The Arrow-Maker
I
CAPTAIN COOK, being an observer and explorer rat her than a mere trader, appeals especially to ‘the more philosophical reader, who loves to see human nature in new situations.’
There was never a newer situation in the history of human nature than when the inhabitants of this continent, still living in the Stone Age, suddenly discovered that there was such a substance as iron in the world. To the mind of an Indian, there could be nothing approaching it in importance except his first learning that, there was such an animal as the horse. When we consider that, till well along in the last century, the Indians of the upper Missouri got their horses by stealing them from the tribes farther south, who stole them from the Comanches, who, in turn, stole them from the Mexicans, we gain some idea of the ability of the Indian to cover the length and breadth of this continent by way of theft or barter. The Indian never raised horses, and seldom bought, them: his method was to steal them. But he would trade anything he had for a piece of iron.
Thus iron, and the news of iron, spread as if it also had wings. Nothing ever advertised itself better, or showed such ability to run on ahead. Indians who had never seen a white man had learned about it ; and a specimen here and there had created a demand for more. It took no traveling man to go forth and introduce iron to the Stone Age.
Wisconsin, being on the trade-route between the Lakes and the Mississippi, and therefore the outlet for all the goods that found their way west, was a live place so far as the trader and voyageur were concerned, as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century. When the first missionaries came here, in 1669, they found traders in nearly every Indian village. The representatives of business were ahead of the representatives of God. The trader had begun to look the country over as early as 1639; and he had business well in hand before Marquette and Joliet came along, with Indian guides, to explore the Mississippi. The man of learning came along still later, of course — a tardy scholar.
But iron was not wholly dependent upon the fur-trader, to bring it on its way. The Indians, to some extent, were traders themselves. A whole tribe would sometimes go forth to make advantageous bargains with a tribe that was farther from the source of supply. Then too, the red man was a great news-bearer, carrying all his history, the terms of his treaties, and the latest doings of the wilderness, in his head. With these traits of his character in mind, let us take a look at the far Pacific coast, at a time when no white man had as yet crossed the continent, and see how the fame of iron is coming along.
In 1776, Captain Cook came eastward round the Cape of Good Hope, and struck diagonally across the Pacific, in hope of finding a northwest passage. This was the voyage on which he discovered the Sandwich Islands; and while he did not find a northwest passage, he did gain some further knowledge of the western shore of that continent which Drake had discovered, and which was vaguely known as New Albion.
Threading his way among the South Sea Islands and finally up the American coast, he makes many stops along the way. At each stop we see canoes putting forth to meet him, and his ship swarming with strange peoples who have but one demand to make upon him: they want iron. His voyage from first to last is punctuated with this thought of iron. The call for it comes to him from island after island, and seems to be following in his wake; and when he reaches the coast of North America, the demand is heard again. To the reader with an ear for history, it becomes the dominant note of his narrative, recurring always and deepening in meaning. It is the voice of the Stone Age calling out for this new substance.
At a little island north of the Society group, a mere garden spot in the ocean, he makes this note: —
In the course of my several voyages I never met with the natives of any place so much astonished as these people were upon entering a ship. Their eyes were continually flying from object to object, the wildness of their looks fully expressing their entire ignorance about everything they saw, and strikingly marking to us that, till now, they had never been visited by Europeans, nor been acquainted with any of our commodities except iron, which, however, it was plain they had heard of, or had known it in some small quantity, brought to them at some distant period. They seemed only to understand that it was a substance much better adapted to the purpose of cutting, or of boring holes, than anything their own country produced. They asked for it by the name of hamaite, probably referring to some instrument, in the making of which iron could be usefully employed. For the same reason they frequently called iron by the name of toe, which, in their language, signifies a hatchet, or rather a kind of adze. When we showed them some beads they asked first what they were, and then, whether they should eat them. But on their being told that they were to be hung in their ears, they returned them as useless. They were equally indifferent as to a looking-glass which was offered them, and returned it for the same reason; but sufficiently expressed their desire for hamaite and toe, which they wished might be very large.
As on his second voyage, he did much traffic in nails; and at one place he says, ‘Several small pigs were purchased for a six-penny nail; so that we again found ourselves in a land of plenty.’
At an island where the language of Tahiti was spoken the natives passed up some mackerel to them by means of a rope. ‘This was repeated, and some small nails, or bits of iron, which they valued more than any other article, were given them.’ And at another: —
As soon as we landed, a trade was set on foot for hogs and potatoes, which the people gave us in exchange for nails and pieces of iron formed something like chisels. We met with no obstruction in watering; on the contrary, the natives assisted our men in rolling the casks to and from the pool; and readily performed whatever we required.
Of this ‘newly discovered archipelago’ of the South Seas, there were five islands which he visited. Speaking of them generally, he says: —
The only iron tools, or rather bits of iron, seen amongst them, and which they had before our arrival, were a piece of iron hoop, about two inches long, fitted into a wooden handle, and another edge-tool, which our people guessed to be made of the point of a broadsword. How they came by them I cannot account for.
Having come among the Indians of the continent, which he first touched at a point in northern California, he coasted along Canada and the shores of Alaska. Here the demand for iron became more definite and insistent. Of the Indians along the Canadian coast he writes: —
Though our visitors behaved very peaceably, and could not be suspected of any hostile intention, we could not prevail upon any of them to come on board. They showed great readiness, however, to part with anything they had, and took from us whatever we offered in exchange, but were more desirous of iron than of any other of our articles of commerce, appearing to be perfectly acquainted with the use of that metal. . . . For the various articles which they brought, they took in exchange knives, chisels, pieces of iron and tin, nails, lookingglasses, buttons, or any kind of metal. Glass beads they were not fond of; and cloth of every sort they rejected.
From being so suspicious of a ship, the Indians, after a while of this sort of barter, became too familiar. They hung around the vessel in their canoes, and made a practice of staying all night. Presently the news struck inland, and parties from a distance arrived every day; meanwhile, those who had sold all they had would disappear for four or five days, and then return with fresh cargoes of skins and curiosities. At this stage of affairs Cook tells us: —
Nothing would go down with our visitors but metal; and brass had by this time supplanted iron, being so eagerly sought after that, before we left this place, hardly a bit of it was left on the ships, except what belonged to our necessary instruments. Whole suits of clothes were stripped of every button; bureaus of their furniture; and copper kettles, tin canisters, candle-sticks, and the like, all went to wreck.
These Canadian Indians were already in possession of metal, although Cook says he ‘never observed the least sign of their having seen ships like ours before.’ And here he makes a shrewd conjecture.
The most probable way, by which we can suppose they get their iron, is by trading for it with the other Indian tribes, who either have immediate connection with European settlements upon the continent, or receive it, perhaps, through several intermediate nations. The same may be said of the brass and copper found amongst them.
Along the shore of Alaska the story was the same.
These people were also desirous of iron; but they wanted pieces eight or ten inches long at least, and of the breadth of three or four fingers. The points of some of their spears or lances were of that metal; others were of copper and a few of bone, of which the points of their darts, arrows, &c. were composed.
Again Cook is puzzled to account for the presence of the metal.
We were pretty certain [he says], from circumstances already mentioned, that we were the first Europeans with whom they had ever communicated directly; and it remains only to be decided from what quarter they got our manufactures by intermediate conveyance. And there cannot be the least doubt of their having received these articles, through the intervention of the more inland tribes, from Hudson’s Bay, or the settlements on the Canadian Lakes.
Thus we see that, in a voyage which took him from the South Pacific Ocean to a point beyond the Arctic Circle, he found that the fame of iron had preceded him all the way. It had been the same on his second voyage, three years before, when he was going into a world so little known that England was expecting him to discover a new continent in the South Pacific.
It was, in a sense, the age of bone as much as the age of stone. In the South Pacific islands their chisels were bone; and as there were no mammals of any size on these islands, a chisel was always made of the upper bone of a man’s arm. In Alaska, likewise, we find the darts and arrows pointed with ivory and bone. It is interesting to note in Cook’s narrative (though he does not draw our attention to the point) that among the northern Indians it was the arrows that were pointed with bone, while the spears were pointed with iron. An arrow is likely to be shot away and lost. A fish-spear is held in the hand; or, if it. does have to be thrown, it can usually be recovered. A blown-up bladder, attached to the spear with a thong, ensures its safety.
Among our American Indians, it was, in a more fundamental sense, the age of bone. Captain John Smith tells us that he once met an Indian who had an old piece of bone, which he carried about with him in his pouch, and which he seemed to prize greatly. Upon being asked what it was for, he replied that he used it in shaping his flint arrowheads. The captain, probably thinking there was some secret to be discovered in this piece of bone, tried to get possession of it; but the Indian refused to part with it because it was ‘big medicine’ to him.
As we now know, there was no secret about the bone. It was simply old and dry, and the refusal to part with it was wholly due to a trait in human nature. A skilled workman, whether he be white or red, clings fondly to his old familiar tools, and is loath to part with one, even though he knows he can easily get another.
II
From such meagre and incidental hints as this, in the writings of soldiers and adventurers who were little concerned with the curious questionings of modern science, did we get our first clue to the means by which the preColumbian Indian shaped his arrowheads. The Indian of to-day does not know. But the archæologist knows, to a certain extent, even though he may not be able to do it. The Indian made all of his arrowand spear-heads, and like implements, out of the hard, unstratified, glasslike rocks; and he did it by working on this refractory material with a piece of bone.
An amusing illustration of the ignorance of the modern Indian with regard to the art of his forefathers recently brought it self to pass in the course of a trip which some friends of mine made to northern Wisconsin. They were a committee of the State Archæological Society, who had been sent up there to investigate Indian mounds and dig for specimens; and they had along with them Mr. H. L. Skavlem, a pleasing old naturalist of the type of John Burroughs, who is an expert on Indian implements. Mr. Skavlem, whose summer seat is on Lake Koshkonong, in a. county which almost joins corners with my own, is the only man, so far as Wisconsin archæologists know, who has acquired the art of making flint arrowheads after the manner of the pre-Columbian Indian. And I dare say he is the only one known in other parts of the world, for his work has recently come into demand in public museums. Examples of it have found their way into museums in France and Norway, and lately he had a request for specimens from the Canadian Provincial Museum at Toronto.
On this trip the archæological committee went up through the towns of the Chippewa Indians, following the Chippewa River to the mouth of the Flambeau. In the course of their wanderings, Mr. Skavlem picked up a mass of flint rock, and, having shattered it into fragments of workable size, occupied his spare time in shaping arrowheads. This work soon attracted the attention of the Indians. Being wholly ignorant of the art, they were much amazed. They stood about, saying nothing, while he turned out heads for bird-arrows and war-arrows, chipping the flint with apparently as little trouble as if it had been a good, crumbly piece of Wisconsin cheese.
This exploit soon began to have results. Thereafter, whenever they arrived at an Indian town, the Indians would be on hand awaiting his arrival. The news of the white man’s strange ability had gone on ahead of him; and there would be a curious throng following him about and watching for him to do it again. In this way Skavlem made many arrowheads of approved archæological design; and this signal victory over the Chippewas was achieved by means of an implement very much used by the white man, namely, a toothbrush. In order to make arrowheads, one needs only a piece of bone from which all fatty matter has been removed. Hence, why not a toothbrush?
‘At one place,’ Skavlem told me, ‘I thought I would test their knowledge of what I was doing. I held up an arrow before a group of Chippewas and asked them what it was. They all gazed at me in silence, not one of them offering a word of comment. Presently an old squaw found her tongue and said, “I know. Thunder stone!” That’s how much they know about flint-working.’
In Wisconsin we have a little more than ten thousand Indians, most of them on the northern reservations. The oldest men among them, of pure Indian blood, have no remembrance of any tradition regarding the making of flint arrowheads. On a festival day, when the Chippewas array themselves in their finery of beadwork, and put on their bonnets of eagle feathers, they look very promising to the curious traveler who would pry into the ancient secrets. But he might better address his inquiry to the Elks, or the United Order of Red Men. Tribal history is preserved in tales of the heroic and the supernatural, not of the commonplaces of life. When the age of iron came in, the age of stone went out of the door with as little sentiment as a modern housewife would bestow upon the old washboard when the new electric laundry was installed. It is not Indian nature to make tradition out of anything so prosaic as mere work.
In other ways they are equally progressive. A couple of years ago, one of the tribes was divided into parlies over the subject of the annual dance. Modern tendencies, such as the ‘ bunny-hug,’ the ‘bear-walk,’ and other wild vagaries of the white man, had begun to creep in. The old men, who might be called the conservatives, raised their voices in opposition to such innovations. But the younger party stood stoutly in favor of the up-to-date.
In the Far West, the Stone Age held on much longer than it did in this country of the seventeenth-century fur-trader; but even there it passed out with a suddenness that was complete. Some years ago the Smithsonian Institution thought it had found an authentic pre-Columbian Indian in California. He was very secretive about his methods, and would not let them see him at work. Finally they outwitted him by placing a mirror so that it would transmit the necessary knowledge; and when they found him pecking away at the flint with an old nail, rather inexpertly, they knew they had not found a true flint-worker.
In order to do that, they would have to come to Wisconsin and visit the lakeside cottage of my friend Skavlem. As Charles E. Brown, curator of the State Historical Museum, recently wrote me, ‘He is a real naturalist, with a wide knowledge of birds, animals, plants, and rocks; and he chips flint with the same facility as the old-time Indian. We call him the John Burroughs of Wisconsin.’ Besides being a true naturalist, he is a shrewd judge of archæological specimens, and has been of great help in mapping the many effigy-mounds to be found in this state. But it is his skill in flint-working, deliberately and purposely cultivated, which makes him of unique interest to the archæologist.
As for the practical objects which would actuate a man to cultivate this familiarity with stone and bone, there is a spirit of pure science behind it, and a finality of investigation which the true archæologist will readily appreciate. And the general reader, who has no doubt puzzled his head in vain every time he looked at an exhibit of Indian arrowheads, may now find his questions easily answered.
One day, not long ago, I went over to Mr. Skavlem’s home, with the idea of giving the operation close scrutiny, and getting him to make an arrowhead for the editor of the Atlantic. My errand turned into a social visit, so that, although I had arrived shortly after dinner, it was growing dark before the object of my call again occurred to us. We were examining one of the books in his library, which entirely covers one wall of his small living-room, when the waning light warned us that it was high time to be getting at the arrowhead; whereupon we hurried down to the cellar. Here, before the dimly lighted window, were no tools but a piece of bone in a wood handle, and a block of oak. While I held my watch, he made a well-shaped arrowhead, with tang, barbs, and notch complete, in the space of eleven minutes.
In the bad light he had the misfortune to break it when it was nearly done, so that he had to start over and alter it into an arrowhead of smaller size. He had really made two arrowheads in that time. It was not intended as a museum specimen, but an example of the average arrowhead picked up in the fields. ‘The Indian was not much of a mechanic,’ he explained, continuing our visit as he worked; ‘and when I am illustrating the average quality of work, I have to be careful not to make it too good.’
Mounted on cards, he has examples of the various styles of Indian arrowheads made out of all the materials that the Indians used — flint, chert, quartzite, jasper, chalcedony, and black obsidian. These are of his own manufacture. Prominent among them, catching the eye with their jewel-like glint, are bird-arrows, beautifully shaped and barbed, which look as if they might have been made out of emerald and topaz. These were fashioned with the same piece of bone, and in no great length of time, out of the bottoms of beer bottles, brown and green. While they are not intended as mere curiosities, they excite the greatest wonder of the layman, who naturally thinks them the hardest to make. This is a mistaken conclusion. Quartzite will scratch glass, and some flint will scratch quartz. The rocks are harder than glass, and no less brittle.
As an Indian always selected for his arrowheads the hard, structureless, and rather vitreous rock, there is no doubt that he would have made use of glass if he had had the glass to work with. He did make use of black obsidian when he could get it; and obsidian is nothing more or less than natural, or volcanic, glass.
Eleven minutes in Skavlem’s darkening cellar begin to shed light; and it is a light which would never transmit itself through the polished glass of museum cases. Suddenly you exclaim, ‘Why, it was not such a great loss for an Indian to shoot away one of those beautiful arrows and never find it again! I had always thought — ’
And who is there among us who has not thought it, as we stood gazing imaginatively into museum cases at delicate bird-arrows, and detachable poison-arrows, and big war-arrows intended to kill buffaloes and men? What a tragedy to an Indian to shoot at a bird and miss it! What a gambling with his long labor to draw upon a duck! What careful searches he must have made for arrows that went sailing away into primeval fastnesses, and there hid themselves with all the sagacity of a modern collar-button! We sympathize with him, knowing that, in his day as well as ours, there must have been this same ' perversity of inanimate things.’ And finally we have said: ‘What a waste of human effort it was to have to depend for a living upon the shooting of such ammunition!'
Museums are dedicated to wonder; but Skavlem’s cellar is not. It, is there done away with by means of a block and a bone. I dare say that prehistoric man was more concerned over the straight stick with which he had made his feathered shaft than he was over the loss of the arrowhead. He would hardly spend a great part of his day hunting for that, when he could so easily make another.
Thus the usefulness of a twentiethcentury arrow-maker begins to make itself manifest. As everyone knows, who has posted himself theoretically upon some practical operation and then gone away with the intention of doing it or writing about it, there was always something he forgot to ask. You did not get quite thoroughly into it; and then you wished you were back at your original source of information. Archæology, so far as the Stone Age is concerned, deals mostly with tools. Many archæologists have made experiments with these tools, using the various drills, and boring out catlinite pipes by way of practical knowledge. In this way a man gets down to details, makes new observations, and becomes more of an authority on the catlinite pipe or the bead of wampum.
But how about making these tools themselves, setting out with nothing but a piece of bone, and making yourself familiar with the kind of tool that long ago decayed? Why not start from the ground up? This was the question which Skavlem asked himself, and which made him dissatisfied with the mere use of flint implements, or the making of stone axes by the pecking and grinding of stone upon stone. Behind the flint tool was another tool that made it; so he got a piece of bone and started in to rediscover its possibilities. It was the age of stone only in the sense that the stone implement bears everlasting testimony of itself, while the tool of bone decays. Some of these arrow-making bones have resisted decay enough to preserve their form; and Skavlem has found a few in such a state of preservation that he has been able to do a little chipping with them. If the New England farmer of to-day were able to plough up all the shoulderblades of moose that were formerly used for hoes, and all the needles and bodkins and awls and flint-working tools that the Indian had ever used, he would probably be in a quandary whether to call it the age of stone or the age of bone.
III
The making of an arrowhead is the last word in simplicity, so far as the outward procedure is concerned. It may readily be understood by anyone who has been housekeeping long enough to have had a few accidents with glass. Possibly — or I should say probably — you have been coming through a door with a piece of plate glass, a mirror or other cherished object in your hands; and you have had the misfortune to strike it against a hard corner, in such a way that a piece was bit right out of the surface of it. The piece was a thin semicircle of glass, with knifelike edges, and somewhat the shape of a shell. This, to all intents and purposes, is the ‘conchoidal fracture.’ An Indian made his arrowheads simply by breaking such pieces out of a piece of flint, always working inward from the edge. It was never done by hammering. Such a method does not allow of that deliberate control which is necessary; and the force required would break off the more delicate details, so that the barbs could never be shaped. It is done wholly by placing the bone against the edge and using pressure. Thus the material is broken off, chip after chip.
It is evident that, if you are to have any control over the shape of the work, these chips cannot be all of the same weight and size. In forming the body, or heavier part, of the arrow, the chips may be long and large, striking inward halfway across the breadth of the arrow, or even farther; but in shaping the notches, with the shank and the sharp little barbs, the chips must be smaller and the work more delicate. You must have control over the size of the chips; and this is determined by the amount of pressure you bring against the edge, while, at the same time, you push downward to separate it from the surface.
I have said that you press downward, t hat being the natural way to exert a strong pressure. To do this, the flint must be held firmly in some way, as over the edge of a board or block; and the greater part of the flint must project, so that the larger chips shall be free to break off. But to hold it firmly in this position with the fingers is hardly practicable. And any viselike sort of arrangement will hardly do, because the fragment of flint has to be constantly moved about in shaping it.
After a little experience, the practical way suggests itself. You cut a slot in your oak block, a quarter of an inch deep and about as wide Now, when you place the edge of your flint in this, it does not stand straight up, neither does it fall over on its side; it is at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the greater part of its surface is free to let loose the flakes as they are pressed off. By placing a finger of the left hand at the base of the fragment of flint, it is held easily in place, and you may now exert your strongest downward pressure as you work around the edge. The flint may be turned over readily into any position, as you work on it; and it will keep tumbling about in its slot as the deft workman virtually hurries it into shape. This is all there is, practically, to the making of an arrowhead. Any secret beyond this will be in your fingers, not in your head.
The work, it will be noted, is all done by pressing the end of bone firmly against the edge, to make it take hold, and at the same time pushing downward. In no case would it be possible to take a piece off your arrow by applying the tool to its face. A piece of bone would not remove an objectionable hump in this way; neither would a piece of steel, unless you w ere to hit it such a blow as to break the flint. It is this peculiar fracture which is accommodating you; and the white man gets the same results as the Indian by taking the same advantage of it.
‘But,’ says the attentive reader, ‘I have seen arrows where these chips were taken right out of the face of the arrow. The marks did not lead from the edge.’ True enough. But these marks are the remainder of larger chips, which did strike inward from the edge, when the fragment was larger and was being roughed into shape; or they are the marks that were on the fragment before it was trimmed up at all. An Indian, in order to save himself unnecessary work, would select a fragment that was somewhere near the size of the arrow he intended to make.
The bone employed is, as I have said, about the size of the handle of a toothbrush, and it is flattened down to an edge like that of a dull chisel, though not, of course, with a view to using it like a chisel. The edge of the bone stands at right, angles to the edge of the flint, and is firmly pressed against it in that position. The bone is made about three-eighths of an inch wide, in order that it may be strong enough to bear the downward pressure; and it is sharpened to a point for three reasons — to enable you to do fine work and get into details, to make it take a firm hold of the edge of the flint, and to bring all the pressure to bear on one small point so as to start the fracture.
When we examine one of those chips that are knocked off the edge of a piece of glass, we see that it is not only shelllike in form, but also has a slight indication of ridges — little waves or ripples surrounding the point where the force was applied. In like manner, your edge of bone seems to radiate its force out into the surrounding material. The workman thus regulates the size and nature of his chips, taking off big ones to bring the work into shape, or little ones to put a set of saw-teeth on the arrow. It is the amount of pressure against the flint, together with the push downward, the one proportioned to the other, which determines the size of the chip: it is not dependent upon the amount of surface which the tool takes hold of. It is all very simple in procedure, though not at all easy to do. Being both simple and difficult, it is a trade; and one in which the skilled workman can produce wonderful results in a surprisingly short space of time.
Thomas Wilson, whose work on prehistoric art is a standard in its line, says that the work is done by pushing at an angle of forty-five degrees. His description is misleading, because it conveys the idea that the bone is held at a certain angle to the work. The work is not done by an angle which may be determined by the eye, but by the combination of two pressures which are determined by the fingers. Mr. Skavlem called my attention to this attempt of the archæologist to explain the use of the tool; and it conveys so little of the true idea, such as a man would get from a practical contact with flint, that I have thought it worth while to describe the process at length.
IV
I cannot drop this hard and brittle subject here without the feeling that I ought to leave the reader better acquainted with my friend Mr. Skavlem. All the world loves a lover; and I have never met a man who represented the lover of Nature so purely and so simply, and with no ulterior motive. He is not a writer, nor a speaker, nor anything that reaches out for fame. With him, Nature is her own reward; and she still continues to reward him, in the eighth decade of his life. He knows the birds, the animals, the rocks, and the flowers. Every wren that selects its place for a home becomes his companion for the summer; and he has humorous appreciation of its strong character and little household ways. Along with this love of Nature, he has the strict truth-telling instinct of the pure scientist — all the more so, perhaps, because of this profound simplicity of mind.
But he has interested me particularly because of his early beginnings as contrasted with what he finally became. ‘We know what we are,’ says Ophelia, ‘but know not what we may be.’ This problem is best solved when a man has passed three score and ten, and finds himself with a beard turned white and a whole life to look back upon. One may prophesy after the fact. — and this, let me say, is one of the most interesting forms of prophecy. The self-educated man spends a large part of his life groping toward his destiny. And right here he may have a great advantage over the man who has become committed to a vocation too early in life, and feels that he must keep on, even if he has chosen wrong.
H. L. Skavlem, when he was a young man in a Wisconsin farming community, discovered that he liked to play billiards. The skill of eye and hand appealed to him. Amid the ruder employments of pioneer life, this fine touch and feeling for the weight of the ball, and the shrewd calculation of angles of incidence, gave him an outlet for something that was strong within him; and he became a confirmed billiard-player. It cost him little, because he was usually the victor; and so he could play as much as he liked. As he grew more skillful at the game, it dawned upon him that he was becoming too good. He was spending too much time at it; and it was getting hold of him. Suddenly, one day, he placed his cue in the rack and said, ‘This is the end of it for me.’ And it was.
As he tells this at the age of seventythree, there is a glint in his eye which shows that the billiard cue is not really a thing of the past with him, but rather a passion long renounced. Billiards was his game.
In these retired-farmer towns of the Middle West, where farmers retire too soon and often without a shadow of excuse, it is the well-worn pack of cards that must bear the brunt of eking out the empty latter years. Some of them play all day, and come back to play in the evening; and when no opponent can be found, they play solitaire. To Skavlem, cards never made any appeal. The nature of the game bores him. In billiards, depending wholly upon skill, and appealing to a certain pride of workmanship, he found something that peculiarly fitted him.
Being a farm-boy by training, and having now a large city acquaintance, he was elected to the office of sheriff. With his taste for active employment among men, and a rugged physique derived from Norwegian ancestors, he was well selected for the position. Here one might expect him to go into politics, the office of sheriff being generally considered a long step in that direction. But he had no taste for the mere political side of his situation, its compromises and connivings appealing to him as little as did the game of cards. And so, having attended to the duties of the office, he stepped out without having paved the way to further preferment. Politics was not his line.
He had always been a hunter, and, as he grew older, he found himself with a settled taste for the out-of-doors. In the adjoining county is a lake, nine miles by four, which, as its feedinggrounds are especially attractive to the canvasback duck, has long been known as the Chesapeake of the West. Every autumn Skavlem was at the lake, gun in hand, consorting with hunters and making the outdoors his hobby. In the meantime, having an inquiring mind, he had been growing familiar with the scientific side of nature.
And along with this scientific bent he had a love of animals, which, as he had been raised on a farm, first manifested itself in his knowledge and understanding of horses. I was recently talking with him upon the subject of histology, in which a mutual friend is much interested, and I asked him what he thought of the theory of curing human ailments by manipulation. ' Well,’he said, ‘I have rubbed and kneaded too many horses into shape, and put them on their feet again, to be a complete skeptic regarding that method of cure.’
But it was the lake, and the out-ofdoors, that really charmed and held him. Finally, twenty-three years ago, he built a cottage on its shore and made it his summer seat. And now, instead of merely hunting in the fall, he stayed there the greater part of the year. Thus, at the age of fifty, he reversed the programme of the average farmer. He retired from the city to the country.
Twenty-three years is a long time as human life goes — long enough for a man of parts to learn a profession and achieve eminence. What, then, became of Skavlem when he retired to the country and sat down on the shore of his Wisconsin lake?
For one thing, he became a botanist. The subject had always interested him as he came in practical contact with it, more especially the botany of waterplants. Finally, he produced his monograph on the Potomageton pectinatus, in which he held, contrary to the belief of all hunters and scientific writers, that the canvasback does not get its distinctive flavor from feeding on wildcelery buds. The government later issued a bulletin on the subject, setting forth evidence that reached the same conclusion; and, by an oversight, Skavlem, the pioneer, was not mentioned. A long time later, however, the editor, Emmaline Moore of the Department of Zoölogy and Botany of Vassar College, very graciously made amends. Having learned of his monograph and the date of it, she wrote him a letter acknowledging the oversight, and complimenting him, in 1915, upon work that he had done in 1904. Many elusive circumstances, partly botanical and partly due to the anatomy of the duck, had misled observers and perpetuated in science what was mere tradition and hearsay. ‘Skepticism, at least in science,’ says Skavlem, ‘is the basis of human progress.'
But it was in ornithology, more than in botany, that Skavlem found himself truly at home. The largest collection of native birds in Wisconsin is the work of his hand. Having completed it and put it in order, he presented it to the city of Janesville. He humorously describes himself as ‘an old-fashioned naturalist — one that knows a little of everything and not much of anything.’ But the Curator of the State Historical Society at Madison, and bird-lovers generally, take him more seriously than that. He is the ‘John Burroughs of Wisconsin.’ This is a good description of him, both as to personality and as to his attitude toward nature in general; though he has a craggy brow, which is more like that of Bryant.
Unlike Burroughs, however, he has little inclination to write. The State Historical Society has recently been urging him to write some articles upon the making of stone implements, but so far with no success. The naturelover in him tells him to write; the pure scientist — whose respect is all for the thoroughgoing and accurate — tells him not to do so. He confided to me that a scientist is on the downward path when he starts writing ‘just to please people.’ Such is the literary philosophy of Skavlem.
But there is, I think, a deeper reason why he does not write. He takes it out in first-hand contact — the pleasures of talk. His summer seat on the lake has become a Mecca for his friends — bird-lovers, geologists, hunters, and archæologists. It is the social instinct that drives on your true writer. He is reaching out for people to share the world with. But when a man is so truly in love with Nature that she is her own reward, and when this brings a man just the human contact he needs, he is likely to put off the labors of the pen. Like Socrates and Diogenes and Coleridge, he gathers his disciples about him. One might wonder, sometimes, why Christ did not write.
There is a temptation to philosophize here; but we began with billiards, and the discerning reader always expects a writer to draw his observations to a point. We have no doubt raised the query, What has billiards to do with the career of a naturalist? And by this time we have anticipated ourselves so much, that there is scarcely an opportunity to point out the trend of Skavlem’s predilection for manual skill.
It was this that made him known as an archæologist. The piece of land he bought on the lake was on the site of Carcajou, an Indian village rich in aboriginal remains. He found here much to interest him. And this, together with his growing acquaintance among the archæologists of the state, turned his mind strongly toward the problems of the Stone Age. He went behind the flint implements, and the experiments in using them, to the art of making them. And in the interest of pure science, he resolved to start life all over again, beginning with a bone. To members of the State Archæological Society, and to certain professors at the University, he is known for his remarkable control of the ‘conchoidal fracture.’ In the more practical view of the Chippewa Indians, he is the arrowmaker.