e as truly
objects of art as are many things of the same decorative intent produced
under the best conditions of civilization.

To create beauty with the very limited resources of skins, hair, teeth,
and quills of animals, colored with the expressed juice of plants, was a
problem very successfully solved by these dwellers in the wilderness,
and the results were practically and aesthetically valuable.

In the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D. C., there has happily
been preserved a most interesting collection of these early efforts. The
small deerskin shirts worn as outer garments by the little Sioux were
perhaps among the most interesting and elaborate. They are generally
embroidered with dyed moose hair and split quills of birds in their
natural colors, large split quills or flattened smaller quills used
whole. The work has an embossed effect which is very striking. A coat
for an adult of Sioux workmanship, made of calfskin thicker and less
pliant than the deerskin ordinarily used for garments, carries a broad
band of quill embroidery, broken by whorls of the same, the center of
each holding a highly decorated tassel made of narrow strips of
deerskin, bound at intervals with split porcupine quills. These
ornamental tassels carry the idea of decoration below the bands, and
have a changeable and living effect which is admirable. In a smaller
shirt, the whole body is covered at irregular intervals with whorls of
the finest porcupine quill work, edged by a border of interlaced black
and white quills, finished with perforated shells. Many of the designs
are edged with narrow zigzag borders of the split quills in natural
colors carefully matched and lapped in very exact fashion. There is one
small shirt, made with a decorative border of tanned ermine skins in
alternate squares of fur and beautifully colored quill embroidery, not
one tint of which is out of harmony with the soft yellow of the deerskin
body. The edge of the shirt is finished in very civilized fashion, with
ermine tails, each pendant, banded with blue quills, at alternating
heights, making a shining zigzag of blue along the fringe. The
simplicity of treatment and purity of color in this little garment were
fascinating, and must have invested the small savage who wore it with
the dignity of a prince.

The mother who evolved the scheme and manner of decoration carried her
bit of genius in an uncivilized squaw body, but had none the less a true
feeling f