448 AGRICULTURE. 



the Indians possessed. Unacquainted with the use of iron, 

 their cutting instruments aiad sharp weapons were pointed with 

 flint-stone, shells, or bones, and their earthen vessels were of 

 the coarsest description. They had no domestic animals except 

 a few small dogs, and no poultry. 



Such was the primitive agricultural life of the Indians, who 

 have been gradually blotted out from their pleasant homes, to 

 make way for the "pale faces." On many sunny slopes now 

 smiling with cultivation were their cheerless wigwams, their, 

 crabbed orchards, and their ill-tinted corn-patches. Beneath 

 the shade of forests long since felled, and where flourishing 

 communities now dwell, they tracked the wild beast to his lair, 

 or reposed, weary of the chase, to partake of their slaughtered 

 game. Where spires now point heavenward, and the doors of 

 school-houses " swing on their golden hinges," the war-hatchet 

 was unburied, or the " calumet " of peace was whiffed, or the 

 " pow-wows " went through their mystic incantations. And as 

 we meet at cattle-shows and agricultural anniversaries, so the 

 Indians, in their day, celebrated the " green corn dance," or the 

 "feast of the chestnut moon." 



" Alas for them their day is o'er ; 

 Their fires are out from hill and shore. 

 No more for them the red deer bounds, 

 The plow is in their hunting grounds, 

 The pale man's axe rings through their woods, 

 The pale man's sail skims o'er their floods, 

 Their pleasant springs are dry." 



Spanish Colonial Agriculture. Spain having discovered 

 America, endeavored to colonize the regions of which so many 

 wonderful and mysterious accounts were circulated by the early 

 navigators. As early as 1520 a royal edict, "in order the better 

 to facilitate the emigration and permanent establishment of col- 

 onists," offered to all who wished to go, provisions for a year ; 

 to defray the transportation of their supplies and persons ; 

 exemption from all duties and imposts ; and the perpetual 

 ownership of the houses they might construct, and the lands 

 they might cultivate. But the needy adventurers who flocked 

 to the New World sought gold and glory rather than homes 

 and lands, especially those who landed oh the shores of Florida. 



