Quirt

Object Details

Donor Name

Victor J. Evans

From card: "Bone handle with incised decoration. Beaded wrist thong at the end to which is attached an ermine skin. The lash is of leather."

Reference: Keyser, James D., and Phillip Cash Cash. "A Carved Quirt Handle from the Warm Springs Reservation: Northern Plains Biographic Art in the Columbia Plateau." Plains Anthropologist 47, no. 180 (2002): 51-59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25669750. The article provides a detailed analysis of the iconography and possible origins of the quirt. It is identified there as an antler tine quirt decorated with biographic drawings with a wristlet decorated with Transmontane style beadwork. This beadwork is most often associated with the Nez Perce and other tribes from the eastern Columbia Plateau, although also done by the Crow. Drawings on the handle mimic almost exactly those drawn by Sioux artists in their winter counts and ledger drawings of the late 1800s. The authors conclude that the piece originated with the Sioux and was traded to the Warm Springs reservation in the late Historic period, probably through the hands of Nez Perce and possibly Crow middlemen. The antler handle is decorated on two faces with incised drawings: One one face the drawings include a tipi with a full meat-drying rack in front and a bison head positioned on its side, pointing right, just above the horizontal bar of the rack. Below the tipi (and running to the left on the tine) is a row of animals, all facing left, including single bision, elk, bear, pronghorn antelope, and unidentifiable carnivore. The animals all face the large end of the quirt, and all except the bear are clearly depicted as males. On the other face is a series of Biographic style renderings beginning at the sharper end of the tine with a constellation of seven dots, and spread-eagle bird (hawk, eagle, or thunderbird), a human bust wearing a feather and forehead roach and holding a pipe, a rank of four pipes, three human busts, 16 horse tracks arranged in four rows of four tracks each, and a combat scene showing a mounted rider spearing an enemy bowman (probably a pedestrian). The rider wears a single feather and a forehead roach and carries a shield emblazoned with a bird much like that incised earlier in the series. Just to the left of the combat scene, surrounding the metal rivet head, is a series of six equally-spaced dots made exactly like those in the constellation.

Record Last Modified

2 Jun 2023

Specimen Count

1

Culture

Warm Springs (Tenino) (?)

Sioux (Oceti Sakowin) (?)

Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) (?)

Accession Date

20 Mar 1931

Accession Number

113605

USNM Number

E358332-0

Object Type

Whip

Place

Not Given, Oregon, United States, North America

See more items in

Anthropology

NMNH - Anthropology Dept.

Topic

Ethnology

Record ID

nmnhanthropology_8404938

Metadata Usage (text)

CC0

GUID (Link to Original Record)

http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/3fad86500-0fb2-4424-920d-d9982e107a46