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Chapter 2. Skis For A Purpose
- University of Massachusetts Press
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chapter 2 Skis for a Purpose But it would seem a greater marvel to hear about men who are able to tame trees and boards, so that by fastening boards seven or eight ells long under his feet, a man is made able to pass the bird on the wing, or the fleetest greyhound that runs in the race, or the reindeer which leaps twice as fast as the hart. For there is a large number of men who run so well on skis that they can strike down nine reindeer with a spear, or even more, in a single run. Now such things must seem incredible, unlikely, and marvelous in all those lands where men do not know with what skill and cleverness it is possible to train the board to such great fleetness.—The King’s Mirror, c. 1250 ad Webbed snowshoes, ski-like sliding snowshoes, and skis were invented for the purpose of winter survival. In the pre- industrial world, virtually no farming or field labor could be carried on in the depths of a snowy winter. To survive, people ate what they had in store. They also hunted game, but their difficulties increased in winter; birds and most animals had the advantage of flight and speed over the human hunter. To this day, in Canada, which is snowbound in winter, the snow- shoe remains the symbol of winter. Anthropologists have analyzed the varieties of snowshoes in the Arctic, in parts of the Americas, in Europe, Japan, and Korea. Some were small, round platters; others were frame-and-web contraptions of many shapes.1 As long as the snow was not too deep and powdery, snowshoes were excellent for check- ing traps and hunting with bow and, later, gun, but they were too slow when it came to a chase. Far more effective was the ski—a smooth piece of wood fashioned to let the hunter glissade over the snow rather than sink into it. The longer and broader the ski, the better it would carry the weight of a man on top of the snow. In Californian gold mining days, men specifically chose skis over snowshoes simply because snowshoes proved useless in the deep powder of the Sierra Nevada. “We started with the Canadian snowshoes,” reported one mining engineer, “but soon abandoned them for the Norwegian skis.”2 The world over, skis were made from local wood. Soft pine and fir, hard birch, ash and oak were common until hickory was recognized as superior skis for a purpose 23 both for flexibility and durability and became available from the southern United States starting about 1900. The early skis unearthed from the peat bogs were roughly fashioned and served as plain utilitarian instruments with- out any regular pattern. These unsophisticated, hand-hewn boards continued to be made long after ski factories began producing sporting skis for a mass market. In the United States, the homemade board was used in backcountry Idaho in the late 1930s. During the Second World War, Italian troops destroyed most of the old Bloke skis, primitive boards then still used by Slovenian peas- ants as means of transport, in order to prevent their use by partisans.3 the wooden-board people of asia Nowhere are we more unsure of the early history of skiing than in Asia4 — here considered to be east of the Urals, south to the Himalayan chain, and east to China and Japan. From China, a document of the West Han period (206 bc–225 ad) that has recently emerged, reports that “people of the Din- gling nationality living in the Altai mountains of northwest China sped like goats in the valleys and on the flatlands wearing the ‘horns of goats’—a kind of knee high fur boot under which is bound a wooden board with a hoof-shaped front tip.”5 The remark is cited again 750 years later, and over the next mil- lennium there are only five other accounts that mention skiing. The Shiwei of northern China, “afraid of falling into pits, sped by riding on wooden boards.”6 The use of poles—“they were supported by curved sticks”—made another tribe, the “Wooden Board Tujue,” able to reach “nearly one hundred meters quickly in one step.” There are further references during the Sung to Yuan dynasties (960–1368). Of particular interest is the explanation of how the Baximis used horsehair under the ski “which touch the snow with its growing direction towards the back for fast...