Natural Dyes & Quills
Behind my house in the little town of Leicester, NY (population 446) runs Little Beards Creek. During the Revolution Little Beard was a powerful Seneca chief and military leader working closely with Butler's Rangers as they launched raids out out Fort Niagara. Little Beards "Castle" was located just down the road from me and is famous locally for being the western most fought battle of the Revolutionary War in NY State. Boyd and Parker, scouts for the Sullivan and Clinton Campaign, were taken prisoner nearby after a Seneca/Ranger ambush and tortured to death a mile down the road on the river flats area. The castle was burned by Sullivan's troops as were the Seneca's crops and orchards. Sullivan thus ended the campaign here and returned east. So you can see the natural dyes I gather and use from the local plants are about as "historically" accurate as you obtain. This area was the traditional homeland of the Genesee Seneca. It was also known as the Valley of the White Woman of the Genesee....Deh- he- wa-mis...Mary Jemison.
Legend has it that Seneca Indians called this place jo-nis-hi-yuh, meaning the pleasant or beautiful valley. This phonetic spelling evolved into Genesee which is the name of the river whose centuries of meandering carved out this beautiful valley.
To obtain quills for dying get a nice quality porcupine and skin him out. Be careful....needless to say the quills are more than sharp and the entire body is totally covered. Give old Mister Porky a Woolite bath for 3-4 hours to make the quills easier to pull out. Wear your heavy leather gloves and start pulling. The whole process is a good days job. As you can see one porky yields a mass of quills!!!
A variety of natural dye plant materials gathered on my property for dying the porcupine quills: hickory and walnut hulls, sumac berries and bark, osage orange, goose berries, blood root, etc.
