The Blank Pages of History

Evolving Moloch recently tweeted an account of the Bloody Falls Massacre of 1771, a historical event in which a group of (mostly) Chipewyans attacked a group of Copper Inuit in modern Nunavut, Canada.  The event was witnessed by Samuel Hearne, who was travelling with the Chipewyans at the time, and who left us a written description of the massacre.  His account reads:

"By the time the Indians had made themselves thus completely frightful, it was near one o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth; when finding all the Esquimaux quiet in their tents, they rushed forth from their ambuscade, and fell on the poor unsuspecting creatures, unperceived till close at the very eves of their tents, when they soon began the bloody massacre, while I stood neuter in the rear.

In a few seconds the horrible scene commenced; it was shocking beyond description; the poor unhappy victims were surprised in the midst of their sleep, and had neither time nor power to make any resistance; men, women, and children, in all upward of twenty, ran out of their tents stark naked, and endeavoured to make their escape; but the Indians having possession of all the landside, to no place could they fly for shelter.  One alternative only remained, that of jumping into the river; but, as none of them attempted it, they all fell a sacrifice to Indian barbarity!

The shrieks and groans of the poor expiring wretches were truly dreadful; and my horror was much increased at seeing a young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of age, killed so near me, that when the first spear was stuck into her side she fell down at my feet, and twisted round my legs, so that it was with difficulty that I could disengage myself from he dying grasps.  As two Indian men pursued this unfortunate victim, I solicited very hard for her life; but the murderers made no reply till they had stuck both their spears through her body, and transfixed her to the ground.  They then looked me sternly in the face, and began to ridicule me, by asking if I wanted an Esquimaux wife; and paid not the smallest regard to the shrieks and agony of the poor wretch, who was twining round their spears like an eel!  Indeed, after receiving much abusive language from them on the occasion, I was at length obliged to desire that they would be more expeditious in dispatching their victim out of her misery, otherwise I should be obliged, out of pity, to assist in the friendly office of putting an end to the existence of a fellow-creature who was so cruelly wounded.  On this request being made, one of the Indians hastily drew his spear from the place where it was first lodged, and pierced it through her breast near the heart.  The love of life, however, even in this most miserable state, was so predominant, that though this might justly be called the most merciful act that could be done for the poor creature, it seemed to be unwelcome, for though much exhausted by pain and loss of blood, she made several efforts to ward off the friendly blow.  My situation and the terror of my mind at beholding this butchery, cannot easily be conceived, much less described; though I summed up all the fortitude I was master of on the occasion, it was with difficulty that I could refrain from tears; and I am confident that my features must have feelingly expressed how sincerely I was affected at the barbarous scene I then witnessed; even at this hour I cannot reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears."

Read enough about the past, and after a while you stop being surprised by such things.  Wikipedia says that Hearne's original manuscript is lost, and the version that survives is possibly embellished.  If true, then I suspect that embellishment lies less in the levels of violence and butchery depicted, and more in the description of brave Hearne heroically standing up to the Chipewyan man, demanding a mercy kill.  That sounds like maybe what Hearne had -wished- had happened.

But it does bring to mind another account, very similar, also of a fight between two Indian groups as witnessed by a lone white guy.  During the 1850's—I'm not certain of the date—Texas Ranger Nelson Lee witnessed a skirmish out on the open plains between the Comanche (who were holding him captive) and the Apache.  He later wrote a book about the experience:

"In the afternoon of the third day we struck a wide rolling prairie.  Dividing it nearly in the center was a high, smooth ridge—its summit reached from both sides by an easy, gradual ascent.  As we crossed the prairie and approached this ridge, our scattered cavalcade extended, perhaps, a quarter of a mile, moving forward, carelessly, and in no order whatsoever.  I was at the extreme rear, by the side of the Spotted Leopard, and surrounded by the pack mules.  As the foremost horsemen reached the height they halted suddenly, making hurried signs, while two or three of the braves galloped back down the slope, riding eagerly to and fro among their brethren, as if urging them to push forward without delay.  The whole band, thereupon, dashed up the hill, except the Spotted Leopard and myself, who remained with the mules in the rear, and on reaching the summit deployed into line.  By this time I had heard the cry of 'the Apaches, the Apaches,' and knew at once there was hot work near at hand.

As yet, however, I had seen nothing of an enemy, and only drew the inference there was one present from the cries I had heard, and the general commotion that prevailed.  In the course of two or three minutes after our line formed on the ridge, the air was rent with the noise of the war whoop, and up the opposite ascent, at full speed, came the Apaches in solid body, like a black cloud.  As they approached, a shower of arrows were discharged from both lines, when they rushed upon each other in a hand to hand encounter.

From the position I occupied I had a fair, unobstructed view of the battle.  It was fierce and terrible.  The horses reared, and plunged, and fell upon each other, their riders dealing blow for blow, and thrust for thrust, some falling from their saddles to the ground, and others trampling madly over them."

... and so on.  Lee's description of this skirmish is memorable not so much for the encounter itself, but for the observation he makes of it afterward:

"The Comanches lost in this battle seventeen warriors; the Apaches, probably, as many more.  Had the combatants belonged to a civilized people, who keep a record of their wars, it would have furnished a thrilling page of history; but thousands of such sanguinary struggles take place on the lonely prairies, of which the world knows not.  That same season, however, they buried the tomahawk and danced the pipe dance, and henceforward were at peace."

Comments like that get to the heart of the difficulty in trying to reconstruct the history of nations which lie far beyond the frontier.  Because it is true—and ought to be obvious—that history happens regardless of whether anyone around bothers to write it down.  Or: if someone does write it down, but their writings later get lost.  Richard Miles, in Carthage Must Be Destroyed, describes how when Gustave Flaubert wrote his novel Salammbô, set in ancient Carthage,

"One critic indignantly wrote, 'How do you want me to be interested in this lost war, buried in the defiles of sands of Africa . . . ?  What is this to me, the duel between Tunis and Carthage?  Speak to me rather of the duel between Carthage and Rome!  I am attentive to it, I am involved in it.  Between Rome and Carthage, in their fierce quarrel, all of future civilization is already in play.'  The point was that any aspect of Carthaginian history that was not associated with Rome was of no real interest or importance for an educated audience." (p. 10)

Flaubert published Salammbô in 1862, but nothing has changed.  The written history of the Apaches begins in 1541 when Coronado met them and called them "Querechos," and it becomes more detailed after 1598 when the Spanish founded New Mexico.  Over the centuries, Apaches fought with Spaniards, Pueblos, Wichitas, Tonkawas, Jumanos, Comanches, and others.  And yet if you happen upon a book about "the Apache Wars" in almost any bookstore, it will most likely begin its narrative around 1849.  Why?  Because that's when the war began between the Apaches and the United States.  "What is this to me, the duel between Apache and Jumano?  Speak to me rather of the duel between Apache and Rome America!"

Or consider this.  Medieval Persian folklore includes mention of two outstanding conquerors who invaded Iran from opposite directions: Eskandar of Rum, and Afrāsīāb of Turan.  Eskandar is known to be Alexander the Great ("Rūm" = "Rome" i.e. Greece).  But who on earth is this Afrāsīāb person?  "Turān" is the old Persian name for the Central Asian steppe.  But we know nothing of the Achaemenids' dealings with the people on their eastern borders; almost all of our knowledge comes from Greek writers who focused on the western portion of the empire.  Some think that Afrāsīāb is a fictional character (like another villain of the Shahnameh: the demon-king Zahhāk, who derives from the mythical dragon Aži Dahāka).  But I think it's also possible that he was a real person—perhaps some Scythian warlord—who fought against Persia and was remembered for it in Persian mytho-history.

A good comparison here is with Attila the Hun, another would-be conqueror from the steppe.  Like Afrāsīāb, Attila was remembered and commemorated in the folk traditions of the local people—in this case, Germanic poems like Widsith, the Nibelungenlied, and the Poetic Edda.  The difference is that in Attila's case, we also have contemporary, reliable historical accounts which historians can use to corroborate (or not) the references to Attila in poetry: no need to uselessly speculate on who this mysterious "Atli" figure was or whether he existed.  No such corroborating witness exists for Afrāsīāb.  So we can't even know if he was real or mythical.

A modern Persian wanting to learn about the earliest history of his or her civilization is much better served by reading Herodotus than Ferdowsi.  Likewise, a modern Greek is going to get much better information about earliest Greece from the records of the Egyptians and Hittites than from the poetry of Homer.  Adopting a discerning eye towards different sources of historical evidence often means that the most accurate and reliable history of a culture doesn't come from that culture at all, but from outsiders—this is a point which modern commentators of Native American history often don't want to accept.  Who knows the most about the early Alaskan Tlingit?  People who can read Russian, that's who.

The flipside, however, is that when documentation for a period is sparse, people can start to confuse lack of evidence for lack of incidence: "we don't know a lot about the eastern Persian Empire, so not a lot must have happened."  But that's not going to be the perspective of someone from ancient Persia—certainly not if they're from one of the eastern satrapies after their village has been sacked.  To assume that everything of significance that happened in Persia happened with Greece is to make the same mistake as that critic ("What is this to me, the duel between Iran and Turan?").  Modern histories of Persia ignore Afrāsīāb; they can only go where the evidence takes them.  But the Shahnameh apparently puts Afrāsīāb on roughly the same level as Eskandar—that fact might (might!) be a clue that something big did happen out on the eastern Persian frontier, which could be compared to Alexander's invasion.  Maybe.  The record is silent.

[Ehsan Yarshater's article over on Encyclopedia Iranica says that if Afrāsīāb represents a historical figure, he was more likely from the Parthian period, and not from the earlier Achaemenid period.  But that makes little difference to my point—it's not like we know a lot about the eastern border of the Parthians, either.]

This kind of stuff, by the way, is why I am initially skeptical towards theories like Mark van de Logt's, which says* that the monstrous beasts from Caddo mythology are symbolic representations of the wrath inflicted upon the Caddos by the entrada of Hernando de Soto in 1541-2.  I'm not skeptical of the idea that some real history (including the conquistadors) is contained in Caddo mythological stories—this is almost certainly the case.  But I am skeptical of the idea that anything of note that was remembered by the Caddos centuries after the fact must have involved the Spaniards in some way.

The oral traditions of the Caddos no doubt does contain encoded memories of events from early Caddo history... but just what is that "Caddo history"?  Surely it isn't limited to their interactions with Europeans, any more than Carthage's history was limited to its interactions with Rome.  For every "Eskandar" in the guise of a Spanish cavalryman from the south, was there also an "Afrāsīāb" in the guise of an Osage warchief from the north?  Probably.  Which of the two would have left a stronger impression on contemporary Caddos, to later become immortalized in myth?  I don't know.  The De Soto expedition is just one page from the early history of the Caddo.  All of the other pages are blank.  But the contents of those blank pages are surely under no obligation to only contain material that seems important to us ("What is this to me, the duel between Caddo and Osage?").  The historic Caddos had other priorities.

[* - I should make it clear that I have not actually read van de Logt's book, and therefore my criticisms of it are unfair and founded upon total ignorance.  When I do read it—and I intend to—he may very well end up convincing me.]

One can assume a priori that the Caddos' northern border—like the Persians' eastern border and the Carthaginians' southern border—was a busy place.  But those parts of the world, in those periods of history, have gone dark.  They weren't dark to the people who were there, but they're dark to us.  For this reason, I am grateful for all the brief little flashes of light that illuminate the darkness: such as Miguel's map of Quivira, or Saukamappee's reminiscences of the Blackfoot-Shoshone war.

Trying to reconstruct the history of the frontier-beyond-the-frontier is a tricky business.  Sometimes you get lucky, like with the Kiowas (on whom more in a future post): where written history, oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and winter counts all come together to form a coherent picture of the Kiowa past which reaches back a thousand years.  And sometimes you get unlucky, like with the Arapahoes, who are invisible to the archaeological record and whose early history is a giant mystery.  And then there are enigmas, like the Suhtai, on whom all a person can really do is guess.  All of this is of course highly relevant to any attempt at making a map of peoples who lived beyond the reach of recorded history.  Crumbs...

And as for the Bloody Falls Massacre: the Wikipedia article tells me that "in 1996, Dene and Inuit representatives participated in a healing ceremony to reconcile the centuries-old grievance."  I can't really argue with that, I suppose.  Healing is good, reconciliation is good.

But it is hard to hold a healing ceremony for a massacre that nobody remembers.  Did you take notice of the fact that it has a name: "the Bloody Falls Massacre"?  Why?  Who named it that?  Do you suppose it would it have a name, or be remembered at all, among the Chipewyans, still to this day, after 248 years, if no one had been there to write it down?  Perhaps... but I'm inclined to think likely not.  It was just one raid, after all.  One among thousands of sanguinary struggles that took place on the lonely tundras, of which the world knows not.

Good Maps #1: Atlantic Colonies

This is the first in a series of posts wherein I share some of the maps that I have found while researching my project which are outstanding in quality.  As I've said before and will say again, there are an awful lot of unhelpful maps out there that purport to show this-or-that part of North America at this-or-that period of history, so if I can do my part to signal-boost some maps which are of actual quality, then that might be of use to... somebody.  My ultimate goal is to make maps of my own, but I'm a slow researcher and that still seems a long way off.  Also I'm not an expert, and I don't trust myself any more than you should.

So far the most detailed, helpful, and relevant set of maps I have found are from Herman R. Friis, A Series of Population Maps of the Colonies and the United States, 1625-1790, published in 1940.  These are a series of maps showing the locations and sizes of Euro-American settlements east of the Mississippi River for the years 1625, 1650, 1675, 1700, 1720, 1740, 1760, 1770, 1780, and 1790.  I would like to show all ten maps, but since they form the bulk of the article I'm not sure if that would be permitted by the copyright gestapo, so I'll just show four.  If you want to see the rest, the article is in Geographical Review, volume 30, no 3:

Friis' maps are useful because they show exactly what most colonial-era maps don't: just exactly where the colonists were, and what areas were under their jurisdiction.  In other words, what territories belonged to the British Empire in actuality, as opposed to on paper.  Territories located beyond the region of settlement can be assumed to belong to this-or-that Indian tribe.  There are still difficulties, however.  As far as I know, the British colonies were very agricultural in focus, so it's much easier to infer who-owned-what from who-lived-where when dealing with them than it is when dealing with New France, Louisiana, or Florida.  Friis' maps may not be very useful in mapping the latter.  In the future I would like to write a post specifically about the different definitions of territorial sovereignty one has to use when dealing with the British versus the French, Spanish, Dutch, sedentary Indians, and nomadic Indians.  But for now, the Friis maps are an excellent resource and I would like more people to know about them.

Another useful map of the Atlantic colonies is the following, from Ralph H. Brown, Historical Geography of the United States (1948).  It is based directly upon the Friis maps, but uses shaded regions with solidly delineated borders:

There is also this map of 1660, from The Settling of North America ed. Helen Hornbeck Tanner (1995).  The map projection used is a bit strange, though:

And this map from the same volume, showing the settled area of the British colonies in 1760:

I'm less enthusiastic about this one (same volume again), because it smears two decades of history into a single image, but it's certainly not terrible:

H. H. Tanner also edited another volume, the Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (1987).  I have quibbles with some of the maps from the two volumes, but they seem to mostly be good resources.

Some Trivia about Armor

Have a couple posts relevant to the map project in the works, but it's been a while since I uploaded anything, so here's a little something that might be of interest to someone: Native American body armor.  Take a look at this picture:

That's a picture of a Huron warrior from the early 17th century.  What the man is wearing is a suit of armor made from flat wooden slats woven together.  Similar armor was worn by warriors of the Iroquois, Powhatan, and many other tribes.  Now, I saw that movie The New World a few years back, and even though I don't remember much of it (except that I thought it was boring), I'm pretty certain that it did not accurately depict any Powhatan battle armor.  In fact I'm not aware of any media in which aboriginal American armor is depicted, and consequently I wonder if most people are aware it even existed.

I would suppose that if people don't know, it's because, when it comes to North American frontier history, with few exceptions, people are only interested in the 1800's or later.  By that late a period (and in my view, 1800 is "late"), American Indian body armor was mostly no longer used, so a film taking place in the 19th century isn't going to depict any.  That wouldn't be a problem in itself, except that people go on to assume that things were the same in the 17th and 18th centuries.  So you get media that depicts Atlantic coast tribes in the 1600's already without armor, and practicing guerilla bush warfare that wasn't really typical until a much later era.  That, at least, is my impression of things.

Military body armor was abandoned in North America for the same reason it was abandoned everywhere else: guns.  But the transition from armor use to gun use didn't happen all at once—it took about two centuries.  The important factor is that, for the most part, guns entered North America from the east, and very gradually became available farther west, as more firearms saturated the intertribal trading networks and more European traders penetrated deeper into the continent.  This is the model of the "Gun Frontier" (and of its counterpart the "Horse Frontier") that was popularized by Frank Secoy back in the 1950's.

The spread of the Gun Frontier (highlighted in red) in North America.

The reason historians usually give for why the Gun Frontier only spread from the Atlantic colonies, rather than from the Spanish colonies in the south, is that the Spanish Empire had a longstanding ban against selling guns to Indians.  The other colonists—the English, Dutch, French, and Swedes (everyone always forgets the Swedes)—had no such rule.  Likewise, it's been said that the Spanish had more horses than the English &c. because the environment in the Southwest was more favorable to them, and because Spain preserved more of that old European knightly culture which emphasized equestrianism... which is why the Horse Frontier spread from the south.  You can find exceptions to these rules: the Spaniards' gun embargo was often broken, and the Atlantic colonies did sometimes sell horses to the Indians.  But that the horses entered Native North America from the Southwest and the guns entered from the East is more or less an empirical fact, and explanations for why this happened are secondary.

As you can see from the map above (taken from Secoy's Changing Military Pattens), by the 19th century most of the continent was already within the gun zone, so body armor was already abandoned.  So if you're the kind of person who only cares about the 1800's, then of course you are not going to hear about any Native American armor, which is a shame, because some of it could be pretty weird and interesting.

(Most of the following info comes from David Jones' fascinating book "Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications".)

Indian armor came in different forms depending on which natural materials were available, and on the tree-poor Plains this material was leather and rawhide¹.  Plains armor consisted of a large, bulky, probably ugly-looking coverall which extended down past a person's knees.  Leather on its own isn't very tough—in fact, from what I understand, part of the regular routine of tanning a rawhide involves repairing all the puncture holes that inevitably get poked accidentally during the fleshing and de-hairing process.  People solved this problem in three ways.  The first was just to use the thickest animal hide they could find: elk, bison, moose, walrus, and even alligator hide was used depending on the region.  The second was to lay the hide on in multiple layers—David Jones mentions as much as six-ply leather armor used among the Blackfoot and Assiniboine.

The third method of strengthening rawhide armor was very curious.  The hide was reinforced by applying a layer of sand attached with glue.  Sometimes an additional hide layer was added over the sand layer, then another layer of sand over that... repeat as necessary.  The same principle was also used in the construction of hand-held shields.  One way of applying the sand-and-glue layer (as done by the Subarctic Athabaskans) is described as follows:

"The armor of cuirass was of moose skin, which, when sewed according to the proper pattern, was soaked in water, then repeatedly rubbed on the sandy shore of a stream or lake and dried with the sand and small pebbles adhering thereto, after which it was thoroughly coated with a species of very tenacious glue, the principal ingredient of which was boiled isinglass obtained from the sturgeon.  Being again, before drying, subjected to a thorough rubbing over, it received a new coating of the aforesaid glue.  When this process had been repeated three or four times, it formed an armor perfectly invulnerable to arrows over the part which was protected." (A. G. Morrice, qtd. in Jones Native North American Armor, p 92)

Obviously not everyone had sturgeons at their disposal.  I don't know how everyone made their glue, but in the Southwest it was created from cactus leaves, and among the Mandan it was made from bison hooves.

As far as I know, there are no surviving specimens or photographs of sand-reinforced armor, so I'm left to imagine what it might have looked like.  Walter Hough, in Primitive American Armor (1895), does mention some old museum specimens of rawhide armor which show signs of having been glued, but no sand.  So either the sand had all worn off by the time Hough examined the specimens (not improbable), or the glue was used on its own as a hardening agent.  Hough implies the latter.  If so, that means some North American leather armor was strengthened using glue alone—adding sand may have been a later innovation, only used in some areas.

Museum specimens of rawhide leather armor hardened with glue (Hough 1895)

Prior to the gun (and the horse), Plains Indian warrior fought a bit like Zulus, pre-Shaka: in an infantry line, holding heavy shields, exchanging and dodging missile fire.  People like to quote the Saukamappee account when discussing this period, and I'm no exception, so here we go:

Saukamappee was a Cree man (with a Blackfoot name: Saahkómaapi), born around 1705~1710, who spent most of his life living among the Blackfoot of Alberta.  We know about him because of the fur-trader David Thompson, who spent the winter of 1786 huddled in Saukamappee's tepee listening to the man tell his life story.  Saukamappee's story is interesting, because he lived through most of the 18th century on the Northern Plains and witnessed the full transition from the Pre-Horse/Pre-Gun lifestyle to the Post-Horse/Post-Gun lifestyle, and everything in between.  He's yet another one of those fascinating, obscure figures of early American history.

As a young man, sometime around 1730, Saukamappee participated in a battle between the Blackfoot and a tribe he called the Snakes, who were probably Shoshone.  This battle took place before either the Blackfoot or Shoshone had enough guns or horses to use them effectively in combat.  David Thompson (speaking in the first-person as Saukamappee), writes:

"A war chief was elected by the chiefs and we got ready to march.  Our spies had been out and had seen a large camp of the Snake Indians on the Plains of the Eagle Hill, and we had to cross the River in canoes, and on rafts, which we carefully secured for our retreat.  When we had crossed and numbered our men, we were about 350 warriors... [T]hey had their scouts out, and came to meet us.  Both parties made a great show of their numbers, and I thought that they were more numerous than ourselves.

After some singing and dancing, they sat down on the ground, and placed their large shields before them, which covered them: We did the same, but our shields were not so many, and some of our shields had to shelter two men.  Theirs were all placed touching each other; their Bows were not so long as ours, but of better wood, and the back covered with the sinews of the Bisons which made them very elastic, and their arrows went a long way and whizzed about us as balls do from guns.  They were all headed with a sharp, smooth, black stone (flint) which broke when it struck anything.  Our iron headed arrows did not go through their shields, but stuck in them; On both sides several were wounded, but none lay on the ground; and night put an end to the battle, without a scalp being taken on either side, and in those days such was the result, unless one party was more numerous than the other.  The great mischief of war then, was as now, by attacking and destroying small camps of ten to thirty tents, which are obliged to separate for hunting[.]" (Thompson, in Tyrell ed. 1916:329-30)

It's worth noticing that, although the Blackfoot already had access to European-manufactured iron arrowheads, they still couldn't penetrate the Shoshones' shield wall.

The Zulu style of combat disappeared as soon as the Gun Frontier showed up in any particular area: warriors abandoned the heavy and now-useless coats of n-ply sand-and-leather armor and adopted lighter armor (or none at all), and smaller shields.  This allowed more mobility and led to the guerilla-style of bush warfare that people are familiar with from the movies.

The Blackfoot were positioned along the fault line where the Gun and Horse Frontiers met, so for Saukamappee the transition from the -Gun/-Horse phase to the +Gun/+Horse phase happened relatively quickly.  The same was not true for tribes located closer to European settlement.  Tribes in the East underwent a prolonged, transitional +Gun/-Horse period, and tribes nearer the Southwest likewise experienced a -Gun/+Horse phase which lasted most, or all, of the 1700's.  The upshot to all this is that, whereas the Gun Frontier rendered body armor obsolete, the Horse Frontier actually caused an expansion of the use of armor, at least among the High Plains tribes.  This led to one of the most fascinating and under-appreciated aspects of the Native American military complex: the armored war horse.

Meriwether Lewis², in 1805, described the Shoshones outfitting their horses with armor (reinforced with sand, of course):

"They have also a kind of armor which they form with many foalds of dressed Atelope's skin, unite with glue and sand.  with this they cover their own bodies and those of their horses.  these are sufficient against the effects of the arrow." (The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark, Vol 5, p 151)

But a more detailed description comes from an old tradition of the Ponca tribe, telling of their first encounter with horses, which were ridden by their enemies the Comanches:

"To protect their horses from arrows they [the Comanche] made a covering for the horses' breasts and sides, to prevent an arrow taking effect at ordinary range.  This covering was made of thick rawhide cut in round pieces and made to overlap like the scales of a fish.  Over the surface was sand held on by glue.  This covering made the Ponca arrows glance off and do no damage." (Fletcher & La Flesche 1911, qtd. in Jones p 40)

Moreso than anything else, I can't help but wonder what these Plains Indian cataphracts might have looked like.  The image of a Indian warhorse donning a full suit of leather armor covered with sand, and of his³ rider doing the same, really clashes with most popular images of the American West.  Unfortunately, I'm going to have to keep wondering, because I am unable to find any contemporary paintings or modern costume replicas of Native American horse armor.  There are, however, several depictions of them in tribal rock art.  The artistic quality leaves a lot to be desired, but still gives a general idea of what the texture looked like.

Rock art drawings of armored war horses, from (clockwise from top-left): Alberta, New Mexico, Montana, Montana again (Moyer 2000)

Aside from that, the only visual depiction of any kind I could find comes from the Dariusz caballeros blog:

From Dariusz caballeros.  Copyright et cetera belongs to him.

Dario's vertical strip design doesn't match the fish-scale pattern described in the Ponca account, though it does resemble some of the rock carvings a bit.  The lack of any protection for the horse's head and neck seems strange, but is historically accurate from what I've read.  However, I can't see that the armor is reinforced anywhere with sand covering.

More sturdy than rawhide armor was wooden armor, like in that picture of the Huron warrior from earlier.  Wooden armor was, as far as I know, unknown in the Plains, but was used more-or-less wherever there were trees to make it from: the Pacific coast, the Atlantic coast, and across the Canadian forest belt between them.  It came in two types: rod armor, made from weaving wooden dowels together, and slat armor, made by tying flat, rectangular sheets in parallel.  Slat armor gave better protection, but rod armor was lighter and more flexible.  The Indians of the Pacific Northwest combined the best of both worlds by using heavy slats on the front and back of their chestpieces, with rod armor sections protecting the sides.

"Detail of weaving rod and slat armor of the Northwest Coast" (Hough 1895)

A full suit of Pacific Northwest armor (from Middenmurk)

Wooden armor was usually used with, rather than instead of, leather armor.  Typically a wooden cuirass was worn over top of a leather coat, but sometimes vice-versa.  Pacific Northwest armor also came with an elaborate helmet which covered the entire head, face, and neck.  The bottom half of this helmet, which covered everything below the eyes, was held in place by a strange method: the inside had a small leather hoop, which the wearer had to grip in his teeth in order to keep it from falling down to his shoulders.  You can see this mandible-piece and the leather tooth strap in the following diagram:

Tlingit helmets and slat armor (Hough 1895)

We don't know a whole lot about armor from the Northeast.  Because of the Gun Frontier, this region gave up on armor very early on, and few Europeans ever even saw it in use.  No museum specimens exist, and any artifacts which once existed in the field have probably rotted away by now.  Northeastern armor didn't include helmets as elaborate as the Northwest, but as you can see from the Huron picture it did include armguards and leg graves protecting the wearer's limbs.  Jacques Cartier in the 1500's even implied that the Laurentian Iroquoians wore some kind of armoring for their hands and fingers (Jones p.51).

In 1609, Samuel de Champlain devastated the Iroquois with his boomstick, ripping straight through their armor.  But it might not have even taken guns to force the Northeasterners to abandon wooden armor: according to Elisabeth Tooker (qtd. in Jones p.60), Huron rod-armor was built to protect against stone arrowheads, but could be broken by iron arrowheads just as easily as by bullets⁴.  Since the "Iron Frontier" probably spread much faster than the Gun, we can assume that armor went obsolete in the Northeast especially fast.  No wonder we know so little about it.

We know more about armor from the Pacific Northwest, because there it was still being used on into the 19th century, and is pretty well-attested from ethnographic descriptions, early photographs, and museum specimens.  Part of the reason for this is that the Northwest was one of the last areas to be touched by the Gun Frontier (see the Secoy map above), but according to David Jones, another reason is that the armor was just so damn good.  Huron rod armor couldn't even stop an iron arrowhead, but Tlingit and Haida slat armor was so strong it could reportedly stop a musketball fired from medium range.  This was accomplished by using two separate layers of rawhide armor, with the wooden breastplate sandwiched in between.

David Jones also draws a curious comparison between the Northwest and the Southeast.  The latter is supposedly the only place in North America where indigenous armor was never used, at least not in the historical period.  Prehistoric statuettes from the Mississippian period depict warriors wearing wooden suits of armor in pre-Contact times, but this had already been abandoned by the time of the De Soto expedition.  Jones' explanation for this is that, whereas the Northwest excelled in defensive technology, the Southeast excelled in offensive technology.  Northwestern armor was so strong that it could deflect musketballs, but Southeastern longbows were so effective that they could pierce European platemail.  So armor was already obsolete before guns even arrived.

Among the tribes of the Canadian Subarctic, slat armor was sometimes made from ivory or whalebone.  Walter Hough calls this "plate armor" rather than slat, but as far as I can tell the construction principle is the same, it just uses a different material.  So I feel safe calling it "bone slate armor" or "ivory slat armor".  Bone armor is something you sometimes see in fantasy RPGs, but I never supposed that such a thing actually existed in real life.

Eskimo "plate" slat-armor, made of walrus ivory (Hough 1895)

Bone armor is probably the strangest kind of body protection regularly worn by American Indian tribes.  However, one 18th century observer did report that the Mohawk wore armor made from seahorse skins... probably baloney, but I won't stop you from believing it if you really want to.

Here's a question, though: did any Indian tribes ever manufacture metal armor?  It would have had to be copper, since more advanced metallurgy was unknown to them at the time.  Copper arrowheads were used in the Northeast.  Copper knives were used in Alaska.  But what about armor?

There are a few indications that some groups may have made copper armor at some point, but they're all indirect, ambiguous, or otherwise unreliable... but only JUST unreliable to still be plausible.  For example, the Tsimshian of British Columbia made small shields out of beaten copper—but shields aren't quite the same thing as armor, and are probably easier to make, so all we can do is guess as to whether they ever experimented in making actual copper armor.

One of the members of the 1602 Gosnold expedition to Virginia, Gabriel Archer, claimed to have seen a Virginia Indian man wearing copper armor: "[he] had hanging about his neck a plate of rich copper, in length a foot, in breadth half a foot for a breastplate."  However, the other chronicler of the Gosnold expedition, John Brereton, mentions no such copper breastplate in his account, and refers only to decorative copper paraphernalia.

Captain James Colnett reported in 1787 that he had seen pieces of copper armor worn by the Haida.  According to Frederica de Laguna,

"[Colnett] sketched a suit of wooden slat body armor... and alongside it (but to a larger scale?) a typical 'copper,' which he described as 'their Copper Breast plate which is their under armour." (de Laguna, qtd in Wark 2009)

Archer and Colnett may have just seen people wearing ornamental coppers that served no function beyond that of jewelry.  However, David Jones points out that armor pieces the world-over are often retained—in reduced and decorative form—as fashion accessories for the wealthy and high-status, long after they've ceased being useful as combat protection.  So the presence of decorative copper gorgets or breastplates might still imply that, in bygone days, such pieces were used as armor.  Maybe!

My direct source for the above quotation (which appears to be an undergraduate paper—take it or leave it!) also mentions this:

"Acheson (2003:223), in describing an ancient site in Prince Rupert, lists a set of 'copper tubes {that} were uncovered aligned in double, parallel rows, along with a cache of weapons (a slate dagger and clubs), which suggests to MacDonald (1983:105-106) that the copper pieces may be the remains of a suit of rod armour.'" (Wark 2009)

That is exactly what one would expect to find after centuries of decay, after the strips used to sew the rods together had all rotten away.  So it sounds like centuries ago, some people at least were wearing suits of copper armor in the Pacific Northwest.  I wonder what such armor might have looked like.

There is also this: in the early 20th century, J. Aldon Mason was told by Slavey informants that the Slavey tribe had once possessed armor "made of plates of copper buckled together" (qtd. in Jones p.93).  One would hope that this very exceptional practice were corroborated by some other account or photograph, but I am aware of none—Mason never saw such armor himself.  I would like to believe it's true, but I'm not sure the evidence supports it.

The Prince Rupert archaeological site seems to me the best evidence for copper armor... at least in aboriginal times.  For the post-Contact period there are a few examples of Native armor being reinforced or augmented by bits and pieces of iron (or of Indian warriors just straight-up wearing European steel breastplates).  But by far the most curious example comes from the Tlingit, who somehow had the brilliant and crazy idea to sew Chinese coins onto their leather armor.  This was made possible by the fact that China used to mint their coins with little square holes in the middle.  The end result was, in essence, that mythical "studded leather armor" that history nerds say never actually existed.

Tlingit leather armor coat studded with Chinese coins (from Beyond Buckskin)

Sand armor, scaled rawhide horse armor, slat armor, bone armor, copper armor, coin armor...  This is all very alien to the image of Native North American history that most people know.  It would be nice to see some of this stuff someday make it into a movie, made by a really competent wardrobe department to actually look good (you know how in historical epics made before Gladiator, the armor costumes never quite fit right, and make the actors look scrawny?).  I'm not very optimistic.  But maybe it already has and I'm just not aware of it.  Maybe I'm complaining about nothing, and in reality everyone already knows about this stuff.  So lemme just finish with this amusing historical anecdote from David Jones, one that I am certain will never be depicted in any film:

"Indians had no monopoly on wooden armor in the Southeast.  When the French soldiers prepared to attack the Chickasaw fort at Ackia they donned wooden breastplates as protection against the Chickasaw arrows they expected to face.  Cushman wrote, 'No wonder their astonishment was great, when instead of a shower of arrows to rebound from their breast-plates, a hail storm of leaden bullets greeted them, against which their wooden shields were as gossamer.'  For a brief moment in history, the European put his faith in a wooden armor and found himself defeated by Indians using the gun." (p 139)

Notes

¹  I'm not entirely certain what the technical distinction is between "leather" and "rawhide".  I looked at several leatherworking websites and tanning videos trying to find out, and just ended up more confused than before.  So apologies if I make any terminological errors.

²  For some reason, the version of this Meriwether Lewis passage quoted by David E. Jones and Walter Hough is slightly different than this.  Jones is quoting Hough, and Hough was using an older edition of the Lewis & Clark journals that I couldn't find.

³  The Comanches rode stallions if they could help it, and possibly other Plains tribes did as well.  One explanation why might come from an old description of the Pawnees, wherein it was said that they couldn't breed their own horses because riding the mares caused them all to miscarry.  I'm not a horse person, so I don't know how common this problem is.

⁴  The Northeast Indians also used copper arrowheads-- I don't know how effective this was against rod armor.

Sources

Gabriel Archer, The Relation of Captain Gosnold's Voyage to the North part of Virginia [1602].  In Collections of the Masachusetts Historical Society, Vol. VIII. of the Third Series. 1843.

John Brereton, A Brief and True Relation of the Discovery of the North Part of Virginia [1602].  In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. VIII. of the Third Series. 1843.

Walter Hough, Primitive American Armor. 1895.

David E. Jones, Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications. 2004.

Meriwether Lewis & William Clark, The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, ed. Gary E. Moulton. 2002 [1804-6].

David Moyer, New Interpretations of Rock Art from the Nordstrom-Bowel Site (24YL419), Yellowstone County, Montana. 2000.

David Thompson, David Thompson's Narrative of His Exploration in Western America: 1784-1812, ed. J. B. Tyrell. 1916.

Kyle Wark, The Copper Age on the Northwest Coast: Early Indigenous Metalworking. 2009.