Charlie Lundblade took up the art of flint knapping on a dare.

It started about a decade ago when he was at a gun show in Clay Center. There, he saw three arrows the seller claimed came out of a museum near Westmoreland. After looking at them, he wasn't terribly impressed with their authenticity.

Lundblade said he thought he could do better. The seller disagreed. "He said, 'Well if you don't like it, go make your own,'" said Lundblade. So, that is what he decided to do.

Flint knapping is the process of taking a rock that flakes and removing the flakes chip by chip until it is shaped into a primitive tool. American Indians used the process to create spearheads, arrowheads, tomahawks and other weapons. It can take several hours to create just one piece.

Lundblade, of Courtland, a retired schoolteacher, has been fascinated with the cultures that created flint knapping since he was a boy. In grade school, he admits, he doodled bows and arrows and horses on his papers. As an adult, he made it a study.

"I'm a great follower and reader of the horse culture of the Great Plains. I'm really a student of that culture," Lundblade said. "I'm very envious of them. They would feel the wind in their face and their long hair, and off they would go."

His primary interest is in nomadic tribes that followed buffalo throughout the Midwest. He creates tools the men in these horse-based cultures would have used.

"I call it warrior art. Anything the old boy carried on his horse or went into battle with, that's what I do," Lundblade said. Authenticity is important to Lundblade. He designs his pieces based on sketches from artists such as George Catlin, who recorded the lives of Plains Indians in the early 1800s.

His is primarily self-taught. Lundblade started by buying books and researching on the Internet the various ways that Plains Indians created the arrowheads, spears and knives they used for hunting and battle. While he had a lot of early failures, he gradually found materials that he liked to use and increased his skill.

Now, he finds it a soothing pastime. He can sit down to start on a project and find that hours have passed without much notice.

"It's very obsessive. I'm just obsessed by the whole thing. My fever for it hasn't lessened any," Lundblade said. Flint knapping requires a lot of patience, but he said his years as an elementary school teacher taught him plenty of that.

Lundblade and his wife, Pat, who does Indian beading, display and sell their work at various rendezvous and historical re-enactments throughout Kansas.

They attend about 20 events a year, but Lundblade hasn't run across the man who dared him to become a flint knapper.

"I keep looking for that guy. I'm going to run into him one of these days," Lundblade said. Until then, he keeps educating people who stop by his tent and shooting the breeze with people who want to tell their own arrowhead stories.
