Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/122

 advanced families of the Iroquois tribes. There are still upon the Iroquois reservations in this State many log houses or cabins with but a single room on the ground floor, and a loft above, with neither a table or chair in their scanty furniture. A portion of them still live very much in the old style, with perhaps two regular meals daily instead of one. That they have made this much of change in the course of two centuries must be accounted remarkable, for they have been compelled, so to speak, to jump one entire ethnical period, without the experience or training of so many intervening generations, and without the brain-growth such a change of the plan of domestic life implies, when reached through natural individual experience There is a tradition still current among the Seneca-Iroquois, if the memory of so recent an occurrence may be called traditional, that when the proposition that man and wife should eat together, which was so contrary to immemorial usage, was first determined in the affirmative, it was formally agreed that man and wife should sit down together at the same dish and eat with the same ladle, the man eating first and then the woman, and so alternately until the meal was finished.

The testimony of such writers as have noticed the house-life of the Indian tribes is not uniform in respect to the number of meals a day. Thus Catlin remarks, "As I have before observed, these men (the Mandans) generally eat but twice a day, and many times not more than once, and these meals are light and simple * * * The North American Indians, taking them in the aggregate, even when they have an abundance to subsist on, eat less than any civilized population of equal numbers that I have ever travelled among. And Heckewelder, speaking of the Delawares and other tribes, says: "They commonly make two meals every day, which they say is enough. If any one should feel hungry between meal-times, there is generally something in the house ready for him. Adair contents himself with stating of the Chocta and Cherokee tribes that "they have no stated meal time. There was doubtless some variation in different localities, and even in the same household; but as a general rule, from what is known of