How did native Americans built bows and arrows?

Answer 1

Bows were not the same throughout the Americas and different tribes made bows in their own traditional way.

Let's take three examples to illustrate the point: the Algonkin (Algonquin) of Canada, the Crows of Montana and the Wai Wai of Guyana and northern Brazil:

• The Algonquin tribe made their bows of hickory wood, from 52 to 60 inches long and only about 1 inch wide, often with faces carved at the tips of the bow limbs. They hunted and fought on foot. Strings were made of plant fibre (probably nettle or"Indian hemp").
• The Crows of the Great plains made much shorter bows for hunting and warfare on horseback. Some were of wood such as ash, about 46 inches long and fitted with a string of twisted sinew. Other bows were painstakingly made from sections of mountain sheep horn or elk horn glued to a wood core and wrapped with sinew.
• The Wai Wai hunters and warriors made their bows of local hardwoods, some up to 12 feet long with arrows 6 feet long, again for use only on foot. Even a small bow could be 7 to 9 feet long. Scientific study of Archery shows that most of the potential power in such a set is lost because human arms can not draw the bow to its full potential, but nevertheless this is the traditional method among these people. Curare poison was used on arrow points.

Answer 2

Bows were not the same throughout the Americas: in South America some bows were 12 feet tall and entirely made from a single piece of wood, while many Crow bows on the northern Great Plains were made of composite materials and just 30 inches long.

Taking as an example a simple selfwood bow of the Blackfoot, the maker would find a straight chokecherry branch or shoot thicker than the finished bow will be. He then had to remove the bark and work the wood with stone tools, or metal tools from the traders, giving the bow a rounded front and rear and thinning it gradually towards each tip. The bow would be about 50 inches long, 1 and an eighth inches wide at the handle and nine sixteenths of an inch wide at each tip; the handle is just under an inch thick and the tips are less than half an inch thick. There must be no scratches or dents in the finished surface of the wood, which could be smoothed with a block of sandstone. The wood must seasoned by hanging it horizontally high inside the tipi for some months before use.

The string was made from animal sinew, trwisted and lengthened by adding in more strands until it was the correct length; this was tied to the lower tip of the bow and a loop was made at the other end. Using his knee, the maker would bend the bow with both hands while pushing the looped end of the string over the upper tip, creating the curve of the bow.

Decoration was up to individual makers or owners. One chokecherry bow has red flannel wrapped around the handle and tied with buckskin thong and a line of small red spots painted along the entire outer face of the bow; there is also a small bunch of horsehair glued to the upper tip.

Bows are relatively easy to make, but arrows are considerably more work. Red osier dogwood was a favourite wood for the shafts - small straight shoots (longer than the finished arrows) would be collected in the early winter and tied in bundles, again hanging these high inside the tipi to dry out.

Every so often the shafts would be taken down and straightened, often using the teeth, then tightly tied in their bundles and hung up again. After a few weeks the bark would be scraped off, leaving the white wood exposed and again time would be spent straightening each shaft before tying them back into bundles and hanging them up again.

When the wood was dried the shafts could be cut to the correct length (around 24 inches among the Blackfoot) and the thinning could begin - the shafts would be too thick and needed to be gradually reduced by pulling them through holes in blocks of sandstone, which also smoothed the shafts. The end where the string will fit was carved into a wide v-shape to accept the bowstring.

Metal points obtained from traders were set in glue into a long notch cut at the front end, then wrapped tightly with wet sinew. This shrinks as it dries, creating a very strong and secure fit.

The feathers of hawks, eagles or sometimes turkeys were split and three were tied to the rear of each shaft; these feathers were 6 or 8 inches long and trimmed to about three-eighths of an inch high along their length. On the shaft between the feathers the owner would paint his personal markings in bands of colour: blue, black, red, green and yellow were the main colours used.

Arrows constantly needed to be checked for straightness and heated and bent into shape if required. Some examples in museums today still have the marks of teeth where the shafts have been straightened. After a hundred years of lying around in collections these arrows are generally no longer straight.

See links below for images:

Answer 3

The short answer is wood and/or horn, but the long answer is much more complex. Since "Native American" includes all the aboriginal inhabitants of North, Central and South America, a huge range of different styles of bow were made of many different materials - whatever was available locally or through trade.

A few examples:

Powhatan bows were of mulberry wood; Delaware and Mohegan bows of hickory or elm; Rappahannock bows of hickory; Montagnais bows of conifer or ash; Cayuga bows of slippery elm; Seminole bows of mahogany or cypress; Ojibwa bows of ash or birch; Blackfoot bows of chokecherry; Mandan, Arikara, Crow and other Plains tribes made bows of elk horn or mountain sheep horn backed with sinew; Sioux bows of Osage orange, hickory or ash; Cheyenne bows of Osage orange and so on.

Answer 4

sharpen flint