Explore 360-degree scans of historic Native American parfleches. Parfleches are still created today, but they saw widespread use from the mid-1600s through mid-1800s, after the horses arrived on the plains but before the decimation of the great bison herds.
Parfleches are leather containers (usually rawhide) that the People of the Great Plains used to carry belongings from one place to another. Historically, they were created and decorated by the women of the tribe. They came in many different shapes, but the envelope shape was the most common. To learn more about how parfleches were made, follow the link below to a National Park Service video.
This page allows you to explore many of the parfleches in our Permanent Collection. You can look at 360-degree scans of each of them. To learn more about an individual parfleche, use our Online Collection Database to see what information we have. Simply follow the link below, and type in the object's number into the "Catalog Number" box. Make sure you put the object number in quotation marks to ensure it pulls up the correct item.
Link to the Online Collection Database