Early in the spring our people returned to Like-a-Fishhook Point and took up again the labor of clearing and planting fields. Each family had its own field, laid out in the timbered bottom lands along the Missouri, if possible, in a rather open place where there were no large trees to fell.
Felling trees and grubbing out bushes were done with iron tools, axes and heavy hoes, gotten of the traders. I have heard that in old times my tribe used stone axes, but I never saw them myself. Our family field was larger than any owned by our neighbors; and my mothers were at pains to add to it, for they had many mouths to feed. My grandmother, Turtle, helped them, rising at the first sound of the birds to follow my mothers to the field.
Turtle was old-fashioned in her ways and did not take kindly to iron tools. “I am an Indian,” she would say, “I use the ways my fathers used.” Instead of grubbing out weeds and bushes, she pried them from the ground with a wooden digging stick. I think she was as skillful with this as were my mothers with their hoes of iron.
Digging sticks are even yet used by old Hidatsa women for digging wild turnips. The best kind is made of a stout ash sapling, slightly bent and trimmed at the root end to a three-cornered point. To harden the point, it is oiled with marrow fat, and a bunch of dry grass is tied around it and fired. The charring makes the point almost as hard as iron.
Turtle, I think, was the last woman in the tribe to use an old-fashioned, bone-bladed hoe. Two other old women owned such hoes, but no longer used them in the fields. Turtle’s hoe was made of the shoulder bone of a buffalo set in a light-wood handle, the blade firmly bound in place with thongs. The handle was rather short, and so my grandmother stooped as she worked among her corn hills.
She used to keep the hoe under her bed. As I grew a bit older my playmates and I thought it a curious old tool, and sometimes we tried to take it out and look at it, when Turtle would cry, “Nah, nah![4] Go away! Let that hoe alone; you will break it!”
[4] Näh
We children were a little afraid of Turtle.