The Amerindians of the southern parts of Canada and British Columbia were more or less settled peoples of towns or villages, of fixed homes to which they returned at all seasons of the year, however far afield they might range for warfare, trade, or hunting. But the more northern tribes were nomads: people shifting their abode from place to place in pursuit of game or trade. Unlike the people of the south and west (though these only grew potatoes) they were not agriculturists: the only vegetable element in their food was the wild rice of the marshes, the sweet-tasting layer between the bark and the wood of certain trees, and the fruits or fungi of the forest or the lichen growing on the rocks. Though these people might in summertime build some hasty wigwam of boughs and moss, their ordinary dwelling place was a tent.
The Wood Indians, or Opimitish Ininiwak, of the Athapaskan group (writes Alexander Henry, sen.) had no fixed villages; and their lodges or huts were so rudely fashioned as to afford them very inadequate protection against the weather. The greater part of their year was spent in travelling from place to place in search of food. The animal on which they chiefly depended was the hare—a most prominent animal in Amerindian economy and tradition. This they took in springes. From its skin they made coverings with much ingenuity, cutting it into narrow strips and weaving this into the shape of a blanket, which was of a very warm and agreeable quality.
The Naskwapi Algonkins of inland Labrador were savages that led a wandering life through the bare, flat parts of that country, subsisting chiefly upon flesh, and clothing themselves with the skin of the caribou, which they caught in pitfalls or shot with the bow and arrow. "Very few sights, I believe, can be more distressing to the feelings of humanity than a Labrador savage, surrounded by his wife and five or six small children, half-famished with cold and hunger in a hole dug out of the snow and screened from the inclemency of the weather by the branches of the trees. Their whole furniture is a kettle hung over the fire, not for the purpose of cooking victuals, but for melting snow" (James M'Kenzie).
A description of the tents of the Kris or Knistino (Algonkins of the Athabaska region), written by Alexander Henry, sen., applies with very little difference to all the other tribes dwelling to the east of the Rocky Mountains.[11]
These tents were of dressed leather, erected with poles, generally seventeen in number, of which two were tied together about three feet from the top. The first two poles being erected and set apart at the base, the others were placed against them in a slanting position, meeting at the top, so that they all formed nearly a circle, which was then covered with the leather. This consisted of ten to fifteen dressed skins of the bison, moose, or red deer, well sewed together and nicely cut to fit the conical figure of the poles, with an opening above, to let out smoke and admit the light. From this opening down to the door the two edges of the tent were brought close together and well secured with wooden pegs about six inches long, leaving for the door an oval aperture about two feet wide and three feet high, below which the edges were secured with similar pegs. This small entrance did well enough for the natives, who would be brought up to it from infancy, but a European might be puzzled to get through, as a piece of hide stretched upon a frame of the same shape as the door, but somewhat larger, hung outside, and must be first raised by the hand of the incomer.
Such tents were usually spacious, measuring twenty feet in diameter. The fire was always made in the centre, around which the occupants generally placed a range of stones to prevent the ashes from scattering and to keep the fire compact. New tents were perfectly white; some of them were painted with red and black figures. These devices were generally derived from the dreams of the Amerindians, being some mythical monster or other hideous animal, whose description had been handed down from their ancestors. A large camp of such tents, pitched regularly on a level plain, had a fine effect at a distance, especially when numerous bands of horses were seen feeding in all directions.
The "lodges" or long houses made of poles, fir branches, moss, &c., wherein, among the Iroquois, Algonkin, and Siou peoples, several families made a common habitation, are described here and there in the course of the narrative. The houses of the coast tribes of British Columbia were bigger, more elaborate, and permanent, and in this region the natives had acquired some idea of carpentry, and had learnt to make planks of wood by splitting with wedges or hewing with adzes.
One of these British Columbian houses was measured, and found to be seventy feet long by twenty-five feet wide; the entrance in the gable end was cut through a plank five and a half feet wide, and nearly oval. A board suspended on the outside answered for a door; on the other side of the broad plank was rudely carved a large painted figure of a man, between whose legs was the passage. But other houses on the Pacific coast, visited by Cook or Vancouver, are said to have been large enough to accommodate seven hundred people. These houses of the Pacific coast region were exceedingly filthy, sturgeon and salmon being strewn about in every direction. The men inhabiting them were often disgusting in their behaviour, while the women are declared to have been "devoid of shame or decency".
According to Mackenzie, such habitations swarmed with fleas, and even the ground round about them "was alive with this vermin". The Alexander Henrys, both uncle and nephew, complain of the flea plague (partly due to the multitude of dogs) in every Indian village or encampment.
The domestic implements of the Amerindians were few. Pottery seems to have been unknown amongst the northern tribes to the east and north of the Mississippi valley, but earthen jars and vessels were made by the Dakota-Siou group in the valley of the Mississippi. Amongst these agricultural Indians the hoe was made of a buffalo's blade bone fastened to a crooked wooden handle. The Ojibwés manufactured chisels out of beavers' teeth. The Eskimo and some of the neighbouring Amerindian tribes used oblong "kettles" of stone—simply great blocks of stone chipped, rubbed, and hollowed out into receptacles, with handles at both ends. (It is suggested that they borrowed the idea of these stone vessels for cooking from the early Norse settlers of Greenland; see p. [18].)