The government also broke up big fields of prairie ground, and had us plant corn in them; but these fields on the prairie near the hills I do not think are so good as our old fields down in the timber lands along the Missouri. The prairie fields get dry easily and the soil is harder and more difficult to work.
Then I think our old way of raising corn is better than the new way taught us by white men. Last year, 1911, our agent held an agricultural fair on this reservation; and we Indians competed for prizes for the best corn. The corn which I sent to the fair took the first prize. I raised it on new ground; the ground had been plowed, but aside from that, I cultivated the corn exactly as in old times, with a hoe.
Iron Kettles
The first pots, or kettles, of metal that we Hidatsas got were of yellow tin [brass]; the French and the Crees also traded us kettles made of red tin [copper].
As long as we could get our native clay pots, we of my father’s family did not use metal pots much, because the metal made the food taste. When I was a little girl, if any of us went to visit another family, and they gave us food cooked in an iron pot, we knew it at once because we could taste and smell the iron in the food.
I have said that we began cooking food in an iron kettle in my father’s family when I was about eighteen years old; but the great iron kettle that lies in Goodbird’s yard was given us by an Arikara woman before I was born.