“Diorite, diabase, and granite appear to have been most employed in the making of these implements. Specimens made of slate, sandstone, and other materials are known.
“They are usually quite smooth and polished. The sides of the handle are frequently pecked or left unpolished as if to afford a better grip for the hand. The notches and incisions which characterize many specimens of the former class are absent in this. There is a well-marked tendency in some of the smaller types toward celt forms.
“The blades of a majority of these implements exhibit nicks and fractures and other unmistakable signs of use. Broken specimens are common and there can be no doubt of their having been employed by the aborigines for one or more useful purposes.
“Dr. J. F. Snyder, who is well acquainted with these implements, says of them: ‘These indigenous specimens were evidently tools in common use. It is readily to be seen that they were serviceable appliances for stripping the bark from trees, for skinning large animals, for dressing hides, and a variety of domestic purposes.’
“Honorable J. V. Brower of St. Paul, who has spent fifty years in studying the habits and customs of the Northwestern Indian tribes at their camping-grounds, and whose work in the archæological field is well known, says:—
“‘They were most likely used in the process of making canoes from burned-out logs.’ He has not found them in Kansas, where ‘boat tools were very scarce, simply because they used bull-boats instead of log canoes.’
Fig. 375. (S. 1–4.) Collection of J. R. Lovejoy, Schenectady, New York. Small groove near small end. Sixteen notches are upon the more perfect surface. Dark greenish stone, smooth as satin.
“This, then, is the form of stone implement which has come to be designated by the name of ‘spud’ by Western archæologists and of which curiously enough little or nothing has been written.
“The majority of the implements illustrated and described in this article as Wisconsin types, belong to this class. Dr. Snyder and others have informed me of the occurrence of these implements in Illinois, Honorable J. V. Brower, Professor T. H. Lewis, Reverend E. C. Mitchell, and others, of their being found in various localities in Minnesota and North and South Dakota. The writer has seen specimens from Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa. It is quite probable that further research will show them to be quite common in nearly all of these states.