Their vegetables were generally roasted or baked. They peeled and split the stalks of wild parsnip, roasting them over the hot coals to bring out the juice. They baked the prairie turnip, also camas roots, which they put in a long hole three feet deep, in layers with grass and leaves between, and hot stones at the bottom. Then the hole was covered and a fire kept burning over it for two days and two nights.
The women of our camp were continually at work, gathering wild berries and firewood, cooking, dressing skins, and making clothes. They had an ingenious way of getting dry branches for firewood, when they were out of reach on the big trees, breaking them off with a long pole with a crook at one end, which they called a “limb-catcher.”
In gathering wild berries, a crowd of women and children generally went together. They struck the bushes with sticks and caught the berries in blankets, putting them into bags made from the whole skins of small animals or unborn calves. On hot days, they worked in the open, seated together under a large cowskin, which was spread over a tripod of poles as a sun shelter, making clothes, parfleches, and lodge covers.
ONESTA ENTERING THE THUNDER TEPEE WITH HIS SACRED BUNDLES
THE CROW WATER CEREMONY OF ONESTA IN THE THUNDER TEPEE
The day Onesta gave his Crow Water Ceremony, he asked me to help him in the singing. He began his drumming before sunrise to waken the people of the North Piegan camp; and made our women get up early to prepare the feast, which they cooked in a large kettle over an outside fire.
Then they pitched a large lodge, which was loaned for the occasion by Brings-Down-the-Sun. It was decorated with symbolic pictures; a band of dusty stars and mountain peaks at the bottom represented the earth; round the center were four red bands, representing the trails of the Thunder Bird [[201]]or lightning; the top was black for a cloudy sky at night, with a cross at the back for the Butterfly, or Bringer-of-Dreams. They called it the Thunder Tepee.
The Crow Water Ceremony came to the Blackfoot tribe in recent years from the Crow Indians. It was a society of both men and women for singing and dancing. It was believed to have power to make its members wealthy, to fulfill their desires, and to cure the sick. The women did most of the singing, while the men beat drums and helped in the songs.