Handicrafts 161 The breech clout worn with these is a rectangular piece of flannel, decorated with designs, and usually edged with ribbon. . Another type of breech clout—one which may be used by our girls in doing Indian dancing—is made in the form of a pair of shorts, with decorated flaps, front and back. Many such are described and fully illustrated in Buttree’s RoytHM OF THE REDMAN, Pp. 250. = The Dancing Bustle 10 II N1o By Ernest THOMPSON SETON During my young days on the Plains, we saw daily during the springtime, the Dance of the Pintailed Prairie Chickens. In performing this, each bird, especially the males, would bend forward, erect and spread the tail, trail the wings like a turkey cock, go strutting and crowing around with rapid foot work, varied by a double-time stamping that helped the tail feathers to vibrate with singular noise and effect. This was precisely the action of a Taos Indian I watched doing the Bustle Dance. The stooping pose, the strutting, the rhythmic steps, the occasional vibration that made the bustle shiver with life, as the lithe young dancer kept time to the music, with swing and step of marvelous poise and grace,—all seemed to me simply a dramatization and hu- manization of the Grouse Dance. The bustle was obviously copied from the grouse tail,— the rays of long and white-tipped feathers, the two long medicine plumes above, and the trailing wings represented by the double tail behind. — The sage grouse has not the two medicine plumes, but the prairie chicken has. 4 And this fact seems to me significant: The Bustle Dance was done among the Indians wherever the Plains grouse were found; and outside of this region where the grouse do not dance, the Indians also had it not.
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Ths bustle which this Taos Indian wore for the dance was apparently made as follows: Twenty beautiful long sage grouse feathers were each tipped with a ball of white down. These were laid, under side up, flat on a table, radiating out in a circle, bases as close
