Outdoor Idaho
                        "Vanishing Arts"

Bruce Reichert, Host:
It was a simpler time, a time before factories when nearly
everything was made by hand.  

Horace Henderson:
People didn't have time to spend at this sort of thing.  It's an
old cowboy craft that's just about died out.

Reichert:
Today, a new generation of craftsmen keeps these vanishing arts
alive.  But what drives them to spend hours turning cork and wood
into a decoy or a piece of bamboo into a flyrod?

Marv Hoyt:
The payoff is like any fine woodworking craft that people do. 
It's saying, "I did this with my hands, without a lot of modern
machinery."

Rob Young:
One reason why I do as I do is because I don't want those
concepts to be lost.  

What these people did back then with the materials straight out
of the environment was so wonderful.  I don't think it should be
lost.  I think it ought to be appreciated.

Reichert:
You know, not too many years ago if you wanted to stay warm, you
built a fire.  Well, today you turn up the thermostat.  

Hi, I'm Bruce Reichert and welcome to Outdoor Idaho.

You know these days it's pretty easy to forget how much effort
went into even the simplest of activities.  For example, back
then if you wanted to go hunting or fishing, well you pretty much
made your own equipment or you found someone who could.  

Well, those master craftsmen are fast disappearing, their skills
replaced by factories and mass produced merchandise.  But we've
managed to find some folks who are trying to keep alive those
vanishing arts.

Marv Hoyt, Bamboo Rod Maker:
This is a piece of Tonkin cane.  It comes from the Tonkin
province of China and it's the raw material.  This piece of cane
contains one or more of the bamboo rods that I'll build.  You
don't just go down to your local hardware store and buy a piece
of cane and you put ferrules and guides on it and go fishing. 
There's a lot of work in there.  

After I select a piece of cane, I go ahead and I'll cut it into
two 6 foot sections and then I'll flame it like this, which adds
color to it, gives it what I think is a more attractive
appearance and also it helps harden the cane a little bit, gives
it a little more strength when you're finally done with your rod.

What I'm doing is splitting it down and down to the point where
I've got fairly uniform pieces and width, usually anywhere from a
1/4 to 5/16 in width.  And those are manageable in size that I
can plane them down without spending hours and hours planing.

I've got all the strips split out of a section that I'll use for
one of the tip sections of this rod.  And what I'll do now is
stagger the nodes slightly, measure out my length of the rough
blank that I want, and then cut it off on either end.  Make sure
that you have on both sides of each node have good solid fiber
out there, power fiber.

Otherwise, if you put all your nodes together, you have a good
chance if you put too much stress on it, it would break at that
point.

The nodes, those little dams that are in the cane, they have a
hump in them and I have to flatten those out so that they are the
same plane as the rest of this so that when you glue these strips
together you have a nice smooth finish on each flat.

They'll have some pretty big wows in them and your plane blade
will pick those and splinter and you won't get a nice smooth edge
along there.  And so it's really critical to get those flattened
that way.

Okay, well this one is going to have to be straightened also. 
Get that node straightened out so I can plane it.  You can do an
incredible amount of straightening.  I could take this, heat it
up and put a 90 degree bend in it without splintering it.  It's
literally that plastic.

What you're doing is you're putting in probably about 95 percent
of your time into making the blank and 5 percent of that time is
in actually assembling it and putting it together and finishing
the rod.  The mass produced rods, the strips of cane are sawn
from the bigger pieces rather than hand planed like I do.  

While that is quicker and you can really make a lot of rods that
way, it's not nearly as precise, the joints don't fit as well. 
I'll be planing this down to a 60 degree equilateral triangle and
these pieces will fit together and glued together and make one
solid rod.

Okay, that gives us a 60 degree triangle, put six of those pieces
together and that'll give us the 360 degree cross-section for the
rod.

I'm binding it to hold all of the pieces together where I've
straightened the nodes.  I want to make sure those nodes don't go
back into that weird little curve that they would have in them. 
This holds everything together, keeps it straight.  

They don't really make tools to build cane rods with.  What I've
done with this particular thing is just taken an old illustration
of one and built it using different components but it works the
same way.  The process of the heat treating it removes most all
the moisture and a lot of the resin from the cane in the strips
and that removes a lot of the memory from the cane, it also
hardens it, makes it stronger.

Not everybody does that with their cane rods.  I like to.  I like
the feel and the action I get from the cane when that happens. 
With a heat treated rod like this you'll end up with a fairly
good straight sections to plane on then.

Well this is the most precise part of the rod building.  This is
where I go ahead and plane out the final form and it's usually in
100ths of 1000ths of or 10s of 1000ths of inches.  This gives me
the taper and the taper gives me the action and the weight of the
line the rod will throw.

Garrison, one of the old rod makers, he was an engineer.  He'd
have you believe it's a science, more than an art or a craft.  I
feel that it's more of a craft myself.  It's not really art, and
it's definitely not science.

I generally take about a month from the time I'll start a rod
until the time I'm finished, sometimes longer.

The payoff is like any fine woodworking craft that people do,
whether it's building furniture or anything else, it's saying, "I
did this with my hands without a lot of modern machinery." 

When I get the blank to this point, this blank has been
straightened, it's about as straight as I can get it, which means
it's straighter than most graphite blanks.  Once I've got it to
that point, putting the finish on the blank, fitting the ferrules
on it, assembling it, that's all pretty much easy stuff.  Lots of
folks know how to do that.

I would say that counting all the, from the very simple to the
fairly complex steps, a good 25 steps in this process of starting
out with the big long chunk of cane to going out and getting
ready to cast a rod.

I had built quite a few graphite rods and I really wanted to
build a rod from scratch.  I wanted to build the blank and then
build the rod, so I did that.  And I started fishing with them
and it's the same sort of satisfaction that, "Yeah, I tied this
little fake bug and that fish took it, I've cast it with a rod
that I built and the fish took it."  To me it's really quite
satisfying to fish with something I've made.
Reichert:
Anyone who has worked with horses knows well-made gear is
important.  That's as true today as it was yesterday.  What has
changed is the material.  Nylon and plastics have replaced
untanned cowhide, otherwise known as rawhide.

Horace Henderson, Rawhide Artist:
The cowboys in my time didn't get to town but about once a year,
and they didn't have much money so they made everything from
rawhide that they could.  

My dad raised cattle over in the Snake River country and I wanted
to be a cowboy when I was a little guy.  And he had used nothing
but rawhide reins.  And a leather rein, he wouldn't have anything
to do with it.  He said it was all right for a sheepherder but
they ain't worth a hoot for a cowboy.  So that was what I thought
I ought to have.  But I didn't money enough.  I was too poor to
buy them so I thought I'd try to make them.  Well, I started in
trying to learn and it took a long time.   

If you notice, there's v's in this braid.  Little v's, you keep
that line straight.   When I first started braiding, it would go
this way and then it'd go that way.  I found out, I finally
figured what was the matter, I was pulling harder with one hand
than I did with the other, then I'd overcorrect and I'd go the
other way.  I'd be like the guy that ran off the road with his
car.  He'd turn it too far and he'd go clear over on the other
side.  That's the way I do with my braiding.  

But I finally got so I can keep it fairly straight anymore. 
There's a place for each string.  And if you don't put it in the
proper place, you've got a boo boo in your braid.  If you're an
impatient person and you can't stand to wait to get something
finished, you don't want to start trying to braid because you
won't make it.

Well this is the finished product - a quirt that a cowboy might
use.  And it didn't take too long to make.  I think about three
or four days I had probably finished that one.  But this one,
this is a show quirt.  I just thought I'd make it fancy and I
guess I did.  I expect I had 60 hours time in it.  A lot of work
went into that.  There's 50 strands a going around this handle
here and there's a five point star on the end of it there if look
closely.  

It's an old cowboy craft that's just about died out.  The guys
that used the most of this horse tack that I make, originally
they made their own because they were too far from town to go in
and buy it but, as time went on and roads got built and it got
easier to get to town and so forth, people stopped doing this
sort of thing and they'd go to town and buy what they needed
instead of trying to make their own and the craft died out.  It
was practically gone 30 years ago.  

Reichert:
Horse hair hitching - it's another nearly forgotten craft.  

For years, elaborate horse tack was made out of twisted horse
hair.  

Gary Stark, Horse Hair Hitcher:
Each strand of horse hair that I use has 10 individual hairs
twisted together to make that strand.  It takes 750 approximate
strands to make an average sized man's belt.  Each strand is 22
to 26 inches long.  That makes the average man's belt have about
two mile of horse hair in it.  

It's called hitching because it's a series of half-hitches. 
There are only two half-hitches that are used.  Back hitching
brings the design towards me.  Front hitching takes it away from
me.  So a combination of the two bring the design together.

You can do chevrons, you can do arrows, you can do x's.  The fun
part of that is to make each design different.  

It really came to light in the prisons in the mid 1800's.  In the
prisons, the older inmates would have access to horse hair and
string and they had plenty of time so they would sit and make an
elaborate piece of some sort and when their sentence was up they
would go out and they would have this beautiful headstall that
they would trade to some rancher for a grubstake and a saddle or
a horse or something.

It was popular, I suspect, because the inmates had access to the
materials to do it.  I don't know that every common day cowboy
had a piece on his saddle.  I'm pretty sure they didn't.

While I was living in western Montana, managing a ranch, my
boss's husband got me permission to go in the prison and learn
from one of the inmates.  It was something so beautiful that I
had never seen before and I just had to learn how.  It was
something that was intriguing to me.

Reichert:
Joe Landis is different from most duck hunters.  His decoys don't
come from a store.  He makes them himself.

Landis spends hours turning cork and wood into decoys.  It's a
hobby he started 25 years ago.

Joe Landis, Decoy Carver:
At the time, when I could make each decoy for half the price I
could buy one for, so I went ahead and knocked them out.  

It's just plain fun now.

This step, we're rounding the body off to get the fundamental
shape of the decoy.  You want a relaxed bird, one preening, or
even one sleeping, a bird drinking, you know.  That sets up a
very relaxed flock situation.  I really feel like that it helps
when you're attracting birds.

At this stage, we blank the head out on a band saw, done some
preliminary cuts to begin the shape, pre-drilled the eye socket
and now we will begin roughing it out.

With experience, you can have the rough shape rather quickly.  It
would be nothing to do a dozen of these heads in a day as far as
rough shaping goes.

Well in the carving world there's an axiom:  A good head will
always carry a poor body but a good body will never carry a poor
head.

I want to have a nice eye channel.  The duck should be able to
look across the end of his bill where he's going to feed.  Also,
looking at the bird from the top of his head you want to be able
to see the eye channels there because he needs to protect himself
from predators and that's another thing that lends to the
realism.  If you have that in mind of how the bird actually feeds
and how he has to live, you can induce those attributes in the
piece as you carve it.

A working decoy is fundamentally going to represent the species
you wish to hunt.  The paint job would be relatively simple and
it will probably attract, at least get them into gunning range,
and most of the time a well built decoy, you'll have them landing
literally on top of you.

At this stage we've begun painting.  We have a very simplistic
pattern, which is typical of the canvasback.  The canvasback has
a slate gray vermiculated pattern on the feathers on the back and
it's a prominent feature.  

After the application of the white paint you allow it to dry for
maybe 10 - 15 minutes and it becomes tacky.  Then you use a
wiggling motion with the comb to remove some of the paint.  And
that allows the undercoat to shine through and shows the
vermiculation.

When the decoy is all finished, it's kind of a pleasure just to
peel that paint off of the eye and it seems like it jumps to life
then.  And that's when it says I'm finished.

One of my fondest memories is we had a gentleman stalk our decoys
and shoot them.  And I felt that was a reasonable tribute to the
realism.  He was definitely snookered into sneaking up on them.

You can buy the decoys but I prefer to do it this way.  It's kind
of a historic process of using the cork and making your own
decoys and it's just very, very satisfying.

Reichert:
To say that Rob Young is fascinated by bows is an understatement. 
Besides being an avid bow hunter, Young spends weeks recreating
ancient weapons.

Rob Young, Bowyer:
I have been really curious about what the peoples in North
America did long before they were influenced by Europeans.  And
it was obvious that they managed to live using these weapons. 
And I figured if they could do it, I should be able to do it as
well.  

Reichert:
Young has turned what started out as a simple curiosity into a
business - handcrafting exact replicas of the primitive bows he
finds in museums or illustrated in books.

Young:
I say my goal is to try to be as faithful to what the peoples
were doing.  After the research is gathering the raw materials.  

Reichert:
The search takes him across the country looking for minerals for
natural paints, and just the right juniper tree for the bow.

Young:
Well that's the basis for the whole operation.  If it has knots
in the right place then you've already incorporated weaknesses
into the wood that you may not be able to compensate for.

The stage we're at right now is finding out what the wood really
has to offer.  The first stage in that of course is to remove the
bark.  And right underneath that is going to be the real working
surface.  And we won't know whether this wood is going to produce
the bow that I'm after until we get down to that point.

What I'm trying to do at this point is just get the contours
right and get it placed properly in the stave so that I get past
the irregularities in the wood.  And it appears that everything
is all nice and lined up and straight.  And it looks like we're a
go for the next step, cutting it out.

One guy said when asked, "How do you make a bow?" he said, "You
just keep whacking away at the wood until you get nothing but a
bow left."  When I'm working on the band saw, and all of a sudden
this side profile shape comes into being where it's not just a
chunk of wood staring at you anymore, I just feel a joy.

There's a lot of excess wood that you know you're going to have
to take off and that's basically what the band saw did, was just
to get me into the realm of efficient use of hand tools.

Dynamic shaping, actually the bowyer's term for it is tillering,
basically is taking into consideration what the bow is going to
look like as it is drawn.  This step can really make a bow either
a good one, or a not so good one, or it can cause the bow to
fail.

While I'm removing the material from the back, I'll take it out
of the vice, put it across my knee and look at the arc that's
being formed or lack of the arc.  And that helps me to determine
exactly how much material to remove.  You can't do it by
measurement, I mean as far as putting numbers to it, because you
have to see it.

If you force modern technology on to this kind of work, the
result is going to be a child of modern technology and that's not
my angle.  What I'm trying to do is produce a bow that is as
close as I can get within reason to what the people before us
were using in North America.

Reichert:
Young's dedication to the old ways includes spending hours
pounding elk tendons into sinew, which will be glued to the bow.

Young:
One reason why I do as I do is because I don't want those
concepts to be lost and I don't want people to think that the
only way is the modern materials way.

A sinew backed bow can be drawn much farther than if it's not
sinew backed, because the sinew can, well it reinforces the wood. 
It lets the wood do more than it could have all by itself.  Now
there's a real advantage to that in having a shorter bow for the
same draw length, I mean maneuverability if you are a hunter.  If
you are a target shoot it doesn't matter.

What I'm looking at is to mimic the probable drawn shape of the
bow as the original people had designed it.  There are different
drawn shapes, so it's up to me to match the appropriate shape
with the appropriate tribal practice.  And so that is why I use
the tillering board because then as I draw the bow I can take a
look at what it is going to appear like at various stage during
the draw.  

Coupled with that, using the spring balance over there and a
measured arrow, I can actually draw the bow and look at the
pounds that are being generated at the number of inches as it is
being drawn.  And so it is just a matter of removing the wood
until I get to whatever the specifications were.  This one was
going for 50 pounds at 24 inches.

A 100th of an inch can make a lot of difference over the belly of
the bow.  That's why it's take a couple of scrapes, stop, do the
measurement, come back, take a couple of scrapes, stop, go over
and take a couple of measurements.  It's not just scrape it down
and you go over there and shazzam it's done.  It's back and
forth, and back and forth, and back and forth.
I do my best to use nothing but natural materials.  You can't
understand the time, the place, the people, or the weapon unless
you use the same materials that they did and attempt to assemble
those materials the way that they did.  And you find out how good
those were.  

I definitely had developed a respect for the ingenuity that they
had, the acquired wisdom that they had, their creativeness.  

This paint, it's hematite, which you can find most anywhere, it's
an iron oxide and it's a very, very smooth blood red.  And in
this case it is just mixed with some sinew glue.  The same glue
that I use to attach the sinew to this bow.  These so called old
ways or more basic ways work very well.  I really don't think
they should be put down.  

What these people did back then with the materials straight out
of the environment was so wonderful.  I don't think it should be
lost.  I think it ought to be appreciated.  

At the top we've got a man with a headdress and then a the bottom
we have a hunter with two dogs.  The stripes represent some sort
of tree boring grub which the archers used to rub onto their,
crush and rub onto their arms to make them stronger.  So actually
having the stripes there is a symbol of strength.

Now what exactly all this means wasn't written down.  It may have
had a very special meaning to the guy who painted the bow, but
that, it's lost.

In a way it is sort of a time machine to their context, their
living context.  Obviously we can never really capture what was
back then but we get a glimpse.  And I think the glimpse is worth
while.

Reichert:
For some of us, tying our own flies or loading our own ammo is as
close as we're ever going to get to making something by hand.

For others, the challenge of creating their own flyrod, or decoy,
or bow is as great a reward as catching a trophy trout or bagging
a big buck.

And it is this challenge that may keep some of those vanishing
arts alive.

Thanks for watching.  We'll see you next time.


Closed captioning transcription by Kelly Roberts.