MORGAN.) TRIBES OF THE PLAINS. GE 
an “early variety,” the “hominy corn,” and the “bread corn,” 
also beans, 
squashes, pumpkins, and tobacco. Chestnuts, a tuberous root something 
like the potato but gathered in the marshes, berries, fish, and game, entered 
into their subsistence. Like the Iroquois, they made unleavened bread of 
maize flour, which was boiled in earthen vessels,” in the form of cakes, about 
six inches in diameter and an inch thick. 
Among the tribes of the plains, who subsist almost exclusively upon 
animal food, their usages in the hunt indicate the same tendency to com- 
munism in food. The Blackfeet, during the buffalo hunt, follow the herds 
on horseback in large parties, composed of men, women, and children. 
When the active pursuit of the herd commences, the hunters leave the dead 
animals in the track of the chase to be appropriated by the first persons who 
come up behind. This method of distribution is continued until all are 
supplied. All the Indian tribes who hunt upon the plains, with the excep- 
tion of the half-blood Crees, observe the same custom of making a com- 
mon stock of the capture. It tended to equalize, at the outset, the means 
of subsistence obtained. They cut the beet into strings, and either dried it 
in the air or in the smoke of a fire. Some of the tribes made a part of the 
capture into pemmican, which consists of dried and pulverized meat mixed 
with melted buffalo fat, which is baled in the hide of the animal. 
During the fishing season in the Columbia River, where fish are more 
abundant than in any other river on the earth, all the members of the tribe 
encamp together, and make a common stock of the fish obtained. They 
are divided each day according to the number of women, giving-to each an 
equal share. At the Kootenay Falls, for example, they are taken by spear- 
ing, and in huge baskets submerged in the water below the falls. The 
salmon, during the spring run, weigh from six to forty pounds, and are 
taken in the greatest abundance, three thousand a day not being an unusual 
number. Father De Smet, the late Oregon missionary, informed the writer, 
in 1862, that he once spent several days with the Kootenays at these falls, 
and that the share which fell to him, as one of the party, loaded, when 
dried, thirty pack mules. The fish are split open, scarified, and dried on 
1 History of the American Indians, p. 430. 2Tb., pp. 406, 408, 
