£ A 9 
[March 29, 1902. 
is constantly darker on the Back than the female, and 
this holds good even in calves of the spring. 
A very interesting point about these caribou is that the 
horns start in the calf when less than six months old. 
Two skins of calves of R. montanus and R. granti, now 
in the American Museum, bear horns, still" in the velvet, 
from four to six inches in length, and these calves were 
killed in November. 
An interesting discovery made by Mr. Stone is that the 
caribou never cross the Mackenzie River ; that is to say, 
the caribou on the east side do not cross to the west, nor 
do those on the west ever cross to the east. Indeed, it 
is believed that those on the east side do not approach 
wfthin one hundred miles of the Mackenzie River. Mr. 
Stone once noted, while stopping at Herschel Island, just 
west of the mouth of the Mackenzie — a point at which 
the whalers receive hundreds, if not thousands, of caribou 
saddles every winter from the mainland, the game being 
killed by Esquimaux or Indians whom they send inland 
for it — that the saddles from west of the Mackenzie 
averaged but thirty- three pounds in weight, while those 
from the east side of the Mackenzie averaged forty-five 
pounds. This suggestive difference in size will un- 
doubtedly be fully investigated by Mr. Stone at the first 
opportunity. 
During his long jotirneyings ' through this northern 
country, when he was obliged for much of the time to 
subsist solely by the product of his rifle, Mr. Stone has 
had an opportunity of trying all descriptions of native 
food. He tells us that the flesh of sheep and of caribou 
is, when in good condition, very delicious, but neither 
meat is so sustaining as the flesh of the moose. In 
fact, he declares that moose is the beef of the north; that 
its flesh is the best and strongest meat that can be had, - 
and that pemmican made from the flesh of moose is by all 
odds the best and most economical food that the ex- 
plorer in these cold countries can take with him. 
Mr. Stone's studies of the life of the north have been 
so fruitful of results that it is not to be doubted that a 
few years more of his work will bring together, in the 
American Museum of Natural History, in New York, a 
quantity of material from the important centers of animal 
life there, together with a mass of data concerning them, 
that will be of inestimable value in making these 
animals and their habits better known. The field is 
wide, full of interest and important, and it may well be 
that Mr. Stone's discoveries up to this point only hint at 
its possibilities. 
Wild Rice. 
It would be hard to name a native plant that has been 
more interesting to gunners, or more discussed in the 
sportsman's press, than the so-called wild rice of North 
America (Zizania aquatica). For gunners its interest has 
been chiefly as a food to attract wildfowl ; and it is also 
known as the food of rails, rice birds (bobolinks) and 
blackbirds. It is a plant of wide distribution, and well 
known to many people, and has no less than sixty popular 
names in this country, derived from four languages — 
the French, the English, the Algonquian and the Siouan 
tongues. 
While wild rice has been the subject of many briff and 
popular articles, which in different forms have repeated 
over and over again a few essential facts with regard to 
the plant, it has remained for Mr. Albert Ernest Jenks 
to write a very complete and most valuable monograph 
on the subject, which will appear as a portion of the 
Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 
and which was originally submitted as a thesis for the 
degree of Ph. D., in the University of Wisconsin, in the 
year 1899. 
Mr. Jenks is already well known to ethnologists, and, 
we may hope, to a large number of other persons who are 
not ethnologists, by his most valuable and charming little 
1 work, on the childhood of an Ojibwa Indian, entitled, 
"The Childhood of Ji-shib." This story, which is as 
attractive to little people as it is to the grown-ups, met 
with an immediate and natural success. It is absolutely 
faithful in its portrayal of Indian child character. It is 
full of feeling, and it shows, also, an intimate knowledge 
of Indian customs and of Indian thought. No one who 
has read this little book need be surprised to find coming 
from the pen of Mr. Jenks another work that is just as 
true, although it is much more pretentious, and written 
altogether from the point of view of the white man. Not 
only is this account full of interest from the botanical and 
_ natural history point of view, it is also interesting as 
giving a very full account of certain habits of many of 
the tribes which use the wild rice, and also as throwing 
new light from a new direction on certain features of 
the culture status of the North American Indian. 
The scientific name of the wild rice is that given it by " 
Linnseus, but it had been well known, and the name 
Zizania had been applied to it before his day. It is widely 
distributed throughout the temperate portions of the 
- North American Continent, at least, as far west as the 
great plains, since it is found abundantly in both the 
Dakotas and in Texas. We are told also that the Amer- 
ican plant is identical with that which grows in Japan, 
Formosa and eastern China, although different from a 
kindred species found in Japan and eastern Russia. 
There are two species of this genus — one, northern in 
its distribution, the better known form; the other, south- : 
ern, and growing in abundance in the brackish waters of 
the Southern States. It is possible that the ranges of the 
two species overlap, since the southern form {Zizania 
miliacea) is said to occur as far north as Ohio and Wis- 
consin. 
As is well known, wild rice is a tall, single-stemmed- - 
grass, or cane-like, plant, growing in the water. * The 
grain, when ripe, in autumn, falls into the water, sinks into 
the soft, alluvial mud at the bottom of lake or river, un- 
til the water grows warm in the springtime, when it 
sprouts and grows to the surface. The plant dies down 
each winter, and the stalks disappear. It has been called 
a perennial, and a biennial, but as a matter of fact, it is an 
annual, and each year grows from new seed. It blossoms 
in June, and by September the seeds are ripe. The stalks 
grow to a height of ten, twelve or even sixteen feet, and 
form a dense mass in and over the shallow water. 
When one considers the vast quantities of seed pro- 
duced by a bed of wild rice, one would imagine that it 
7?ould tend to, -spread itself sr> as to dhnlee up the hed? 
and line the shores of the streams and lakes where it is 
found. Sometimes it does this, but not under natural 
conditions. It must be remembered that the plant is an 
annual, that it produces a food eagerly sought for by 
many wild creatures, and that if it did not produce an 
enormous crop of seeds, it would tend to become extinct, 
owing to the small prospect of a sufficient number of the 
seeds being left to grow in the spring. Beside the birds 
already mentioned, man in the old time, and even to-day, 
is one of the chief enemies of the wild rice. In earlier 
times, too, according to Hunter — long a captive among 
the Kickapoo and Osage Indians in the early days of the 
last century— it was pastured upon by buffalo and other 
grazing animals. In old times, too, the wild pigeon, and 
a host of other small birds, fed on the wild rice, some of 
them picking it from the heads, others seizing it as it 
dropped to the water, while the diving ducks sifted the 
mud of the bottom, and sought for the last grain that 
fell. Beside this, caterpillars have been known to destroy 
crops of the rice in Canada and Minnesota, and various 
fungi kill the plant. 
Just how far north the wild rice grows is perhaps not 
exactly known, but Mr. Jenks gives its habitat as from 
about latitude 50 degrees on the north to the Gulf of 
Mexico On the south, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the 
Rocky Mountains. Its home is in quiet lakes and slug- 
wish waterways, and it prefers a muddy bottom. This is 
what Mr. Jenks has to say on this point, "Wherever the 
last glacier left little mud-bottomed, water-filled hollows, 
there wild rice has established itself, if other conditions 
are favorable. Such ponds and lakes are characteristic 
of the alluvial apron spread out over Wisconsin and Min- 
nesota. In 1817 the interior of Wisconsin is spoken of 
as watered with innumerable small lakes and ponds, which 
generally abound with folle avoine (wild rice), water 
fowl and fish, each in such prodigious quantities that the 
Indians are, in a manner, exempt from the contingent of 
famine. 
"Within the wild rice districts, sluggish streams and 
quiet bends in the rivers and creeks also produce wild 
rice, provided the bed is mud alluvium. The grain has 
followed the stream toward its mouth, the. water fowl 
has sown it in its flight, and the Indian has carried it to 
his favorite lakes and streams, until to-day it is safe to 
say that the grain is found wherever in these two States 
there is suitable soil." And this has always been so in 
historic times, for Marquette, in 1763, speaks of the Fox 
River as abounding in wild rice, saying: "The way is 
so cut up by marshes and little lakes that it is not easy 
to go straight, especially as the river is so covered with 
wild oats that one can hardly discover the channel." 
Carver, who journeyed into what was then the unknown 
Northwest, nearly a hundred years later, wrote: "In 
some places it is with difficulty that canoes can pass 
through the obstructions they meet with from the rice 
stalks, which are very large and thick." It is unneces- 
sary to enlarge on the abundance of the plant in this 
favored region. It is known that it grows both to the 
north and to the south, as already stated. It is reported 
as growing in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, and 
the seed has been planted in England, where perhaps it 
still grows. 
The human wild-rice gatherers of the North, in primi- 
tive times, are grouped under two great linguistic families, 
the Algonquian and the Siouan. These two families, in- 
habiting the same region, and living in the same way, 
though sometimes friendly, were yet more often bitterly 
hostile, until in 1862 the greater number of the Sioux 
were removed to a further Western home, while a number 
of the Algonquian tribes still live in the home of their 
ancestors, and still subsist largely on the rice. The earliest 
explorers of the country about the Great Lakes called 
some of these tribes Wild Rice people, giving them the 
French name, Folles Avoines, and spoke of the country 
by the same name. Mr. Jenks discusses, at some length, 
various tribes; both these stocks, as well as some others 
which have more recently moved into the region where 
the wild rice grows, and following this discussion, which 
is full of interesting historic matter, he passes on to a 
consideration of the production of the plant. 
Wild rice was native to this region, and a self-sower, 
and the main operations of man in this connection with 
it were the harvesting of the grain and the preparing it 
for food. Shortly before the ripening of the seeds, in 
August and September, the women often go to the rice 
fields in their canoes, and tie the standing stalks into small 
bunches. _ After some time has elapsed, and the grain 
has sufficiently matured to be gathered, two women com- 
monly go together to harvest the seed. The stems of the 
rice stands so close together that a paddle cannot be used 
for progression^ but the canoe is pushed along by a pole 
thrust against the muddy bottom. While one .woman 
propels the canoe, the other, by means of a stick, pulls 
toward her, and over the side of the canoe a number of 
the stalks; then with another stick she beats the heads off 
the plant, thus knocking the grain into the bottom of the 
canoe. When one end of the canoe is full, the women 
exchange Implements; the one who has been the grain 
gatherer, furnishes the motive power, and the other 
gathers the grain into her end of the canoe. When the 
vessel is filled it returns to the camp, where the grain 
is taken out, dried, thrashed and winnowed, and then put 
away for future use. 
While most of the wild rice tribes contented them- 
selves with visiting the natural crops and gathering their 
seed, others took pains to sow wild rice in suitable places, 
so that they might have a crop without fail. The Assini- 
boines are said to have done this in old times, and the 
Ojibwas to-day sow the seed, and in some places weed out 
the other plants which grow among the stalks. There is 
a sown field of rice on the Lac Courte Oreille River; it is 
a good field and produces a fine crop. 
Various motives have been assigned to the tying to- 
gether of the heads of the grain already mentioned. At 
the end of the seventeenth century, it was said by one 
author that this was done to protect it from the "water 
fowl. Another author says that it was done so that it 
might ripen. Another, that the collecting of the grain 
might be made easier when it was ripened. Another, 
that the tying up of the bunches gave those who had so 
prepared the heads an ownership in the grain that they 
had tied up. In some places it is distinctly stated by early 
authors that these heads of grain were tied up in rows so 
that the vessel could pass between the rows, which might 
then, conveniently he beaten into the c^nne. Slightly 
different methods of gathering prevailed in different lo- 
calities and among different tribes, but the process was 
essentially the same with all. 
After the grain is gathered it is taken to the shore 
and at once prepared for curing. As the seeds, when they 
have become ripe, drop from the heads at the slightest 
motion, it is necessary that they should be gathered while 
still green, otherwise the very operation of gathering 
them would result in a considerable loss. The curing of 
the grain, which is also called its artificial ripening, must 
therefore be done, and done at once. It is interesting to 
note that rice thus artificially ripened will not germinate, 
and this may account for the lack of success of many 
persons in endeavoring to introduce this plant. 
The grain may be cured by the sun, by smoke and 
heat from a slow fire, the grain being spread on a 
scaffold above the fire, and lastly, by parching and dry 
cooking in a vessel. 
In the sun-drying process, the grain is spread on sheets 
of birch bark, or on blankets on the ground, and dried in 
the sun. Subsequently the dried grain may be placed 
in a copper kettle and roasted over a slow fire, being con- 
tinually stirred until the whole mass of the grain is 
roasted, when the hulls are removed. Sometimes the 
grain is spread on racks to dry in the sun. In drying 
by fire the grain is spread on racks, or on wooden slabs, or 
on mats, or even on a bed of reeds and grass. In each 
case a slow fire is kept burning under it for the neces- 
sary length of time. The popping or parching process is 
commonly done by putting a moderate quantity of the 
grain into kettles or pots, beneath which a slow fire is 
built. The thrashing, by which is meant the removing 
of the hull from the long, slender grain of the rice, is 
commonly done by men and boys. Sometimes the grain 
is flailed out by beating it with a stick; at others a quan- 
tity of the rice is placed in a hole in the ground, which 
has been previously lined with buckskin, and a man steps 
into the hole, and by continual treading, frees the grain 
from the hulls. A quantity, estimated at about four 
quarts, is put -an the hole at a time. In other cases the 
holes are lined with wood ; a block at the bottom, and 
staves a't the sides, which overlap. Sometimes those who ' 
tread out the grain wear moccasins, and sometimes they 
do it with' the bare feet. In old times, among certain 
tribes, the grain was pounded in the hole with a stick, 
which had a lump at one end somewhat like a pestle. 
After the grain has been beaten or trod out, the husks 
still remain mixed up with the grain. Then a quantity is 
transferred to a birch-bark dish, or tray, which is more or 
less shaken, bringing the husks to the top of the mass, 
while the heavier grain sinks to the bottom. The con- 
tents of the tray is then tossed lightly outward, and the 
tray drawn back toward the body of the worker, and the 
husks fall out of the tray and are carried away by the 
wind. 
After the grain has been harvested, thrashed out and 
winnowed, it must be stored until time of necessity, or 
for its ceremonial use. The rice is commonly stored in 
sacks or boxes made of skins or old cloth, or of birch 
bark. These are often buried in the ground in caches, 
which are lifted as the rice is needed for food. Among 
some tribes, wild rice fields were divided up into plots, 
which in a manner belonged to the various families of the 
tribe or band possessing the field; and the rice growing 
on each section was gathered by the women of that family, 
and belonged to them; though, of course, from the com- 
munity of interest in food, acknowledged by all Indians, 
those who in times of scarcity were well provided, shared 
their food with those who were in want. 
The amount of rice gathered by the Indians is not very 
great. > Tanner, in 1820, stated that one family would 
ordinarily collect about five bushels of rice, or that those 
who were industrious would make twenty-five bushels, 
though this was very rare. At the present day the In- 
dians at Pelican Lake, gather about twelve or fifteen 
bushels per family. Mr. Jenks gives some tables, show- 
ing how much wild rice is gathered by certain Indians, but 
as these reports come from the statements of Indian 
agents, they are probably not reliable. 
It is well known that wild rice is a palatable and nu- 
tritious food, and many writers have compared it favor- 
ably with the ordinary commercial white rice. Chemical 
tests of the composition of the grain, made by Mr. Ed. 
Peters and Prof. F. W. Woll, chemist of the Agricultural 
Experiment Station, at Madison, Wis,, indicate that 
wild rice is more nutritious than other native 
foods to which wild rice producing Indians had access. 
These foods are maize, green corn, cornmeal, white 
hominy, strawberries, huckleberries, cranberries, sturgeon, 
brook trout and dried beef. They show also that it is 
more nutritious than any of our common cereals. Indian- 
produced wild rice is very rich in proteine, or the albu- 
minoids which produce flesh; far richer than any of the 
other foods given above, except sturgeon and dried beef. 
It thus appears that wild rice is the most nutritive single 
food which the Indians of North America consume. 
Perhaps the commonest method of cooking wild rice 
was as an ingredient in soups and stews. The dried or 
parched rice was often carried by the Indians on the 
warpath, or on long journeys, and wa; eaten dry, but 
more commonly it was cooked with the meat of deer, 
bear, birds and fish, or with berries, or even alone. The 
cooked grain was often eaten alone, as well as with maple 
sugar. The cooked grain is hardly less popular among 
white people than among Indians. It may be boiled, when 
green, by simply pouring over it scalding water, but the 
parched wild rice must be cooked for half an hour, while 
that which has been cured over a fire requires to be boiled 
for an hour. It is said that a coffee cup of the grain, 
measured before cooking, will furnish a fvdl meal for two 
Indians, or sufficient breakfast food for eight or ten per- 
sons. Long, in his "Voyages and Travels," speaks of 
the use of the wild rice as a food for little children. The 
hulled grain was pounded between two stones and boiled 
in water with maple sugar. 
Commonly, the quantity of rice gathered by any group 
of Indians was not sufficient to last them for more than 
a short time. Often a whole crop was consumed during 
the fall and early winter, though occasionally tribes 
harvested enough to last them through the winter months, 
and Carver tells of Indians who saved sufficient for the 
whole year. 
It is a well-known fact that Indians are likely to regard 
with especial reverence any description of food on which 
th«y chiefty denend. As the Indian of the»p!aips re^ard^ 
