The Lightning Stick

Reviewed by: The Lightning Stick: Arrows, Wounds, and Indian Legends Richard H. Frost H. Henrietta Stockel. The Lightning Stick: Arrows, Wounds, and Indian Legends. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995. xix + 131 pp. Ill. $24.95. Henrietta Stockel is one of the few current researchers in Native American medical history. She could use some help. The Lightning Stick, a slender work of just a hundred pages of text, is an idiosyncratic potpourri about Indian bows and arrows, arrow wounds, arrow myths, and whatnot. It swerves from topic to topic in blithe disregard of some of her own chapter guidelines. The penultimate chapter, on trepanning and scalping, strays from the road altogether. The book would not be worth reviewing were it not for some remarkably interesting material, drawn from U.S. Army surgeons’ sources, on nineteenth-century treatment of arrow wounds. According to one Army surgeon, Dr. J. H. Bill, arrow wounds presented quite different challenges from bullet wounds: Vessels and intestines are not pushed aside, as they frequently are by bullets, but are laid open; fecal matter may be thus thrown into the peritoneum, or a hemorrhage, sufficient to determine the fatal issue, may take place. . . . Not only have we to consider the blood already lost, but that which is likely to be lost in extracting the missile. (p. 75) Surgical methods were primitive, but removal of the arrowhead as well as the shaft was necessary, even from the skull, if there was to be any hope of escaping fatal infection. Arrows were dirty weapons, sometimes contaminated deliberately by the arrow maker. Shafts came out easily; not arrowheads. The surgical information is anecdotal, but such anecdotes! The number of recoveries from critical arrow wounds was remarkable, attesting to the determination of experienced Army surgeons, the superior physical condition of those who fought the Indians, and the role of luck. Arrow wounds in the skull did not always result in death, but those in the heart always did. In one case an Arizonan, shot in the heart with a headless arrow, “killed the Indian who had shot him and a second, and wounded a third; then he chased two mules back to camp. Delirious with fever, he recovered sufficiently to tell what had happened, but succumbed nine days later” (p. 75). Fortunately, the most common arrow wounds were in the arms, but multiple wounds were common. The government was not in the habit of pensioning off soldiers who got in the way of arrows: after surgery the soldier either died or returned to active duty. Richard H. Frost Colgate University Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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