A. Norris & Sons tool...what's it called?

[Billman49]

Could be the tang has a double shoulder as on this one ... plus some other half moon herb choppers...

[Billman49]

And finally (for now) head knives tend to have the handle lower down the blade for better control....

[Branson]

Billman, I see your point.  But it still makes more sense to me as a head knife that somebody tried to make into a chopper.  Now that vertical handle chopper would never look like a leather knife to me, but there was a leather knife that looked a bit like that, called a half round knife.  I found a drawing of one issued by the US Ordnance Department.

[scottg]

According to certain arctic Indian tribes, there is no difference between an herb chopper and head knife.  Reportedly, they use the same knife for many chores. They use the name Ulu.
  I have one herb chopper that wouldn't make much of a head knife though. It has 2 blades at about a 75 degree angle, heh
  its in the upper right
yours Scott

[Branson]

According to certain arctic Indian tribes, there is no difference between an herb chopper and head knife.  Reportedly, they use the same knife for many chores. They use the name Ulu.

Not Indians, but Eskimo.  Ulu's are also, by the same people, called a "woman's knife."  <g>

[Bill Houghton]

According to certain arctic Indian tribes, there is no difference between an herb chopper and head knife.  Reportedly, they use the same knife for many chores. They use the name Ulu.

Not Indians, but Eskimo.  Ulu's are also, by the same people, called a "woman's knife."  <g>

And, by the way, "Eskimo" is not their name for themselves.  The two slightly different groups lumped into "Eskimo" are the Yupik, who live in most of Alaska, and the Inuit or Inupiat, who live in a limited part of Alaska and in Canada (the two groups are also in Siberia, but I didn't want to get too distracted).  Many people consider "Eskimo" not a very positive term; it's apparently derived from another tribe's term for them, that was adopted and adapted by Europeans, fur traders and the like, when contact was first made.

[Branson]

>And, by the way, "Eskimo" is not their name for themselves.

Very true, and there is a pejorative meaning to "Eskimo."  I believe those in the eastern part of North America use yet another name than Inuit or Yupik, though I don't recall it off hand.  Extra reward points for knowing Yupik!

[OilyRascal]

....there is a pejorative meaning to .....

You just led this "redneck hillbilly" to lookup the definition of pejorative.  The things I learn here.

[oldtools]

"The things I learn here"  Copied from (Inuit History-Native Americans);
"about 1000 AD, the Tuniit people began to be conquered by a third wave of people who were moving east from Alaska along the Arctic Circle. These people called themselves the Inuit (some people call them the Eskimo, but that's an insulting Algonquin word for them). The Inuit seem to have reached the Atlantic coast by around 1400 AD. These Inuit people were shorter than the Tuniit, but they had big military advantages because they had dogs and boats, and apparently the Tuniit didn't. The Inuit hunted whales and used the meat to eat and the bones to build their houses"