Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/274

264 that since the Assinaboins had learnt from the Mandans to make pottery, and had been supplied with vessels by the traders, they had entirely done away the custom, "excepting at public festivals; where they seem, like all others of the human family, to take pleasure in cherishing and perpetuating their ancient customs." Elsewhere among the Sioux or Dacotas, to whom the Assinaboins belong, the tradition has been preserved that their fathers used to cook the game in its own skin, which they set up on four sticks planted in the ground, and put water, meat, and hot stones into it. The Sioux had the art of stone-boiling in common with the mass of the northern tribes. Father Charlevoix, writing above a century ago, speaks of the Indians of the North as using wooden kettles and boiling the water in them by throwing in red-hot stones, but even then iron pots were superseding both these vessels and the pottery of other tribes. To specify more particularly, the Micmacs and Souriquois, the Blackfeet and the Crees, are known to have been stone-boilers; the Shoshonees or Snake Indians, like the far more northerly tribes of Slaves, Dog-Ribs, etc., still make, or lately made, their pots of roots plaited or rather twined so closely that they will hold water, boiling their food in them with hot stones; while west of the Rocky Mountains, the Indians used similar baskets to boil salmon, acorn porridge, and other food in, or wooden vessels such as Captain Cook found at Nootka Sound, and La Pérouse at Port Français. Lastly, Sir Edward Belcher met with the practice of stone-boiling in 1826 among the Esquimaux of Icy Cape.

So instantly is the art of stone-boiling supplanted by the kettles of the white trader, that, unless perhaps in the north-west, it might be hard to find it in existence now. But the state of things in North America, as known to us in earlier times, is somewhat as follows. The Mexicans, and the races between them and the Isthmus of Panama, were potters at the