or islands, wholly surrounded by Algonkins. The southern colonies were in contact with tribes of the Muscogee family,—the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. It is only by language and customs that this classification can be made; the lines of alliance and hostility among the Indians did not conform to those of race and speech, and the universal adoption of captives, especially of children taken in war, stood in the way of any very marked diversity of physical appearance or mental characteristics.

II.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE BARBARIANS.

THE Indian manner of living, learned from the climate and the hard necessities of the wilderness, afforded many suggestions to the colonists. In Virginia, as in New England, the planting of the Indians' corn saved the first settlers from starvation, and the white men imitated the Indian method of planting and cooking it. Having no iron, the savages cleared their fields awkwardly by girdling the

trees and letting them stand, if the forest was not dense, or by burning down the tree, and then severing the trunk into logs by means of little fires. The stone axes used in some tribes were accounted precious and were handed down as heir-looms. They were provided with helves by splitting a cleft in a young tree and inserting the ax; here it remained until the wood had grown about it, when a section of the sapling was taken out with the ax inclosed. The Southern Indian twisted a hickory withe about the ax-head for a handle. Even after they had got iron tools from the whites, it suited the indolent temper of the race better to burn down the trees than to chop them. They had hoes made of wood, of a turtle-shell affixed to a stick, or of a sharp stone, or a deer's shoulder-blade similarly arranged. The corn was planted as our farmers plant it, in hills three or four feet apart, with four or five grains in a hill. Beans grew about the stalk then as now, and pumpkins or squashes filled the intervening space.

The very names of our dishes are witnesses that the European-Americans learned many ways of cooking from the Indians. Pone, hominy, samp, succotash, and supawn are words borrowed from the aboriginal tongues; and the preparations of Indian corn which bear these names were served in wigwams, no doubt, for ages before white men had ever seen the gay streamers and waving tassels of the maize-field. On a hot stone, or the bottom of an earthern vessel set before the fire, the aboriginal baked what the pioneer afterward baked on his hoe and called a hoecake; the toothsome southern "ash-cake" was also first made by the squaws, who shrouded it in husks before committing it to the fire. The Indians knew how to hull corn by applying lye. They celebrated the coming of the delicious green "roasting-ears" by a solemn feast. They nourished infants and invalids with maize-gruel, and they were before us also with the merry pop-corn-"the corn that blossomed," as the Hurons called it.

But our wild brethren and sisters" used Indian corn in ways unknown to us; it was their chief food, and they "put it through all its sauces." Jerusalem artichokes, dried currants, powdered mulberries, indeed, almost all other sorts of fruit and flesh,-were mixed with it. They cooked little doughnuts of meal by dropping them into maple syrup. One of their most useful preparations was probably that which, in Virginia, was called rockahominy, and in New England, nokick-simply parched corn pulverized, and carried in a pouch in journeying; it was mixed, before eating, with snow in winter and with spring water in summer. They used maize for many

other things: of the meal they made poultices; with a bowl of mush, given by the bride to her new lord, some tribes celebrated marriages; by means of the grains of maize, to represent a penny or stiver, the savage cast up his accounts with the trader; grains of corn were sent as tickets to those who were bidden to a feast; and, by putting them into gourds and turtle-shells, rattles were made. The husks they braided for mats and wrought into baskets, into light balls for some of their games, into salt-bottles, and even shoes, long before the white man took the hint and made of them chair-bottoms, floormats, and collars for horses. Maize was worshipped as a divinity. Children were kept in the field to watch the precious grain as it grew; but some of the tribes protected the thievish crow, because of the legend that a crow had brought them the first seed of the plant which supported their life on so many sides.

From the aborigines the settlers learned the use of other articles of food, such as the persimmon of the South, and the so-called ground-nut of the North. Penn found the savages eating baked beans, as white people do yet in Boston. The festoons of drying pumpkin in the frontierman's cabin are imitated from the Indians.

None knew better than the red men with what last resorts to sustain life in time of famine. The roving Adirondacks, who planted little, if at all, were called "tree-eaters" by their enemies, because they were often obliged to subsist on the "rock-tripe" lichen, and the inner bark and buds of trees. The starving condition to which many of the European pioneers were reduced obliged them to learn to eat the food with which the savages supplied their wants. The first Virginia settlers were glad to feed on the green snake, and a hundred years later the meat of the rattlesnake was regarded as "dainty food" by some of the planters. The Indians were not epicures. Even their varied preparations of maize must have been insipid from the lack of salt in most of the tribes. But a savage appetite is not fastidious. Putrid meat, whole frogs, the intestines of the deer just as taken from the animal, and fish-oil or bear's oil, even when rancid, were not refused. Fruit was not suf fered to ripen, lest others should find it; the tree was felled, and the fruit, sour and acrid as it was, consumed at once.

The Indian's wigwam was too easily made and too well suited to the pressing needs of the settlers, not to be occasionally used. All the tribes in the country east of the Alleghanies built bark-houses, though of varying degrees of excellence and stability. In a place

of temporary dwelling, or among the more shiftless tribes, it was but a rude little shelter, with a hole at the side by which the owner entered and the smoke came out. The Iroquois race, on the other hand, as well as some Algonkin tribes, constructed an elaborate compound wigwam of bark, capable of holding a clan of many families, of affording some rude conveniences, and of fending the bitter northern cold. The Indians of Virginia and the Carolina coast built houses of red cedar bark, sometimes fifty or a hundred feet long; while the Muscogees, and perhaps others, had winter-houses of logs. But the house of bark was almost universal, and was so well suited to the roving life and easy habits of the savage that even the apostle Eliot could persuade but few of his converts to accept the white man's house. The majority thought it an advantage that they could easily remove the wigwam, and thus be rid of the vermin.

In Virginia, the primitive cabins of Jamestown borrowed the bark roof and other features from the wigwam. The best of these cabins were decorated with brightly colored Indian mats, which the exiled gentry of Lord De la Warre's time playfully compared to "arras hangings and tapestry." In Massachusetts many of the poorer settlers dwelt at first in tents and booths, and for a long time after in wigwams. In Maryland, the first comers shared an Indian village with the original owners. In East Jersey, the settler erected in a single day a wigwam that served him until he could build a palisade house. The Quakers in West Jersey were glad to winter in Indian wigwams at first. In the warmer climate of Frederica, in Georgia, bowers of palmetto-leaves took the place of the preliminary bark shelter. Perhaps the only surviving relic of the Indian mode of building among the white people in the Eastern States is the bark "camp". a sort of wigwam-still used as a place of temporary abode by sportsmen in the northern forests.

With the bark-cabin, with maize, and with tobacco, came the only social customs derived from the Indians by the colonists. When a wigwam was to be built, land to be opened for corn, or other difficult work to be done, the Indian called out all of his neighbors; the husking of the maize, too, was always attended by a merry crowd. Such customs were well suited to the physical and social wants of a community in the wilderness; the "house-raising," the "wood-chopping" and the "apple-peeling" came to be as universal among the colonists as among the Indians. In New England, the word bee" was invented as a generic name for parties of this

sort. The practice of smoking together by the wayside and elsewhere, in sign of friendship, which the Puritan law-makers thought too pleasant to be harmless, was an Indian custom; among the tribes of the great interior valley it had come to be in some cases a state solemnity, so that the calumet or peace-pipe was the safe-conduct of an ambassador.

The make-shifts of the wilderness were early acquired from the savages: modes of hunting, of trapping, and of traveling, the "blazing" of trees to mark new forest-paths, the twisting of ropes from the inner bark of the slippery elm, and other devices for meeting the exigences of forest living. For years the Plymouth pilgrims pounded their corn in wooden mortars, after the primitive manner of their neighbors; and the same practice prevailed in other pioneer settlements. The Virginians were still using the fish-weir at the period of the Revolution. When the Southern or Western farmer, dressing his swine, drops hot stones into a barrel of water until it boils, he makes use of a device common to those tribes of Indians that had only wooden vessels. The making of sugar from the maple was practiced by the Indians, who boiled the sap in earthen pots. The pine-knot candle, so generally used in the cabins of the colonists, had lighted the smoky wigwams, no doubt, for ages before Europeans arrived. The canoe made by excavating a log is still in use: the Indian wrought it painfully by burning the wood and scraping it out with shells or stones. If one may believe the reports, there were some canoes, probably of bark, among the Long Island tribes, that would carry eighty men apiece; those carrying half that number were not uncommon. The birch-bark canoe -the Indian's masterpiece-still holds its own among the Northern trappers, guides, and voyageurs, as does also the ingenious network snow-shoe. So, too, the dressing of skins with the brains of the animal, and the making of basket-splints by pounding ash-wood until the "growths" separate, are lessons which the frontierman learned from the savage.

It is evident that the contributions of the red race to pioneer life in this country were many and important. In estimating the influence of the Indians on colonial character, we must take into account the corruption of manners on the frontier, proceeding from the trickery which always accompanies trade with ignorant and childish savages, and from the irregular relations of white men with Indian women. The idleness and the paucity of moral restrictions in savage life rendered it attractive to reckless men. The New England lawgivers punished dwellers in the tents of the heathen for their pagan way of living;