14 
with the Hurons for corn and tobacco. 1 The Ottawa planted their corn, 
beans, and squashes, whereas the non-agricultural Ojibwa whose descend- 
ants occupy Parry island today moved away from the maple groves to 
fish and hunt. Moose were now lean and difficult to follow, so the principal 
game were beaver, deer, and smaller animals like the muskrat and the 
woodchuck. Fish, however, were the chief mainstay of the Indians 
throughout the spring and summer. Large shoals of pickerel and suckers 
began to ascend the rivers in May, and the men speared them in thousands, 
or caught them by hand in stone weirs, for the women to skin and dry. 
The birds were nesting at this time, and the Indians gathered many eggs 
of ducks, geese, and even seagulls. A little later the women gathered wild 
roots and berries, some of which they stored away for the early winter; 
blueberries they crushed raw and dried in the sun on sheets of birch bark, 
but thimble-berries they cooked into cakes before drying. In midsummer 
they gathered reeds for making mats, cedar bark for both bags and mats, 
and basswood bark for twine. At the same time they helped their husbands 
to build canoes of birch bark, and laid in an extra store of the bark for 
making baskets. Then there were skins to tan, ropes to cut out of rawhide, 
and snow-shoe frames to fashion from the white ash. In August the 
Ojibwa from the northern end of Georgian bay travelled south to obtain 
good hickory for making arrows. These varied occupations filled the 
whole time of the Indians until the ripening of the wild rice in September. 
The agricultural Ottawa, of course, devoted many hours during the summer 
to their gardens, in which the men often worked side by side with the 
women. 
So many descriptions have been published of the rice harvesting that 
it seems unnecessary to repeat them . 2 The grain was beaten from the 
stalks into canoes, dried in the sun on sheets of birch bark and parched 
over a slow fire on straw-covered frames. It was then pounded and 
winnowed to remove the husk and stored in the ground, either in large, 
cylindrical elm-bark boxes like com, or in smaller baskets of birch bark 
like maple sugar. In Georgian bay during the last hundred years, and 
perhaps in early times also, the men generally assisted in the harvesting 
of the rice, although the women alone performed the drying and storing. 
Sometimes, however, the women carried out the whole process unaided, 
while the men spent the time in various odd tasks, such as fishing, shooting 
birds, and putting the finishing touches on their canoes. In early days, 
the Indians say, bull-heads swarmed so thickly among the ripe grain 
that they could haul them in, one after another, merely with a piece of 
meat tied to the end of a basswood line; clouds of pigeons darkened the 
air, an easy mark for the hunter’s arrows, and at dawn such flocks of 
ducks came to feed on the rice that a man standing in water to his waist 
among the stalks could knock them down by dozens with a stick. One 
custom in connexion with the harvesting deserves special mention. Several 
informants stated positively that long before the Ojibwa had any contact 
with Europeans it was usual to wrap a few grains in clay and throw them 
into the water to make new plants for the ensuing year. If a similar 
1 All my informants agreed that the Georgian Bay Ojibwa did not grow their own tobacco in early times. 
1 Cf. David Thompson's Narrative, p. 275, and, for an exceptionally detailed account from the Ojibwa of Wis- 
consin and Minnesota, Densmore, op. at., pp. 313-317. 
