Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I went back to my review of Savage Moon, and looked at the following passage, which I joked was “CSI:Shoshone”:

“See the dried material on the very tips of the sharpened stone arrowhead?” Soaring Hawk said, pointing toward it. “The points of these arrowheads have been dipped into a mixture of pulverized ants and the spleen of an animal that has been allowed to decay in the direct rays of the sun,” Soaring Hawk said grimly. “This rotten mixture combined with rattlesnake venom is the deadliest of weapons.”

Saleratus & Sagebrush: People and Places on the Road West By Robert Lee Munkres uses an identical passage and cites its source as The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1964.

Both books reference a work by John G. Bourke, which I haven’t identified or located.