Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/194

174 frost, where they stored their vegetables and kept their tubs of salted meat. They raised their wood-piles nigh at hand, and very soon had shelters for domestic cattle, — goats, cows, pigs, — and for poultry. The Indian had resources within his reach which he only in small part improved. He had no salt for pickling, and could only smoke and dry his surplus meat or fish. His native vegetables were peas, beans, melons, squashes, pumpkins, gourds, maize; the forest yielded in abundance juicy berries, some succulent roots and grasses and grapes, as well as game; and the ocean shore, lakes, and rivers gave up their finny spoils. White men on the frontiers have contrived to live, and after a fashion luxuriously, on these resources. The Indian, also, had his feasts upon them, but not wholly to the exclusion of fasts. Gathering details from a wide and varied list of early authorities about their way of life and habits in these respects, we can make rather a favorable show for them. It seems evident that white men learned from the Indian the process of making sugar from the sap of the maple-tree, and also the medicinal virtues of several roots and herbs. The natives, as before stated, unquestionably anticipated their white visitors in their sudatory treatment of the sick, after the fashion of our modern Turkish baths; though Lafitau finds the process and contrivance in the old classic world, as he traces so many parallels there with things supposed to be peculiar to our aborigines. They buried heaps of their ripe maize, or Indian corn, in pits, or packed it high on scaffoldings, and a skilful squaw could make a variety of dishes from this substantial grain. In fact, it would appear that the early European colonists, in all their widely separated harboring places on the whole stretch of our sea-coast, were indebted to the surplus maize which the Indians had in store, to save them, on one or another exigency, from starvation.

When Jacques Cartier first ascended the St. Lawrence,