played a very conspicious part in his latter life, as in the lives of less sedentary peoples, and is consequently unheard of, as are all new things includiug the greatest of all, the white man himself in his tribal lore, or the fork tales, mythsand rituals of his sacred cult-societies. All this strength ens materially the claim heretofore made, that in mind, and especially in religious culture, the Zuni is almost as strictly archaic as in the days ere his land was discovered. 4 -,. --,ie.w- t ... '.'., --... ..1-,-j. ...tri Ui -J&L.J11WS Jlilni.JHJ'--