Among the many items in Wicoff House Museum’s Native American collection, the most interesting is arguably the rattles. Used in social dances and traditional ceremonies, the rattle was an instrument created to add percussion to the music of the water drum.

Rattles were typically made of gourd, tree bark, horn, and turtle shell. Gourd rattles were popular because their varied sizes made it easy to create rattles of different pitch. Less popular than the gourd rattles, turtle shell rattles were reserved for formal events like ceremonies.

Later, tribes such as the Iroquois and the Lenape made rattles from coconut shells. We have one such rattle in our collection, a photo of it is included. The coconut is a modern rattle material as these groups previously had no access to it, likely because they were rare or expensive. With present day transportation, coconuts are no longer the rare treasure they were in the past.

Social dances utilized rattles in a variety of songs, some of which include the Quapaw Dance and the Cherokee Dance. Despite their names, these were performed by the Lenape, Caddo, and Shawnee tribes in the central and northeastern portions of the United States.