“Ashhurst wrote an extensive article on arrow-wounds. He takes a favorable view of the curability of arrow-wounds, which is borne out by the cases cited, and says: ‘Those penetrating the chest and wounding the lung, although serious, are by no means mortal.... If the patient survives the hemorrhage, the prognosis is favorable, for the consecutive inflammation is trifling and requires no treatment beyond placing the patient at rest and affording a supply of pure warm air.’
Fig. 101. (S. 1–1.) Large spear-point from Coshocton County, Ohio. Material: clear chalcedony. W. C. Mills’s collection.
Fig. 103. (S. 1–3.) Large, notched flint spear-head. One of the largest in America. Owned by G. F. Arvedson, Carpentersville, Illinois.
“His table of arrow-wounds in the chest shows that out of eighteen cases there were thirteen deaths.”
In 1528 the Spanish traveler, Cabeza De Vaca, said that the Indian arrows were discharged with such force that the armor worn by the Spaniards did not always avail. He stated that the Indians in Florida used bows as thick as the lower part of one’s own arm and discharged arrows at a distance of two hundred paces “with so great precision that they missed nothing.”
He himself observed an arrow sticking in the base of an elm tree to the depth of a span (four inches).
Fig. 87 illustrates two specimens from near Albany, Georgia, typical Southern forms, the edges being slightly serrated. Figs. 101, 104, and three in 83, present objects with almost straight stems, 104 presenting Oregon types and 83 Pennsylvania. Fig. 86 marks the beginning of the transition from the straight stem to the stem contracting from the base. Such objects, with abnormally long stems, were undoubtedly originally much longer specimens. The point broke off and the specimen was re-chipped and made serviceable again.
White quartz was largely used in the South and in New England, also yellow quartz in North and South Carolina and Virginia. Quartz was harder to chip than other materials. Therefore, there are fewer highly specialized forms in quartz than in either flint or argillite. Yet examples are not wanting in which even so refractory material as quartz was worked down, chipped, and made into a very beautiful arrow-point or spear-head.