How did native Americans get the materials to make their weapons?

Answer 1

A Plains bow of wood is fairly easy to make if you are used to using saws, planes and files. The timber must be a straight, flat piece of ash wood, osage orange or hickory, as straight-grained as possible and without splits or knots. All of these are dense hardwoods, so tools must be kept very sharp and used with great care.

Any wooden bow is made perfectly flat and straight; cut out a piece about 48 inches long, 1 inch thick and an inch and an eighth wide. Mark the centre line along the whole length then, using a plane, carefully taper each limb to about three-quarters of an inch wide at the ends. The next step is the crucial one - to slowly and carefully reduce the thickness of each limb from the handle towards each end, leaving the handle area 1 inch thick.

Don't take off too much wood. Cut a shallow groove near each tip for the string, using files, and gently bend the bow (only a little at a time) until the string will keep the bow in an even curve and there is about 5 or 5.5 inches between the handle and the string. Take off small amounts of wood from each limb until this is achieved.

When completed, smooth the wood and coat it with linseed oil - and you have a bow. Remove the string when it is not in use to prevent the bow becoming weak.

Consider how all this was done for many hundreds of years by natives using only stone tools, before white traders provided the kinds of metal tools mentioned above.