262 INDIANS OF NOVA SCOTIA — GILPIN. 



wore the same dress, with the exception of a tight girdle around 

 the cloak. In camp the men wore nothing but the waist leather. 

 They had no covering for their heads, using the loose cape of their 

 cloaks as shelter in winter. The hair was worn long, . cut short in 

 front and sometimes trussed on the top or behind by a feather or pin. 

 For ornaments they seem to neither have been painted or tatooecl, 

 but to have made strings of black wooden beads and pieces of white 

 shells. The quills of the porcupine were also dyed with bright 

 colours and formed into plats and squares. The men cared but little 

 about these things, but they wore knives at their breasts. These 

 people, thus clothed, lived in movable wigwams, a conical tent 

 made of birch bark fastened around poles tied at the top, and at the 

 bottom encircling an area of about twelve feet diameter. During 

 summer they pitched them at the sea side or on the lake borders ; 

 in winter they retired to the forest. In the short summer they lived 

 upon fish, and during the long winter when the fish had retired from 

 the shore, they hunted the elk and reindeer. They, when at war 

 and expecting an attack madeapallisaded fort, by taking a square of 

 living trees, thickening up the spaces with poles and brushwood and 

 leaA'ing but one place of entrance, and building their camps or wig- 

 wams within it, thus contriving a rude fortification. In a print of 

 the period from Champlain, of the pallisaded forts in Canada, the 

 structure is much more elaborate, and built of hewn timber, but 

 LesCarbot distinctly asserts that our Indians never felled trees, not 

 even for fire wood. The few household utensils they possessed were of 

 wood, stone and horn, or bone. They had pots of a very coarse 

 baked pottery, and stone axes and mallets, knives and gouges. 

 Deers' horn and bone were also used, and from a recent deposit at 

 Lunenburg we find copper knife blades and needles made from the 

 native copper of the Bay of Fundy, hammered into shape. They 

 also had the beautiful racquet or snow shoe, that has come down to 

 us unaltered. These simple utensils, with their skins and furs and 

 the boat, or canoe, that transported them from sea coast to lake side, 

 formed all their wealth. They had already acquired the habit of 

 smoking, and though they did carve their pipes sometimes into 

 forms of animals, yet the usual pipe was a stone hollowed at one 



