The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century | Page 8

Indeed, this is stated by the Tuscarora Indian, Cusick, in his curious
History of the Six Nations (Iroquois). Brébeuf says, that as early as

1636 the Jesuits taught the Hurons to build rectangular palisaded works,
with bastions. The Iroquois adopted the same practice at an early period,
omitting the ditch and embankment; and it is probable, that, even in
their primitive defences, the palisades, where the ground was of a
nature to yield easily to their rude implements, were planted simply in
holes dug for the purpose. Such seems to have been the Iroquois
fortress attacked by Champlain in 1615.
The Muscogees, with other Southern tribes, and occasionally the
Algonquins, had palisaded towns; but the palisades were usually but a
single row, planted upright. The tribes of Virginia occasionally
surrounded their dwellings with a triple palisade.--Beverly, History of
Virginia, 149. ]
Among these tribes there was no individual ownership of land, but each
family had for the time exclusive right to as much as it saw fit to
cultivate. The clearing process--a most toilsome one--consisted in
hacking off branches, piling them together with brushwood around the
foot of the standing trunks, and setting fire to the whole. The squaws,
working with their hoes of wood and bone among the charred stumps,
sowed their corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, sunflowers, and Huron
hemp. No manure was used; but, at intervals of from ten to thirty years,
when the soil was exhausted, and firewood distant, the village was
abandoned and a new one built.
There was little game in the Huron country; and here, as among the
Iroquois, the staple of food was Indian corn, cooked without salt in a
variety of forms, each more odious than the last. Venison was a luxury
found only at feasts; dog-flesh was in high esteem; and, in some of the
towns captive bears were fattened for festive occasions. These tribes
were far less improvident than the roving Algonquins, and stores of
provision were laid up against a season of want. Their main stock of
corn was buried in _caches_, or deep holes in the earth, either within or
without the houses.
In respect to the arts of life, all these stationary tribes were in advance
of the wandering hunters of the North. The women made a species of
earthen pot for cooking, but these were supplanted by the copper kettles
of the French traders. They wove rush mats with no little skill. They
spun twine from hemp, by the primitive process of rolling it on their
thighs; and of this twine they made nets. They extracted oil from fish

and from the seeds of the sunflower,--the latter, apparently, only for the
purposes of the toilet. They pounded their maize in huge mortars of
wood, hollowed by alternate burnings and scrapings. Their stone axes,
spear and arrow heads, and bone fish-hooks, were fast giving place to
the iron of the French; but they had not laid aside their shields of raw
bison-hide, or of wood overlaid with plaited and twisted thongs of skin.
They still used, too, their primitive breastplates and greaves of twigs
interwoven with cordage. [ Some of the northern tribes of California, at
the present day, wear a sort of breastplate "composed of thin parallel
battens of very tough wood, woven together with a small cord." ] The
masterpiece of Huron handiwork, however, was the birch canoe, in the
construction of which the Algonquins were no less skilful. The Iroquois,
in the absence of the birch, were forced to use the bark of the elm,
which was greatly inferior both in lightness and strength. Of pipes, than
which nothing was more important in their eyes, the Hurons made a
great variety, some of baked clay, others of various kinds of stone,
carved by the men, during their long periods of monotonous leisure,
often with great skill and ingenuity. But their most mysterious fabric
was wampum. This was at once their currency, their ornament, their
pen, ink, and parchment; and its use was by no means confined to tribes
of the Iroquois stock. It consisted of elongated beads, white and purple,
made from the inner part of certain shells. It is not easy to conceive
how, with their rude implements, the Indians contrived to shape and
perforate this intractable material. The art soon fell into disuse,
however; for wampum better than their own was brought them by the
traders, besides abundant imitations in glass and porcelain. Strung into
necklaces, or wrought into collars, belts, and bracelets, it was the
favorite decoration of the Indian girls at festivals and dances. It served
also a graver purpose. No compact, no speech, or clause of a speech, to
the representative of another nation, had any force, unless confirmed by
the delivery of a string or belt of wampum. [ Beaver-skins