Just as the Hurons of Lorette are snowshoe, canoe and moccasin-makers, the Abenakis are sweet-grass basket-makers. And their market? Mais oui—all over Canada—east and west—, north and south, and the United States. Rumour says that the turnover to the village and region from the baskets is in the neighbourhood of $250,000 a year. Men, women and children work at this basket industry. There is no factory. It is all pleasant homework. Women at work sit on their porches. Housewives ply their fingers in the kitchen, picking up the basket, as other women pick up knitting. Little children braid the grass over backs of chairs in the door of the little play-tent on the lawn. Schoolgirls make pin-money at it. Neighbours gossip in dooryards, basket in hand.
Baskets talk in the grocery and dry-goods shops in Pierreville as successfully as money. If a man or a woman needs a little change, he or she takes a basket in hand and comes back with the silver. It was a happy discovery when the founders of this people trekking it to Canada came by chance on the original grass growing on islands in the river. It was a still luckier turn of fate that prompted some old squaw to dry it as a simple herb and in so doing—though she must have been disappointed from the herbal point of view—to learn the astounding fact that dried, the grass gave forth a pleasing odour—that it was—in her simple language—“sweet”.
So simple a discovery as this, and determination to put it to use, is the Abenaki’s stock-in-trade. Out of it he has built up a quarter-of-a-million dollar business. And he now farms the grass as do more or less all the French farmers of this neighbourhood, because the business has grown to such an extent that the natural supply is not enough. The only part of the basket taken in hand by the men is the preparation of the splint from the big log. The only factory (?) for this work stood across the street from our door. It was merely a neat yard with a board top for shade. Here every morning two big ash logs were pounded with the head of a wood-axe until the layers or rings of the tree’s growth could be stripped off. Little by little these strips were made thinner by a man who separated the ends of each strip and tore them asunder, through their entire length, by means of two small boards held between his knees.
Other men ran the strips through a planing machine. Two keen steel teeth in a board, paralleled the required width, and the wooden ribbon rolled into a bolt was ready for both the market and the dye-pot of madame. I should not be surprised if this is the only factory of its kind on this continent. Certainly it is
“POUR MADAME’S BOUDOIR.”
THE TWICKENHAM OF CANADA.
the only one with Abenaki labour—and Abenaki atmosphere throughout. Its counterpart has been here a long time. Its beginnings reach back very far into Canadian history.