Bows were generally made of ash wood, which grows east of the mountains toward the Sand Hills.  When for any reason they could not obtain ash, they used the wood of the choke-cherry tree, but this had not strength nor spring enough to be of much service.  I have been told also that sometimes they used hazle wood for bows.

Arrows were made of shoots of the sarvis berry wood, which was straight, very heavy, and not brittle.  They were smoothed and straightened by a stone implement.  The grooves were made by pushing the shafts through a rib or other flat bone in which had been made a hole, circular except for one or two projections on the inside.  These projections worked out the groove.  The object of these grooves is said to have been to allow the blood to flow freely.  Each man marked his arrows by painting them, or by some special combination of colored feathers.  The arrow heads were of two kinds,—­barbed slender points for war, and barbless for hunting.  Knives were originally made of stone, as were also war clubs, mauls, and some of the scrapers for fleshing and graining hides.  Some of the flint knives were long, others short.  A stick was fitted to them, forming a wooden handle.  The handles of mauls and war clubs were usually made of green sticks fitted as closely as possible into a groove made in the stone, the whole being bound together by a covering of hide put on green, tightly fitted and strongly sewed.  This, as it shrunk in drying, bound the different parts of the implement together in the strongest possible manner.  Short, heavy spears were used, the points being of stone or bone, barbed.

I have heard no explanation among the Blackfeet of the origin of fire.  In ancient times, it was obtained by means of fire sticks, as described elsewhere.  The starting of the spark with these sticks is said to have been hard work.  At almost their first meeting with the whites, they obtained flints and steels, and learned how to use them.

In ancient times,—­in the days of fire sticks and even later, within the memory of men now living,—­fire used to be carried from place to place in a “fire horn.”  This was a buffalo horn slung by a string over the shoulder like a powderhorn.  The horn was lined with moist, rotten wood, and the open end had a wooden stopper or plug fitted to it.  On leaving camp in the morning, the man who carried the horn took from the fire a small live coal and put it in the horn, and on this coal placed a piece of punk, and then plugged up the horn with the stopper.  The punk smouldered in this almost air-tight chamber, and, in the course of two or three hours, the man looked at it, and if it was nearly consumed, put another piece of punk in the horn.  The first young men who reached the appointed camping ground would gather two or three large piles of wood in different places, and as soon as some one who carried a fire horn reached camp, he turned out his spark at one of these piles of wood, and a little blowing and nursing gave a blaze which started the fire.  The other fires were kindled from this first one, and when the women reached camp and had put the lodges up, they went to these fires, and got coals with which to start those in their lodges.  This custom of borrowing coals persisted up to the last days of the buffalo, and indeed may even be noticed still.