1886.1.818

Collection type

Object

Description

Gun-shaped wooden club painted and bordered with rows of brass round headed tacks, with iron blade. [SM 08/08/2007]

Long description

Gun-shaped wooden club painted and bordered with rows of brass round headed tacks, with iron blade. The club is painted green on one surface and decorated with a painted golden eagle and an arrow. The edges are highlighted in gold coloured paint. The other surface is painted red and decorated with a painted bow and arrow, axe, scrolling pattern and the sun with a human face in it. A heart shape has been cut through the head of the club and a pointed iron blade is attached to one edge. [SM 08/08/2007]

Geographical reference

Canada

Northern America > North America > Canada

United States of America

Northern America > North America > United States of America

Rocky Mountains

Cultural groups

Osage

Person

Field collector Charles Alexander Pope

PRM source Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Date / Period

Date made: On or before 1866

Date collected

?On or before 1866

Acquisition information

Transferred: 17/02/1886

Materials and processes

Material Wood Plant, Material Brass Metal, Material Pigment, Material Iron Metal, Process Carved, Process Nailed, Process Painted

Dimensions

Length: max 861 mm

Object numbers

Accession number: 1886.1.818 PR Cat other PR nos: 818

Research and responses

For an account of the Charles A. Pope Collection, see Speaking for Themselves: The Pope Collection of Native American Artifacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum, by Lindsey Richardson (University of Oxford: M.Sc. dissertation in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, 2001); copy in RDF (Collectors: Pope). [JC 6 1 2004]

The following notes are drawn from research compiled by Andy Mills as part of the DCF Cutting Edge project in 2006-2007.

Taylor (Taylor, C.F. (2001) Native American Weapons. London: Salamander Books, pp. 23-4) remarks that gunstock clubs of this form were popular throughout the area of the Eastern Woodlands, and the Middle-Missouri, during the later 18th and early 19th centuries. Insofar as the collector Pope, was a native of St.Louis, this distribution conforms closely with the location of his acquisition. By 1850, a slimmer and longer version of this type, unlike ours, had been acquired by the Sioux and other peoples of the Northern and Western plains. Of all the gunstock clubs illustrated by Taylor, that of the Chippewa chief Waatopenot, painted in the 1820s, conforms most closely to the design of ours, perhaps indicating a North-Eastern, rather than South-Eastern origin (Taylor 2001, p. 22); the bold use of block primary colour, the ‘spontoon’-style blade, the trimming of brass furniture tacks – all are present on Waatopenot’s club. Taylor also illustrates two Osage clubs (Taylor 2001, pp. 19 and 23), which, although flat-sectioned like ours, are otherwise quite different – without tacks, largely unpainted, with small bands of red and black decoration, snakeskin-gripped, and exhibiting concave planes on the facets of the head. Both of the Osage examples illustrated by Taylor bear similar blades, thinner and smaller than the blade of our example. Dorsey (Dorsey, G.A. (1902) The Osage Mourning-War Ceremony. American Anthropologist, 4/3, pp. 404-11, p. 406) remarks on the importance of black as the symbolic colour associated inextricably with warfare among the Osage, and its complete absence on our gunstock club, alongside the marked lack of formal similarity to other known Osage clubs, seems to suggest that this weapon is not Osage at all.

It seems that the Sioux were also particularly partial to the ornamentation of their clubs using these brass furniture tacks – as the Blackfoot were their knife sheaths, and so it may be that we can recognise it as a trait of the Northern Plains, rather than the Southern (Taylor 2001, pp. 23, 35, 42-3).

It is remarked in the documentation that this weapon, highly decorated, is perhaps an example of tourist art, and this may well be the case. At any rate, the eagle motif is particularly interesting; it appears to have been overlooked in the previous documentation that this eagle carries the arrows and laurel branch in its talons, showing it to be the American Eagle of the Great Seal of the United States, seen on every dollar bill, and usually surrounded by a banner reading E Pluribus Unum – ‘One Out of Many’. Raptorial birds – particularly hawks – were powerful symbols of warfare among the Osage, as they were throughout much of the world (Dorsey 1902, p. 410). It seems that, provided this object was indeed manufactured by a Native American at all, and not by an enterprising European American, its patriotic use of the Great Seal implies the artist was working in a period post-dating his people’s treaty with the Union. The other images, of the stylistically European anthropomorphic sun, the bow and the pipe-tomahawk, may be either read as valid Native American symbols of plains life, or rather hokey and naïve 19th-century European-American conceptions of what a Native iconography might be. [El.B 27/02/2008]

Associated publications

This object features in the Museum's audio guide produced during the DCF-funded 'Cutting Edge’ project, 2007-2009. [HH 20/06/2010] Illustrated in colour on page 111 of The Pitt Rivers Museum: A World Within, by Michael O’Hanlon (London: Scala, 2014). Caption (same page) reads: ‘84 Gun-shaped wooden club, bordered with brass tacks, with iron blade. Osage people (?), North America Length 861 mm Transferred from the Ashmolean Museum 1886.1.818’ [MJD (Verve) 19/2/2016]

Search terms: Weapon, Figure, Trade, Club, Bird Figure