INDIAN AGEIOULTUEE. 611 



tliereb}" their principal diet of game and fish. Such aboriginal agriculture, 

 untaught by white men, yet far from being despicable, I saw in September, 

 1885, at the Ojibway village a mile southeast of the Nan-ows of Red Lake. 

 This largest village of the Ojibways in Minnesota consists of thirty or forty 

 permanent bark lodges, scattered on an area which reaches a half mile from 

 northwest to southeast, and is 40 to 60 rods wide. Adjoining the village 

 were fields of ripening maize or Indian corn, amounting to about 50 acres, 

 besides about 5 acres of potatoes and probably an acre or more of squaslies. 

 These crops showed a luxuriant growth and abimdant yield, and the weeds 

 among them had been held in check by hoeing. During the spring, sum- 

 mer, and autumn, most of the one hundred and fifty or two hundred inhab- 

 itants of this village are usually absent in expeditions for hunting, and in 

 successive portions of the season to make maple sugar, to gather Seneca 

 snakeroot for sate, to pick cranberries, and to reap the natural harvest of 

 wild rice (Zbania aquatica L.) which grows plentifully in the streams and 

 shallow lakes and forms tlie most substantial part of the provisions laid 

 up for the winter.^ In the prame country the })lace of the wild rice is par- 

 tially supplied by the very nutritive, turnip-like root of the pomme de terre 

 {Psoralea esculenta Pursh), which is dried, pulverized, and vised as flour by 

 the Dakotas." 



At an earlier time, of which no distinct tradition is preserved by the 

 hunting tribes of Indians inhabiting this region, other tribes, who built 

 the mounds and probably lived more by agriculture and less by the chase, 

 overspread all the prairie district of Lake Agassiz, extending also east in 

 the wooded country to Rainy Lake. The enduring earthwoi'ks erected by 

 this people testify of their formerly Avide extension throughout the Missis- 

 sippi and Red River basins, and show that the sites of tlieir villages were 

 chosen usually on the banks and bluffs which overlook the food-giving 

 rivers and lakes, often commanding an extensive and beautiful prospect. 

 Most of the mounds within the area of Lake Agassiz are round and have 

 the form of a dome, their height ranging from 3 to 10 feet or rarely more 



'The Flora of Minuesota, in the Twelfth Annual Report, Geol. ami Nat. Hist. Survey of Minne- 

 sota, for 1883, p. 159. 

 -Ibid., p. 42. 



