HOT SPRINGS, S.D. (AP)--When Larry Belitz was a boy growing up on an Iowa farm in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became enthralled with the romance of long-ago American Indian lore.

His uncle, an agent who helped teach Indians to farm, sent him items such as beaded moccasins and belts.

The boy imagined himself back in the Old West, making things provided only by nature.

Belitz has been living that dream for more than 30 years, making buffalo hide tipis, buffalo robes and other items from buffalo using traditional methods practiced by 19th century Plains Indians.

He uses no materials, tools or equipment that weren't available before 1880.

He buys buffalo hides from ranchers who don't brand their animals and who slaughter and skin the animals in the field so there are no brands or bruise marks from buffalo attacking each other in trucks.

He stretches out the hides on a rack made of 2-by 6-inch boards in his small red barn.

Belitz uses an elkhorn scraper with a metal blade to scrape the fat, meat and membrane from the hides. Metal, he says, was available to Plains Indians before 1880.

He sews up any holes in the hides with sinew from the buffalo's back muscle. "Everything we do has to be sewn with muscle," Belitz said.

He uses buffalo brains to tan the hides. He rubs about 4 pounds of buffalo brain (roughly two brains) mixed with water into the hide. The brain remains in the hide after the water evaporates, making for a supple, soft and "breathable" hide.

It's an arduous process.

It takes Belitz about 40 hours to make a buffalo robe and three months of steady work to make a buffalo hide tipi.

Like the Plains Indians, Belitz uses every part of the buffalo. In addition to tipis and buffalo robes, he sells items including buffalo bull horn caps, buffalo bladders, buffalo "milk" teeth, buffalo bull scrotum tobacco pouches, buffalo hair ropes, buffalo stomachs, buffalo sole rawhide for moccasins, buffalo bone awls, buffalo soap (from tallow), and buffalo bone paint brushes. He and his wife, Doris, eat primarily buffalo meat.

Belitz says he is a perfectionist. He makes items that are specific to specific tribes, although he specializes in Lakota and Cheyenne items. He said he will not stray from traditional techniques and materials.

"The littlest detail is significant," Belitz said. "If you compromise somewhere, you compromise everywhere."

Belitz says he is one of a handful of people making these items in the traditional way.

As a boy, he was intrigued by the Indians' ability to make things only from what they could hunt or collect in nature.

He discovered he was good with his hands and began making crude items. He made his first bow and arrows at age 4.

He later learned beadwork.

When he went to college in Illinois, he visited the Chicago Field Museum and saw original Indian artifacts. He didn't realize that he would later be supplying replicas to the Field Museum.

After being a teacher and principal in Lutheran schools in Iowa and Illinois, Belitz moved in 1970 to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where he taught at Oglala Community School and ran a trading post for the tribe.

Soon, items in the trading post needed repairs. He began repairing them and began repairing buffalo robes and other artifacts for museums. The repair work taught Belitz how the original tipis, robes and other items were constructed.

In the summers, he and Doris would travel to museums and draw pictures of the artifacts, which, he said were more useful than photos.

On the reservation in the early 1970s, Belitz talked to old people who remembered helping their grandmothers in the late 1800s and early 1900s brain-tan buffalo hides. They didn't remember much about the technique, but they remembered it was hard, tedious work.

But Flossie Bear Robe of Oglala adopted him as a brother and taught him quill work. "She wanted someone to keep it alive," Belitz said.

Meanwhile, museums were now asking Belitz to produce replicas of things such as buffalo hide tipis and buffalo robes.

He learned through trial and error how to brain-tan buffalo hides and wrote a booklet about the process, "Brain Tanning the Sioux Way."

The tipis were the hardest to replicate, Belitz says. There were only about 12 complete original buffalo hide tipis remaining in museums. He traveled to the museums, examining the tipis' construction.

He found that each buffalo hide has to be skinned a certain way and they have to be put together a certain way to fit as a tipi cover.

A large tipi like the one he used for the recent History Channel filming of "Comanche Warriors" south of Hot Springs is made of 14 buffalo hides. He calls it a "two-wife" tipi because it took two wives to lift the 105-pound tipi cover into position.

Belitz left the reservation in 1973 and spent the next 18 years teaching at Hot Springs Middle School.

He also taught Indian history and culture at the University of South Dakota and continues to conduct seminars on American Indian handicrafts of the 1743-1889 period for the National Park Service and museum staffs. Belitz has also served as an Indian technical and historical adviser on 10 films, including "Dances with Wolves," "Return to Lonesome Dove," "Maverick," "Wyatt Earp," "Crazy Horse" and "Hidalgo."

He made more than 40 hand-tanned and muscle-sewn buffalo hide tipis for museums. He made numerous Plains Indian items for a Lewis and Clark museum at Great Falls, items for Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello and the new Smithsonian Museum. He made items for his own traveling Lewis and Clark exhibit. Last year, it was at Al's Oasis at Oacoma and will return next summer. Among his Lewis and Clark exhibit is a replica of Sakagawea's bighorn sheep hide, detailed to look like it has "dribble" stains from her nursing baby.

Belitz continues to make buffalo hide tipis, buffalo robes and other things, mostly for museums and Indian "hobbyists" but also for schools offering Native American studies and individual Indians. Belitz said there are many hobbyists in Europe enthralled with the Indian way of life. They dress in period clothing, learn Indian languages and meet in "councils."

He also brain-tans deer hides to sell to Indians for beadwork. He provides tribes with items such as buffalo bladders, stomachs and tails.

And some Indians come to him to learn the old traditional methods.

He sees the irony in a white man teaching Indians their traditional crafts.

"It is ironic, but it's what they need to have," Belitz said.

Meanwhile, Belitz still gets to imagine himself back in the 1800s. But he does it while actually making things from that period.

"If you don't picture yourself in that time, you can't do a good job. You have to see yourself into that time, into that location. You're now part of that time," he said. "Then it will all fit together."