towns captive bears were fattened for festive occasions. These tribes
were far less improvident than the roving Algonquins, and stores of
provision were laid up against a season of want. Their main stock of
corn was buried in _caches_, or deep holes in the earth, either within
or without the houses.

In respect to the arts of life, all these stationary tribes were in
advance of the wandering hunters of the North. The women made a species
of earthen pot for cooking, but these were supplanted by the copper
kettles of the French traders. They wove rush mats with no little skill.
They spun twine from hemp, by the primitive process of rolling it on
their thighs; and of this twine they made nets. They extracted oil from
fish and from the seeds of the sunflower,--the latter, apparently,
only for the purposes of the toilet. They pounded their maize in huge
mortars of wood, hollowed by alternate burnings and scrapings. Their
stone axes, spear and arrow heads, and bone fish-hooks, were fast giving
place to the iron of the French; but they had not laid aside their
shields of raw bison-hide, or of wood overlaid with plaited and twisted
thongs of skin. They still used, too, their primitive breastplates and
greaves of twigs interwoven with cordage. [ Some of the northern tribes
of California, at the present day, wear a sort of breastplate "composed
of thin parallel battens of very tough wood, woven together with a small
cord." ] The masterpiece of Huron handiwork, however, was the birch
canoe, in the construction of which the Algonquins were no less skilful.
The Iroquois, in the absence of the birch, were forced to use the bark of
the elm, which was greatly inferior both in lightness and strength.
Of pipes, than which nothing was more important in their eyes, the Hurons
made a great variety, some of baked clay, others of various kinds of
stone, carved by the men, during their long periods of monotonous leisure,
often with great skill and ingenuity. But their most mysterious fabric