For all the Native American's trust in his spiritual protection, in the heat of battle every warrior bet his life on the effectiveness of his weapons.� The classic battle instruments were bows and arrows, clubs and tomahawks.� And they were still used in combat during the late 1860's and 1870's.� By the 1850's, however, the rifle (especially the repeater) had begun to replace the bow and arrow as a preferred weapon for horseback and long-range fighting.� The scalping tool, too, had changed from a piece of finely honed stone to a butcher knife bought from white traders.� In fact, some explorers who traveled among the Plains tribes were bemused to find them carrying knives that had been made in Sheffield, England.

A Sioux warrior's bow was made of carefully selected ash and strung with two buffalo sinews twisted together.� The war bow was accurate at over 100 yards, and could be fired more rapidly than muskets or single-shot rifles.� One of the most common weapons for hand to hand combat was the war club.� The club usually had a wooden handle and a stone head, both of which were covered with buckskin sewn together with sinew.��

Warriors often modified factory-made weapons to their own tastes.� The warrior who owned the single-shot Springfield infantry rifle would often shorten the barrel, change both the rear and front sights, and replace a worn out metal barrel band with rawhide lacing.� He also decorated the stock with the brass tacks the Plains tribes so fancied.� By the close of the period of the plains wars, the Indians had come to rely on guns as weapons to such an extent that the expression for war honor in the Blackfoot language had become "namachkani," meaning "a gun taken."

The gun (obtained from French and English traders) had the most pronounced effect on the warrior's life.� The early caplock, matchlock and flintlock guns were clumsy to load and fire from horse-back; the fact was that a bowman had all the advantage in rate of fire, being able to get off 20 arrows to the musket man's one ball.� A frontiersman testified that he had "as leave be shot at with a musket at the distance of one hundred yards, as by one of these Indians with his bow and arrow."� Nevertheless, the new weapon, even in its early days, did possess a critical advantage:� a tribe with guns could win against one without them because of the noise, smoke, surprise, and effectiveness of the new weapon when it found its target.� It was, for example, the gun in conjunction with the horse that enabled the Comanche's to prevail over the Apaches.� And later when breechloaders and repeating firearms came in, the first tribe to get them could dominate in almost any confrontation.

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