Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/496

480 In the intervals of the meals and prayers the Indians are of course variously employed according to their trade or occupation—that is to say, either in agricultural labors, according to the season, or in the store-rooms, magazines, and laboratories of the mission. The women are much occupied in spinning and other little household labors, the men in combing wool, weaving, melting tallow, etc. One of the principal occupations of the missions is the manufacturing a coarse sort of cloth from the wool of their own sheep for the purpose of clothing the Indians. The grinding the corn is left almost entirely to the women, and is still performed by a hand-mill."

It was a shrewd stroke of policy on the part of the fathers to allot the laborious work of grinding meal to the women, in whose hands it had been from time immemorial, since the men would have stooped to such labor only by dint of the strongest coercion.



With reference to the grinding of corn, Langsdorff (1806), learning that the hand-mill which Pérouse, out of the kindness of his heart, left at the San Carlos Mission (1786), with the view to lighten the heavy labor of the mealing-stones, was not in existence, and that no use had been made of it as a model to manufacture others, records the curious fact that in perpetuating the use of the stone grinding process the fathers were actuated by motives of policy. To use his own words, "As they have more men