Note 19 — PETER KALM’s TRAVELS. (continued 2)

The Indians had their little plantations of maize in many places; before the Swedes came into this country, the Indians had no other than their hatchets made of stone; in order to make maize plantations they cut out the trees and prepared the ground in the manner I have before mentioned19. They planted but little maize, for they lived chiefly upon hunting; and throughout the greatest part of summer, their Hopniss or the roots of the Glycine Apios, their Katniss, or the roots of the Sagittaria Sagittifolia, their Taw-ho or the roots of the Arum Virginicum, their Taw-kee or Orontium aquaticum, and whortle-berries, were their chief food. They had no horses or other cattle which could be subservient to them in their agriculture, and therefore did all the work with their own hands. After they had reaped the maize, they kept it in holes under ground, during winter; they dug these holes seldom deeper than a fathom, and often not so deep; at the bottom and on the sides they put broad pieces of bark. The Andropogon bicorne, a grass which grows in great plenty here, and which the English call Indian Grass, and the Swedes Wilskt Grass20, supplies the want of bark; the ears of maize are then thrown into the hole and covered to a considerable thickness with the same grass; and the whole is again covered by a sufficient quantity of earth: the maize kept extremely well in those holes, and each Indian had several such subterraneous stores, where his corn lay safe, though he travelled far from it. After the Swedes had settled here and planted apple-trees and peach-trees, the Indians, and especially their women, sometimes stole the fruit in great quantity; but when the Swedes caught them, they gave them a severe drubbing, took the fruit from them, and often their clothes too. In the same manner it happened sometimes that as the Swedes had a great encrease of hogs, and they ran about in the woods, the Indians killed some of them privately and feasted upon them: but there were likewise some Indians who bought hogs of the Swedes and fed them; they taught them to run after them like dogs, and whenever they removed from one place to another, their hogs always followed them. Some of those Indians got such numbers of these animals, that they afterwards gave them to the Swedes for a mere trifle. When the Swedes arrived in America, the Indians had no domestic animals, except a species of little dogs. The Indians were extremely fond of milk, and ate it with pleasure when the Swedes gave it them. They likewise prepared a kind of liquor like milk in the following manner: they gathered a great number of hiccory nuts and walnuts from the black walnut-trees, dried and crushed them; then they took out the kernels, pounded them so fine as flour, and mixed this flour with water, which took a milky hue from them, and was as sweet as milk. They had tobacco-pipes of clay, manufactured by themselves, at the time that the Swedes arrived here; they did not always smoke true tobacco, but made use of another plant instead of it, which was unknown to the old Swedes, but of which he assured me that it was not the common mullein, or Verbascum Thapsus, which is generally called Indian Tobacco here21.