Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/516

500 while the luckless thrower of two gets for his reward two cuts with the palm-stick on the soles of his feet.

Yet another fifteen hundred miles or more up into the continent the game is still to be traced. Among the hunting tribes known under the common name of the North American Indians, there is a favorite sport described by a score of writers under the name of "game of the bowl," or "game of plum-stones." The lots used are a number of plum-stones burned on one side to blacken them, or any similar double-convex pieces of wood, horn, etc. They are either thrown by hand or shaken in a bowl or dish, whence they can be neatly jerked up and let fall on the blanket spread to play on. The counting depends upon how many come up of either color, white or black, as is seen in the precise rules given by Mr. Morgan in his "League of the Iroquois." Where six "peach-stones" were thrown, if all six came up, white or black, they counted five, and five up, white or black, counted one, these high throws also giving the player a new turn, but all lower throws counted nothing and passed the lead. It is so curious to find the principle of lot-scoring, which we have tracked all across from Egypt, cropping up so perfectly among the Iroquois, that at the risk of being tedious it is worth while to give in full the mode of counting in the game as played with eight "deer-buttons." The following top line shows how many black or white sides up, with their count below:

In these games there is no board to play on. The Iroquois use beans as counters, the game being won by one player getting all the beans, but perhaps the white men taught them how to do this. So with the game which will occur to English readers who remember it in "Hiawatha," where it is described at full length in prose-poetry as "the game of bowl and counters, pugasaing with thirteen pieces." This game is real enough; indeed, the description of it is taken from Schoolcraft's "Indian Tribes." But there seem to be no early mentions of this Algonquin game with its ducks and war-clubs and elaborate counting, nor of the Dakota game with tortoises and war-eagle son the plum-stones. Thus both may have been lately devised by Indians under European teaching, as improvements on the original pugasaing or "play," which was the simple game with black-and white-sided plum-stones, or the like. This, no doubt, is old, for it is described by the Jesuit missionaries in 1636 under the name of jeu de plat, as a regular sport among the Hurons; and as they clearly did not learn the game from Europe, we are left to argue that it reached them from Asia, very likely through Mexico.

It remains to glance at what may be learned as to the history of the North American Indians from the fact of their gambling with the bowl