here by the Europeans. De Soto brought the first horses and pigs, and when the English began to settle here, they brought oxen, sheep, cows, and all the animals which are seen in an English barnyard.

The Indians who lived in Virginia and the eastern States were even less civilized than those De Soto encountered. Their houses, or "wigwams," were often made of several poles, put into the ground in a circle, and tied together at the top in the shape of a round tent. These poles were covered with mats woven of grass, and the inner bark of trees, which was tough and fibrous. Sometimes the wigwams were square, with poles thrust in the ground in each corner, forming a room eighteen or square, with walls of matting and a roof of the same. tre of the roof was a hole through which the smoke might pass when they built a fire inside this tent. Often the walls inside were lined with the fur of the deer, and piles of these deer-skins made very comfortable beds.

Wigwam.

twenty feet In the cen

In the summer the Indians wore very little clothing, but in the winter the northern Indians dressed warmly in mantles of fur, sometimes very handsomely trimmed with feathers. They wore leggings of skins, and their moccasins or shoes were made of the same material. When they were in full dress the men wore high crests of bright feathers on their heads, and decorated their faces with paints of many colors. They seemed to think this paint added very much to their beauty, and if any of the young Indian girls could get a little blue and yellow and red paint to daub over her cheeks and forehead in long streaks, she was very proud of her personal appear

ance.

They also had strings of shells of different colors, which they used for ornaments. These were woven into belts, and sometimes embroidered upon the edges of their fur mantles, or up and down their leggings, and made little tinklings when they walked. These shells, which they called wampum, they used for money, and had dif ferent values for them, as they were more or less rare. After the white men began to trade with the Indians they brought over many-colored beads which the Indians also called wampum, and used for decoration in the same way that they had used the shells. Often they would give bushels of corn, or an armful of rich furs, for a single handful of bright-colored beads.

The deer was a very valuable animal to the Indians. After they had stripped him of his skin to make their clothes, or their beds,

or the lining to their wigwams, they had his carcass for food. And they used his sinews for thread to sew their clothing, or their canoes of birch bark.

These canoes or boats were sometimes made of logs, hollowed out something as you have seen a pig's trough, but oftener they were made of the bark of the birch-tree, stripped off in one long piece and carefully fitted over a light frame of cedar wood. In these frail little boats, which danced on the water like a plaything, the Indians, sometimes eight or ten in one canoe, would make long journeys in rivers abounding in falls and rapids, and would come safely back in them. When they were on shore, the boats were so light they could take them on their shoulders and carry them from one river to another.

There was no need of their suffering for want of food. Besides the deer which were so abundant, and the corn and beans which they raised every season, there were quantities of wild fowl and game which they could shoot with their bows and arrows. Then

the ocean, rivers, and inland lakes swarmed with fish. All the Indians who lived near the sea, or any body of water, were very skillful in taking fish, and it was a principal feature in their diet. Indeed, many of the Indian dishes would seem very delightful to a hungry man, and quite make his mouth water to think of.

At one time, after a colony of Englishmen had been settled in Virginia and was getting on prosperously, a party of colonists coming over from England to join them were shipwrecked, and cast ashore some miles below the English settlement on a rocky island. One of the gentlemen, named Colonel Norwood, who was a kinsman of the governor of the colony, tells the story of their sufferings. For some time they lived on oysters which they found on the rocks, but at last even the supply of oysters gave out, and they were actually forced to become cannibals, and eat the bodies of their dead companions. In this great distress some Indians found them, carried them off the island in their canoes, took them to their wigwams, and fed and succored them in the tenderest manner.

Colonel Norwood describes the houses and fare of the Indians very minutely, and cannot praise too much their kindness, who thus saved the lives of all the party. This is his description of the king's wigwam :

"Locust posts sunk in the ground at corners and partitions was the strength of the whole fabric. The roof was tied fast to the posts with a sort of strong rushes which grew there, which supplied the place of nails and pins.

"This house or wigwam was about twenty feet square, and on both sides were platforms about six feet long, covered with skins which were used for beds. In the middle of the roof was the hole for the smoke, which naturally did not all rise out at this opening without the aid of a chimney, but was plentifully distributed in all parts of the wigwam.'

The first dish which the starving party were served with was what the natives called "hominy," or Indian corn boiled and beaten to a mash. This they handed round in a wooden bowl, a large clean muscle shell serving for a spoon. Then they fed them with steaks cut from the hind-quarters of a deer, and roasted before the coals on a sharp stick. Another time they had a wild turkey boiled with oysters, and served up in the same pot in which it was boiled. "This," says Colonel Norwood, "was a very savory mess, and I believe would have passed for a delicacy at any great

table in England, by palates more competent to make a judgment than mine, which was now more gratified with the quantity than the quality of what was before me."

All the cooking utensils of the savages were either of stone or a kind of rude earthenware made of baked clay. Indeed, all their implements were of the rudest kind. You can imagine they were so, when you remember they had no iron whatever. Even the Aztecs, who were partly civilized, had no iron, although they knew how to melt copper, silver, and gold. But the northern Indians understood the use of none of the metals. Their most dangerous weapons, and all their instruments for hunting and fishing, were of stone rudely hammered and sharpened. The heads of their arrows were of stone, and their tomahawks (a kind of war-club which they could fling so dexterously as to split the skull of an enemy), were also of sharpened stone.

Weapons.

After the English came they soon learned to use muskets and fire-arms of different kinds. But at first they were very much afraid of them. Often after they had seen these weapons they would fancy, when they were taken ill, that some unseen bullet had wounded them, and they would send to beg a white man to come and cure them. They could not understand, either, what gunpowder was, and the first quantity which they obtained they planted in the ground, expecting it to come up in the spring, as the corn and beans did, and they could raise a large crop of it.

The men among the Indians occupied themselves most of the time in hunting and fishing and going to war. In war they were brave and fearless, although their manner of warfare seemed very mean and cowardly to the whites. They rarely came out in fair and open battle, as the Europeans did. They hid from their enemies to leap upon them and surprise them; they lurked behind trees, from which shelter they shot their weapons; and considered it fair to practice any kind of stratagem upon their foes. When they killed or murdered an enemy on the battle-ground, they cut the skin all around the top of his head and tore away the hair, and this they called the scalp. The bravest Indian chief had many scalp locks of his dead foes hanging at his wampum girdle when he went to dance his fierce war-dance, and on the handle of his tomahawk was cut notches for each scalp he had taken in battle. When they were

captured and put to death they rarely uttered a cry or groan, but bore terrible pain very heroically. Indeed, they seemed to be less sensitive to pain than the white man. Yet though very agile and brave and indifferent to pain, it proved in the end that the white man could endure hardships longer than the Indian, and that he died under sufferings and burdens which the white man could sustain and live through.

The Indian women were treated much like slaves by the men.

They did all the labor, such as planting the corn and the other work in the fields. They put up the tents, wove the mats for the walls, pounded the corn for the flour or hominy, and did all the work except hunting and fishing. The men seemed to care very little for their women, and there was less love between Indian husbands and wives than among almost any other people ever known. They were an idle, wandering race, taking their huts from one place after the hunting grounds were exhausted, and the deer all killed from that spot, and pitching them somewhere else. Then the women trudged along carrying the heavy burdens of lodge-poles and household wares and rolls of furs, their babies strapped on their backs,