FIRE, COOKING, AND VESSELS. 263 



Micmacs and Souriquois/ the Blackfeet and the Crees,^ are 

 known to have been stone-boilers ; the Shoshonees or Snake 

 Indians, Hke the far more northerly tribes of Slaves, Dog-Ribs, 

 etc.,^ still make, or lately made, their pots of roots plaited or 

 rather twined so closely that they will hold water, boiling their 

 food in them with hot stones j* while, west of the Rocky Mounr 

 tains, the Indians used similar baskets to boil salmon, acOrn 

 porridge, and other food in,^ or wooden vessels such as Captain 

 Cook found at Nootka Sound, and La Perouse at Port Fran- 

 Qais.^ Lastly, Sir Edward Belcher met with the practice of 

 stone-boiling in 1826 among the Esquimaux of Icy Cape.''' 



So instantly is the art of stone-boiling supplanted by the 

 kettles of the white trader, that, unless perhaps in the north- 

 Avest, it might be hard to find it in existence now. But the 

 state of things in North America, as known to us in earlier 

 times, is somewhat as follows. The Mexicans, and the races 

 between them and the Isthmus of Panama, were potters at the 

 time of the Spanish discovery, and the art extended northward 

 over an immense district, lying mostly between the Rocky 

 Mountains and the Atlantic, and stretching up into Canada. 

 In Eastern North America the first European discoverers found 

 the art of earthenware-making in full operation, and forming a 

 regular part of the women's work, and on this side of the con- 

 tinent, as high at least as New England, the site of an Indian 

 village may be traced, like so many of the ancient settlements 

 in the Old World, by innumerable fragments of pottery. But 

 the Stone-Boilers extended far south on the Pacific side, and 

 also occupied what may be roughly called the northern half of 

 North America. 



In that north-eastern corner of Asia which is of such extreme 

 interest to the ethnographer, as preserving the lower human 

 culture so near the high Asiatic civilization, and yet so little 

 influenced by it, the art of Stone-boiling was found in full force. 



1 Schoolcraft, part i. p. 81. = Harmon, p. 323. 



3 Mackenzie, p. 37, and see p. 207. " Schoolcraft, part i. p. 211. 



° Schoolcraft, part iii. pp. 107, 146. 



^ Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 321. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. pp. 26, 69. 



' Belcher, in Tr. Eth. Soc, vol. i. 1861, p. 133. 



