38 
or sewn together with spruce roots, gave them roomy chests and 
boxes for cooking their meat and fish and for stoiing their household 
effects. Tough, elastic woods like yew, ash, hickory, and maple, 
made excellent bows and clubs, as well as hanflles for adzes, spears, 
and knives. Even the northern Indians and the Eskimo had the 
willow, spruce, and in some places birch, all woods that can be 
applied to many uses. ^'lany of these trees, particularly the elm. 
willow, and spruce, had long, tough roots that the Indians could 
employ as thread and twine even to the extent of making fish-nets; 
willow and spruce roots, indeed, were favourite materials for basketry. 
Certain barks were valuable. Spruce- and birch-bark covered the 
frames not only of canoes but of dwellings, and from birch-bark the 
Indians made buckets and otlier utensils. Cedar bark shredded too 
readily for canoe coverings, and was very indammable as a roofing; 
but, like the bark of the basswood, it was beaten into cloth, woven 
into baskets and mats, and twisted into cord and ropes. 
Stone tools, therefore, were the foundation of the whole fabric 
of economic life, and their manufacture had an essential place in the 
education of every Indian. Many natives acquired remarkable skill 
in the chipping of flint and quartz, and some of their arrowheads, 
knife-blades, and animal figures rival the best work of the pre- 
historic Egyptians. Chipped implements, however, call for skill 
rather than time or labour, whereas the quarrying of hard rocks, 
and their pecking and grinding into polished adzes and pestles, 
embellished occasionally with realistic figures, required not only 
skill, but days and weeks of patient toil.^ Since the value of an 
object is largely proportional to the labour expended on its manu- 
facture and the difficulty of replacing it, an indispensable tool like 
the stone adze was worth as much to the Indian as a steel ax to 
the woodsman or trapper who lives far removed from the outposts 
of civilization. 
Neither chipped nor polished stone implements, however, are as 
efficient as steel tools for cutting wood and bone; and the making 
of a wooden bowl, a horn spoon, or any of the implements and 
utensils necessary for the home, involved an amount of labour that 
Europeans, accustomed to machine-made products, would consider 
1 Lafitau greatly exaggerates, however, when he says " Often a savage’s whole lifetime hardly 
sulhees (for the maiiuiticiuie of a stone adzej”; op. eit., ii, 110. 
