Archery

the use of the bow and arrow. Archery appears to have been little practiced by the Greeks and Romans; but auxiliary troops, employed by both of these nations were armed with the bow and arrow. The Scythians were skilled in the use of the bow. The enormous armies of Xerxes and Darius were composed in part of archers drawn from the oriental nations. The Egyptians were noted for the use of the bow and arrow. In the Middle Ages the men of Burgundy were famous archers. William the Conqueror owed his victory at Hastings quite as much to the superiority of his bowmen as to the weight of the Norman battle-ax. Arrows fell as thick as hail. The English bowmen gave a good account of themselves at the battles of Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. The English bow was as long as a man; the arrow half as long as the bow. In their contests with the Scots, the superiority of the English bowmen was a great advantage. It was the favorite boast of the English archer that, in his two dozen arrows, he carried the lives of four and twenty Scots at his belt. The bow and arrow of the American Indian was by no means a weapon to be despised. The Chippewas and Sioux depended on their bows and arrows to take wild fowl and buffalo. The Comanches and the Apaches were formidable bowmen. In shooting at wild fowl as they rose, the Indian not infrequently lay on his back, threw up his legs, and bent his bow by holding the string in his hands and pushing the wood away with his toes.

The earliest arrow heads appear to have been made of flint or chert, chipped to the desired sharpness of edge. Heads of this description are found all over Europe and Asia, and in North America. Many savage tribes still depend upon stone for their arrow points. The shaft, whether a reed or a wooden rod, was usually split to receive the neck of the arrow, to which it was bound by a thong or a piece of sinew. Many of these flint arrow heads are exceedingly symmetrical. The next step appears to have been the use of bronze. The famous archers of the Egyptian army used bronze arrow heads fitted to reed shafts somewhat less than three feet in length. These tips were cast. Specimens are still found in burial places. Iron and steel points shaped on an anvil are a later invention.

For fishing, hunting, and wars they use their bows and arrows. They bring their bows to the form of ours by scraping with a shell. Their arrows are made, some of straight young sprigs, which they head with bone two or three inches long. These they use to shoot at squirrels on trees. Another sort of arrow is made of reeds. These are headed with splinters of crystal or some other sharp stone, the spurs of a turkey, or the bill of some bird. For a knife they use the splinter of a reed. To make the notch of their arrows they have the tooth of a boar set in a stick. With the sinews of deer and the tops of deers' horns boiled to a jelly they make a glue that will not dissolve in cold water, and with this they glue the head to the end of their arrows.--John Smith, The Virginia Indians.