employed his boyish leisure in building houses in the forest. As
he grew older these mechanical pursuits took a more useful shape.
The average native American is taught as a question of self-
respect to despise female pursuits. To be made a "woman" is the
greatest degradation of a warrior.

Se-quo-yah first exercised his genius in making an improved kind
of wooden milk-pans and skimmers for his mother. Then he built her
a milk-house, with all suitable conveniences, on one of those
grand springs that gurgle from the mountains of the old Cherokee
Nation. As a climax, he even helped her to milk her cows; and he
cleared additions to her fields, and worked on them with her. She
contrived to get a petty stock of goods, and traded with her
countrymen. She taught Se-quo-yah to be a good judge of furs. He
would go on expeditions with the hunters, and would select such
skins as he wanted for his mother before they returned. In his
boyish days the buffalo still lingered in the valleys of the Ohio
and Tennessee. On the one side the French sought them. On the
other were the English and Spaniards. These he visited with small
pack-horse trains for his mother.

For the first hundred years the European colonies were of traders
rather than agriculturists. Besides the fur trade, rearing horses
and cattle occupied their attention. The Indians east of the
Mississippi, and lying between the Appallachian Mountains and the
Gulf, had been agriculturists and fishermen. Buccaneers, pirates,
and even the regular navies or merchant ships of Europe, drove the
natives from the haunted coast. As they fell back, fur traders and
merchants followed them with professions of regard and
extortionate prices. Articles of European manufacture--knives,