Chapter XXXIII: Section 3: Coloring Matter and Its Application

Painting upon robes or skins is executed by means of thin strips of wood or sometimes of bone. Tufts of antelope hair are also used, by tying them to sticks to make a brush, but this is evidently a modern innovation. Pieces of wood, one end of which is chewed so as to produce a loose fibrous brush, are also used at times, as has been specially observed among the Teton Dakota.

The Hidatsa and other Northwest Indians usually employ a piece of buffalo rib or a piece of hard wood having an elliptical form. This is dipped in a solution of glue, with or without color, and a tracing is made, which is subsequently filled up and deepened by a repetition of the process with the same or a stronger solution of the color.

Of late years in the United States colors of civilized manufacture are readily obtained by the Indians for painting and decoration. Frequently, however, when the colors of commerce can not be obtained, the aboriginal colors are still prepared and used. The ferruginous clays of various shades of brown, red, and yellow occur in nature so widely distributed that these are the most common and leading tints. Black is generally prepared by grinding fragments of charcoal into a very fine powder. Among some tribes, as has also been found in some of the “ancient” pottery from the Arizona ruins, clay had evidently been mixed with charcoal to give better body. The black color made by some of the Innuit tribes is made with blood and charcoal intimately mixed, which is afterwards applied to incisions in ivory, bone, and wood.

Among the Dakota, colors for dyeing porcupine quills were obtained chiefly from plants. The vegetable colors, being soluble, penetrate the substance of the quills more evenly and beautifully than the mineral colors of eastern manufacture.

The black color of some of the Pueblo pottery is obtained by a special burning with pulverized manure, into which the vessel is placed as it is cooling after the first baking. The coloring matter--soot produced by smoke--is absorbed into the pores of the vessel, and does not wear off as readily as when colors are applied to the surface by brushes.

In decorating skins or robes the Arikara Indians boil the tail of the beaver, thus obtaining a viscous fluid which is thin glue. The figures are first drawn in outline with a piece of beef-rib, or some other flat bone, the edge only being used after having been dipped into the liquor. The various pigments to be employed in the drawing are then mixed with some of the same liquid, in separate vessels, when the various colors are applied to the objects by means of a sharpened piece of wood or bone. The colored mixture adheres firmly to the original tracing in glue.

When similar colors are to be applied to wood, the surface is frequently pecked or slightly incised to receive the color more readily.

Jacques Cartier, in Hakluyt (_b_), reports the Indian women of the Bay of Chaleur as smearing the face with coal dust and grease.

A small pouch, discovered on the Yellowstone river in 1873, which had been dropped by some fleeing hostile Sioux, contained several fragments of black micaceous iron. The latter had almost the appearance and consistence of graphite, so soft and black was the result upon rubbing with it. It had evidently been used for decorating the face as war-paint.

Mr. Wm. H. Dall (_a_), treating of the remains found in the mammalian layers in the Amakuak cave, Unalaska, remarks:

In the remains of a woman’s work-basket, found in the uppermost
layer in a cave, were bits of this resin [from the bark of pine or
spruce driftwood], evidently carefully treasured, with a little
birch-bark case (the bark also derived from drift logs) containing
pieces of soft hematite, graphite, and blue carbonate of copper,
with which the ancient seamstress ornamented her handiwork.

The same author reports (_f_):

The coloration of wooden articles with native pigments is of
ancient origin, but all the more elaborate instances that have come
to my knowledge bore marks of comparatively recent origin. The
pigments used were blue carbonates of iron and copper; the green
fungus, or peziza, found in decayed birch and alder wood; hematite
and red chalk; white infusorial or chalky earth; black charcoal,
graphite, and micaceous ore of iron. A species of red was sometimes
derived from pine bark or the cambium of the ground willow.

Stephen Powers (_a_) states that the Shastika women “smear their faces all over daily with choke-cherry juice, which gives them a bloody, corsair aspect.”

Mr. A. S. Gatschet, of the Bureau of Ethnology, reports that the Klamaths of southwestern Oregon employ a black color, lgú, made of burnt plum seeds and bulrushes, which is applied to the cheeks in the form of small round spots. This is used during dances. Red paint, for the face and body, is prepared from a resin exuding from the spruce tree, pánam. A yellow mineral paint is also employed, consisting probably of ocher or ferruginous clay. He also says that the Klamath spál, yellow mineral paint, is of light yellow color, but turns red when burned, after which it is applied in making small round dots upon the face. The white infusorial clay is applied in the form of stripes or streaks over the body. The Klamaths use charcoal, lgúm, in tattooing.

Mud and white clay were used by the Winnebago for the decoration of the human body and of horses. Some of the California Indians in the vicinity of Tulare river used a white coloring matter, consisting of infusorial earth, obtained there. The tribes at and near the geysers north of San Francisco bay procured vermilion from croppings of cinnabar. The same report is made with probability of truth concerning the Indians at the present site of the New Almaden mines, where tribes of the Mutsun formerly lived. Some of the black coloring matter of pictographs in Santa Barbara, California, proved on analysis to be a hydrous oxide of manganese. The Mojave pigments are ocher, clay, and charcoal mingled with oil.

Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, of the Bureau of Ethnology, reports regarding the Osage that one of their modes of obtaining black color for the face was by burning a quantity of small willows. When these were charred they were broken in small pieces and placed in pans, with a little water in each. The hands were then dipped into the pan and rubbed together and finally rubbed over the parts to be colored.

Dr. Hoffman reports that among the Hualpai, living on the western border of the Colorado plateau, Arizona, some persons appeared as if they had been tattooed in vertical bands from the forehead to the waist, but upon closer examination it was found that dark and light bands of the natural skin were produced in the following manner: When a deer or an antelope had been killed the blood was rubbed over the face and breast, after which the spread and curved fingers were scratched downward from the forehead over the face and breast, thus removing some of the blood; that remaining soon dried and gave the appearance of black stripes. The exposed portion of the skin retained the natural dark-tanned color, while that under the coating of coagulated blood became paler by being protected against the light and air. These persons did not wash off the marks and after a while the blood began to drop off by desquamation, leaving lighter spots and lines which for a week or two appear like tattoo marks. Similar streaks of blood have been held to have originated tattoo designs in several parts of the world to record success in hunting or in war, but such evolution does not appear to have resulted from the transient decoration in the case mentioned.

It is well known that the meal of maize called kunque is yet commonly used by the Zuñi for ceremonial coloration of their own persons and of objects used in their religious rites. Hoddentin is less familiarly known. It is the pollen of the tule, which is a variety of cat-tail rush growing in all the ponds of the southwestern parts of the United States. It is a yellow powder with which small buckskin bags are filled and those bags then attached to the belts of Apache warriors. They are also worn as amulets by members of the tribe. In dances for the cure of sickness the shaman applied the powder to the forehead of the patient, then to his breast in the figure of a cross; next he sprinkles it in a circle around his couch, then on the heads of the chanters and the assembled friends of the patient, and lastly upon his own head and into his own mouth.

Everard F. im Thurn (_c_) gives the following details concerning British Guiana:

The dyes used by the Indians to paint their own bodies, and
occasionally to draw patterns on their implements, are red faroah,
purple caraweera, blue-black lana, white felspathic clay and, though
very rarely, a yellow vegetable dye of unknown origin.

Faroah is the deep red pulp around the seed of a shrub (_Bixa
orellana_) which grows wild on the banks of some of the rivers, and
is cultivated by the Indians in their clearings. It is mixed with
a large quantity of oil. When it is to be used either a mass of it
is taken in the palm of the hand and rubbed over the skin or other
surface to be painted, or a pattern of fine lines is drawn with it
by means of a stick used as a pencil.

Caraweera is a somewhat similar dye, of a more purplish red,
and by no means so commonly used. It is prepared from the leaves of
a yellow-flowered bignonia (_B. chicka_) together with some other
unimportant ingredients. The dried leaves are boiled. The pot is
then taken from the fire and the contents being poured into bowls
are allowed to subside. The clear water left at the top is poured
away and the sediment is of a beautiful purple color.

Lana is the juice of the fruit of a small tree (_Genipa
americana_) with which without further preparation, blue-black lines
are drawn in patterns, or large surfaces are stained on the skin.
The dye thus applied is for about a week indelible.

Paul Marcoy (_a_), in Travels in South America, says the Passés, Yuris, Barrés and Chumanas of Brazil, employ a decoction of indigo or genipa in tattooing.

F. S. Moreat, M. D., in Jour. Roy. Geog. Soc., XXXII, 1862, p. 125, says that the Andaman Islanders rubbed earth on the top of the head, probably for the purpose of ornamentation.

Dr. Richard Andree (_b_) says:

Long before Europeans came to Australia, the Australian blacks
knew a kind of pictorial representation, exhibiting scenes from
their life, illustrating it with great fidelity to nature. An
interesting specimen of that kind was found on a piece of bark that
had served as cover of a hut on Lake Tyrrell. The black who produced
this picture had had intercourse with white people, but had had no
instruction whatever in drawing. The bark was blackened by smoke
on the inside, and on this blackened surface the native drew the
figures with his thumb nail.