Our cooking consisted in pounding our corn into samp or hommany, boiling
the hommany, making now and then a cake and baking it in the ashes, and in
boiling or roasting our venison. As our cooking and eating utensils
consisted of a hommany block and pestle, a small kettle, a knife or two,
and a few vessels of bark or wood, it required but little time to keep
them in order for use.

Spinning, weaving, sewing, stocking knitting, and the like, are arts which
have never been practised in the Indian tribes generally. After the
revolutionary war, I learned to sew, so that I could make my own clothing
after a poor fashion; but the other domestic arts I have been wholly
ignorant of the application of, since my captivity. In the season of
hunting, it was our business, in addition to our cooking, to bring home
the game that was taken by the Indians, dress it, and carefully preserve
the eatable meat, and prepare or dress the skins. Our clothing was
fastened together with strings of deer skin, and tied on with the same.

In that manner we lived, without any of those jealousies, quarrels, and
revengeful battles between families and individuals, which have been
common in the Indian tribes since the introduction of ardent spirits
amongst them.

The use of ardent spirits amongst the Indians, and the attempts which have
been made to civilize and christianize them by the white people, has
constantly made them worse and worse; increased their vices, and robbed
them of many of their virtues; and will ultimately produce their
extermination. I have seen, in a number of instances, the effects of
education upon some of our Indians, who were taken when young, from their
families, and placed at school before they had had an opportunity to