The game was ordinarily started by tossing the ball into the air in the
centre of the field. This act is represented by Perrot as having been
performed by one of the leaders in the game, but it is more in accord
with the spirit in which the game was played, that it should have been
done by some outsider. Bossu says, "An old man stands in the middle of
the place appropriated to the play, and throws up into the air a ball
of roe-skins rolled about each other," while Powers [Footnote:
Contributions to North American Ethnology, Vol. III, p. 151.] says that
among the Californian Indians this act was performed by a squaw. The
judges started the ball among the Choctaws. [Footnote: Cuthu, Vol. II,
p. 12.] Notwithstanding the differences in the forms of the goals,
their distance apart and the methods of play disclosed in all these
descriptions, the game can only be regarded as the same. The historians
who have preserved for us the accounts of the ancient southern games
from which quotations have been made, are all Englishmen except Bossu,
and he entered the country not by the way of Quebec but by way of New
Orleans. It is not strange, therefore, that we do not find in use
amongst them the name which the early French fathers and traders
invariably applied to the game. The description, however, given by
these writers, of the racket used in the south, corresponds so closely
with the crook from which the game took the name by which it is known,
that we must accept the game as a modified form of lacrosse. From Maine
to Florida, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we trace a knowledge of
it. We have found it in use among the confederate nations of the north
and of the south and among scattered tribes throughout the country.

In the majority of instances the natural instincts of those who
participated in the strife were stimulated by local pride. The
reputation of their tribe or their village rested upon the result.