[BURPEE] YORK FACTORY TO THE BLACKFEET COUNTRY 339 
which is dryed Horse-dung.t They appear to be under proper discipline, 
& obedient to their Leader: who orders a party of Horsemen Evening 
& Morning to reconitre;? and proper parties to bring in provisions. 
They have other Natives Horsemen as well as Foot, who are their 
Enemies: they are also called the Archithinue Indians: & by what I 
can learn talk the same language, & hath the same customs. They are, 
like the other Natives murthering one another slyly. Saw many fine 
Girls who were Captives; & a great many dried Scalps with fine long 
black hair, displayed on poles, & before the Leader’s tent. They follow 
the Buffalo from place to place: & that they should not be surprised by 
the Enemy, encamp in open plains. Their fuel is turf, & Horse-dung 
dryed ; their cloathing is finely painted with red paint; like unto English 
Ochre: but they do not mark nor paint their bodies. Saw four Asses. 

1Hendry may have been under a misapprehension as to the nature of 
the “tobacco ” smoked by the Blackfeet. Certainly in 1872 they smoked the 
native tobacco, common to all the tribes of the plains. “The natives shew 
me,” says Cocking, ‘a tobacco plantation belonging to the Archithinue In- 
dians, about 100 yards long & 5 wide, sheltered from the northern blasts by 
a ledge of poplars; & to the Southward by a ridge of high ground.” La 
Vérendrye, in the journal of his trip to the Mandans in 1738-39, mentions 
that tobacco was then grown on the Missouri—‘ Lesté blée et tabac au bas 
de la rivière” When he approached the first Mandan village, messengers 
met him and presented him with the calumet. When Alexander Henry, the 
Younger, visited the Mandans in 1806, he was presented with native tobacco. 
As the herb was not yet arrived at maturity (it was toward the end of July) 
the natives used only the blossoms. “ These,” he says, “are collected as 
required, dried before the fire on a fragment of an earthen pot, and smoked 
by all the natives. But I find the flowers a very poor substitute for our 
own tobacco—a nauseous, insipid weed. The ripe leaf is somewhat better, 
but even that is mere trash, possessed of neither strength nor virtue.” This 
native tobacco was the Nicotiana quadrivalvis. Prince Maximilian says that 
the Missouri Indians smoked “the leaves of the tobacco plant, which is 
cultivated by them; the bark of the red willow (Cornus sericea), which they 
obtain from the traders, is sometimes mixed with the tobacco, or the latter 
with the leaves of the bearberry (Arbutus uva ursi). The tobacco of the 
White, unmixed, is too strong for the Indians, because they draw tthe smoke 
into their lungs; hence they do not willingly smoke cigars.’ He adds: 
“The tobacco cultivated by (the Mandans, Manitaries and Arikkaras, attains 
a great height, and is suffered to grow un from the seeds, without having 
any care whatever bestowed upon it.” Although buffalo-dung, known among 
the fur-traders as bois de vache, was always used more or less as fuel by the 
Indians of the plains, when wood was unobtainable, no other traveller seems 
to have recorded its use as a substitute for tobacco. 
2See Chap. 12, Bain’s ed. of Alexander Henry’s Journal, for a very full 
account of discipline among the Assiniboines. Also La Vérendrye’s Journal 
(Archives Report, 1889, p. 13). 
