456 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
town, concentric circles of aboriginal earthworks were closely fol- 
lowed by the outlying streets. An octagonal courthouse, surrounded 
by a circular green, became the hub of the town. And it is said that 
“in the Wabash River bottoms, in the early spring, many farmhouses 
stand high and dry on a wooded burial mound while all the fields are 
under water.” ® 
Among the early settlers, communication by water was everywhere 
the most important. While they were familiar with certain types 
of watercraft in their own culture, they and their descendants have 
been influenced by at least two types used by the Indians, the Chesa- 
peake Bay log canoe and the bark canoe of the north. 
From a European point of view, the Indians wearing moccasins, 
leggings, and breechclouts were considered to be relatively naked 
compared to themselves. However, considered in a very broad 
culture-historical perspective, their own style and that of the 
aborigines shared a generic trait in common: throughout the 
boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere, clothing of the fitted 
or tailored type prevails, standing in marked contrast to the un- 
tailored style once found in the ancient Mediterranean region, 
Africa, and Central and South America. In all these latter regions, 
for example, nothing like the fitted footgear represented by the 
boot, shoe, or moccasin is found. While the practice never spread 
beyond the frontier itself, nevertheless there were white men who 
adopted the wearing of not only Indian moccasins, but leggings 
and a breechclout as well. The moccasin, of course, is the most 
noted item of Indian clothing that was used by white men very early. 
It was a fitted type of footgear, and if the colonists had been Romans, 
this item of clothing might not have been borrowed so quickly, or 
its use continued. Turner has noted that the General Court of Mas- 
sachusetts once ordered 500 pairs each of snowshoes and moccasins 
for use in the frontier counties. Much later, footgear of this type 
was used by lumbermen. In the backwoods of Manitoba in the 1930’s, 
a clergyman of my acquaintance always wore a pair of his best beaded 
moccasins in the pulpit on Sundays. It would be interesting to know 
more about the commercialization of the moccasin type of shoe which 
we see increasingly on the feet of Americans today. 
It was, however, the discovery of the plants cultivated by the New 
World aborigines that from the very first produced the most pro- 
found impact on both European and American culture, revolution- 
izing the food economy and diet of Old World peoples and at the 
same time laying one of the foundations on which was to rise the 
distinctive structure of American agriculture. Of the several 
plants—maize, beans, pumpkins, squash, and others—maize in partic- 
® Walter Havighurst, ‘‘Land of Promise, the story of the Northwest Territory,’ pp. 24— 
25, 158. New York. 1946. 
