Life strings

I was one of several students of Joe Dabill during a weeklong stay in the Sequoia Forest.  Dabill is a master at the art of bow-making and all the skills related to it. He handed each of us a stave that he had cut and split a few months earlier. My stave came from a California bay tree. It was nearly five feet long. My job was to transform that stave into a functional bow. Dabill’s job was to mentor me in each step of the process.

I liked the look of my raw stave and was eager to see it become a bow. After Dabill explained some of the basics, I clamped my stave to a wooden table and Dabill carefully looked it over. The stave was more than an inch thick in most sections, as much as 2 1/2 inches in parts. Dabill took his carpenter’s pencil and marked my stave to indicate those areas that should be completely removed.

Taking a spoke shave, I began the process of shaving off wood, always from the belly of the bow (the side that faces you when you shoot it), never from the back. I spent several hours shaving, though some of that time was spent resting. 

After days of this, Dabill removed the bow from the clamps and filed nocks for the strings into each end. I’d already twined a bowstring from linen, which I then waxed with beeswax.  Dabill strung it and tested the tiller (how evenly each side of the bow bends). Like two scientists, he and his assistant Sig then carefully examined the strung and pulled bow. They pointed out the still-stiff areas, then Dabill marked them for further reduction.

After another two hours or so of off-and-on work, Dabill tested the bow’s tiller again.

“Looks good,” he said, and he fired a few arrows to a nearby tree stump. 

“Shoots good,” he said with a smile.

One day I sat down with Dabill in the early morning around the fire. I wanted to learn more about this bow-maker.

Now sixtysomething, Dabill got interested in archery at around age 15. He was living in Lompoc and had read about Ishi, the last wild Indian in California. “I idolized the Indian lifestyle,” explained Dabill, “and I wanted to become an Indian.”

He learned how to make arrowheads from an archaeologist who’d documented a Chumash site.

“I started practicing making stone points, using modern methods in the beginning. I had a board with a carpet on it that I worked on. I used obsidian and a copper chipper. I was obsessed with this and did it every day for six to eight months. Today I can make points using modern or primitive methods,” Dabill says.

By age 17 he was making crude bows from willow and juniper. “I did it because I loved it,” he adds. Dabill went on to learn most of the crafts of the Native Americans and teach those skills to others. In the 1970s, he offered his first bow-making class by posting flyers in local shopping malls. He had five students paying $5 each for a class in Reservoir Canyon (near San Luis Obispo), where students learned about edible plants, soap plants and woods for bows.

Dabill also spent some time bicycling around the Western states, sometimes covering 100 miles a day. He described himself as a “drifter” during those years, having no money, gleaning for food, carrying only a sleeping bag and a few changes of clothes.

Dabill has spent the last 20 years intensely focused on making bows and teaching bow-making. He also spent 2 1/2 years at the Catalina Island Marine Institute, teaching the Indian program to children. He gave dramatic presentations to students and also taught groups about bead-making, primitive fire-making, making arrowheads and bows, and all the skills of the Chumash and Gabrielinos, the dominant tribes throughout Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Dabill figures that he and his students make about 50 to 60 bows a year in his ongoing classes. “How many bows have you personally made?” I ask. He smiles and nearly laughs. “I have made thousands,” he says.

Though he makes bows with both modern and primitive stone tools, he usually uses a few modern tools in classes since this is the easiest way for novices to learn the art. He shows students how to use the tools and then he gives them each a stick and tells them to get started. He always makes the effort to match the right stick with the right student.

Dabill says that when he began making bows he preferred juniper, but now he prefers the wood from the California bay tree. He has been featured in the “Traditional Bowyers Bible” as an acknowledged expert in making juniper bows. “Some of the old-timers couldn’t believe I was using juniper,” says Dabill.

Dabill travels four to six months out of the year with his wife Amada. Readers can contact Dabill at 4950 Traffic Way, Atascadero, Calif., 93422, or by calling (805) 466-4336.

Christopher Nyerges is the editor of Wilderness Way magazine, author of “How to Survive Anywhere” and a wilderness instructor. Contact him at ChristopherNyerges.com.