This is one of the ways that our people would drink different liquids like teas or take a drink out of the stream. Often times there was a long buckskin string put on here so that somebody from horseback could lower their drinking cup to the stream without having to get off the horse. They could turn it like that and pull themselves up a nice cool drink from the stream. Yeah, this is a buffalo horn and horns were something that were very important for making tools and different implements that you needed not only to acquire food, but utilize those foods.

Right now Nakia Williamson and myself are involved in trying to make a bow out of mountain sheep horns. That was a real mastery because somebody in our ancestry figured out how to take a mountain sheep horn and end up with a bow. The amount of work that goes into there is just amazing because you take the mountain sheep horn and you cut off that back part and you would join them together in the middle. This is just a standard wood bow but this is about the size that they would end up with. These bows were highly sought after by many people across the Plateau and even out onto the plains because of its ability to give the arrow a high velocity with a small bow. Some of them were well over a hundred pounds in pressure. It was something that was small enough for a rider to use on horseback and be able to go back and forth and shoot buffalo and take them down with one arrow being able to pass all the way through the body of that buffalo. That was something that was really important to the Nez Perce and that was something that we always utilized in buffalo country and war as well.