Beaded Cloth Shoulder Bags: Bandoliers of the Southeast‪.‬

Fifty years ago few scholars or students of Native American material culture had reported on the distinctive triangular or "V" shaped flap pouches or shoulder bags of the Southeastern tribes. This is in spite of the three volume epic History of the Indian Tribes of North America by McKenney and Hall, in which a number of Creek men were illustrated wearing these bags in the 1820s (Fig. 1). Goggin (1951) was the first to report them in any detail and Sturtevant (1967) was among the first to consider their structural features in his survey of Seminole men's clothing indicating they were worn on one hip suspended from a strap over the opposite shoulder. He claimed they served to carry tobacco, pipe, flint and steel, ammunition and whetstone, but had been obsolete since about 1910. He also suggested they were probably derived from both aboriginal pouches and 18th century Euro-American frontier bandoliers.