To
dress a goat-skin will occupy one person for a whole day, to dress an
ox-hide will give hard labour to two persons for a day and a half, or
even for two days. It is best to begin to operate upon the skin half an
hour after it has been flayed. If it has been allowed to dry during the
process, it must be re-softened by damping, not with water--for it will
never end by being supple, if water be used--but with whatever the
natives generally employ: clotted milk and linseed-meal are used in
Abyssinia; cow-dung by the Caffres and Bushmen. When a skin is put aside
for the night, it must be rolled up, to prevent it from becoming dry by
the morning. It is generally necessary to slightly grease the skin, when
it is half-dressed, to make it thoroughly supple.
Smoking Hides.--Mr. Catlin, speaking of the skins used by the N. American
Indians, says that the greater part of them "go through still another
operation afterwards (besides dressing), which gives them a greater
value, and renders them much more serviceable--that is, the process of
smoking. For this, a small hole is dug in the ground, and a fire is built
in it with rotten wood, which will produce a great quantity of smoke
without much blaze, and several small poles of the proper length stuck in
the ground around it, and drawn and fastened together at the top (making
a cone), around which a skin is wrapped in form of a tent, and generally
sewed together at the edges to secure the smoke within it: within this
the skins to be smoked are placed, and in this condition the tent will
stand a day or two, enclosing the heated smoke; and by some chemical
process of other, which I do not understand, the skins thus acquire a
quality which enables them, after being ever so many times wet, to dry
soft and pliant as they were before, which secret I have never seen
practised in my own country, and for the lack of which all our dressed
skins, when once wet, are, I think, chiefly ruined.
Pages:
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477