Stories of American Life and Adventure | Page 3

trade between the white men and the
Indians.
At the time that Henry Spelman first went among the Indians, they had
no iron tools except a very few that they had bought of the white people.
They had no guns, nor knives, nor hatchets. They had no hoes nor axes.
They made their tools out of hard wood, shells, stones, deer horns, and
other such things. They had not yet bought blankets from the white
men, but made their clothes mostly out of the skins of animals.
The Indians could not learn much about the white man's arts from
Spelman, because he did not know much. Besides, he had no iron of
which to make tools. He learned to make arrows of cane such as we use
for fishing rods. He also learned to point his arrows with the spur of a
wild turkey, or a piece of stone. These arrow points he stuck into the
arrow with a kind of glue. But he first had to learn how to make his
glue out of deers' horns. Before he could make any of the tools, he had
to make himself a knife, as the Indians did. Having no iron, the blade of
his knife was made out of a beaver's tooth, which is very sharp, and
will cut wood. He set this tooth in the end of a stick. You see how hard
it was for an Indian to get tools. He had to learn to make one tool in
order to use that in making another tool.
One of the principal things that an Indian had to do was to make a
canoe; for, as the Indians had no horses, they could travel only by water,
unless they went afoot. Canoes were the only boats they had. They had
to make canoes without any of the tools that white men use. Let us
explain this by a story about Henry and an Indian boy. The things in the
story may not have happened just as they are told, but the account of
how things are made by the Indians is all true.

THE MAKING OF A CANOE.
Henry had a young Indian friend whose name was Keketaw. One day
Keketaw said to him, "Let us go into the woods and make a canoe."
"If we had an ax to cut down the trees," said the white boy, "or an adz,
such as they have at Jamestown, or if we could get a hatchet, we might
make a canoe; but we have not even a little knife."
"We will make a canoe in the Indian way," said Keketaw. "I will show
you how. Let us get ready."
"What shall we do to get ready?" asked Henry.
"We must take our bows, and we must make many arrows, so as to get
something to eat, and we must have fishing lines," said Keketaw, "or
we shall not be able to live in the woods."
For some days the two boys were getting ready. It took them a long
time to scrape a piece of bone into a fishhook by means of a beaver's
tooth set in a stick, but they made three of these hooks. They made
some more hooks not so good as these by tying a splinter of bone to a
little stick. Keketaw's mother made fishing lines for them. She took the
long leaves of the plant which we call Spanish bayonet, and separated
these threads into a hard cord, rubbing them between her hand and her
knee.
"We must have swords," said Keketaw.
"We can cut our meat with this," said Henry, pointing to a knife made
of cane, such as the Indians called a pamesack.
"But the Monacans may come," said Keketaw. "If we should see one
sticking up his head, I should want a sword to fight him with; and if we
should kill him, we could cut off his scalp with it;" and Keketaw's eyes
glistened a little at the thought of fetching home a Monacan's scalp.

The Monacans were fierce Indians of a tribe living in the country west
of the Powhatan Indians. They were deadly enemies of Keketaw's tribe.
The two boys, by much slow work with stones and shells and
beaver-tooth chisels, managed to scrape a wooden sword into shape.
This, Henry was to wear at his back. Keketaw, for his part, found a
piece of deer's horn. He stuck it into a stick so that it made something
like a small pickax. With this he said he could quickly break the head
of a Monacan. It would also serve as a sort of hatchet.
The land round the village in which Keketaw lived had been cleared of
trees. This had been done by burning the trees in order to make room
for