Bone Knife

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

This is a historic how to in making a Bone Knife. These knives were specific and lasted for ages literally for the use of cutting green squash into slices. The most interesting part of this is the key was making a knife from green or wet, buffalo cow shoulder blade. The bone had to be thin and yet strong, in order to cut the squash slices thin and not break the squash.

Bone cut green and whetted with and edge, would dry hard and keep the edge indefinitely. This is one of the most interesting of knife making, in no one mentions bone knives, but always flint instead. This bone knife was centered in the Hidatsa, who would have had exposure to the Viking migration into America.
One can not discount old methods or technology when it is superior in construction and quality for durability. It is not bone handles but bone blades which are a ready tool for the American Survivor.

The Hidatsa stated it was buffalo shoulder blade only. They never made them from other animals.



"Squash knives of bone were still in use when I was young. I have often seen old women using them but, as I recollect, I never saw one being made. The knife was made from the thin part of a buffalo's shoulder bone; never, I think, from the shoulder bone of a deer, elk, or bear.

The bone of a buffalo cow was best, because it was thinner. If the squash knife was too thick, the slices of squash were apt to break as they were being severed from the fruit. Bone squash knives, as I remember, were used for slicing squashes and for nothing else.
A squash knife should be cut from green bone; it would then keep an edge, for green bone is firm and hard. I do not think I ever saw anyone sharpening a bone knife so far as I can now recollect.. There was no handle to a bone squash knife, beyond the natural bone. A bone squash knife lasted a long time.

Old women in our village who used these bone knives, brought them out each summer in the squash harvest."


Not just turkey wing bone corn cob pipes...........bone knives were the answer.


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