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.