The old men and those who can not or do not wish to go to war or the chase, make nets and are fishers. This is a plebian trade among them. Their nets are made of thread of nettles or of white wood, the bark of which they make into thread by means of lye which renders it strong and pliable.[38]
In another place the same author says:
The Sauteurs, who are beyond the Missisakis, take their name from a Saut (waterfall) which flows from Lake Superior into Lake Huron by a great fall whose rapids are extremely violent. These people are very skillful in fishery by which they obtain white fish as large as salmons. They cross all these terrible rapids into which they cast a net like a sack, a little more than half an ell in width by one in depth attached to a forked stick about 15 feet long.[39]
A novel use of nets is recorded by this author as follows:
For taking pigeons in summer in nets, they make a broad path in the woods and attach to two trees, one on each side, a large net made in the shape of a sack well opened.[40]
Du Pratz, speaking of the fishing nets of the Louisiana Indians, states that they "are meshed like ours and made of lime-tree bark; the large fish are shot with arrows."[41]
Feather Work.
Feather work was one of the most remarkable arts of the natives of Mexico and other southern countries at the period of the conquest. The feathers were sometimes woven in with the woof and sometimes applied to a network base after the fashion of embroidery. Rarely, it may be imagined, were either spun or unspun fabrics woven of feathers alone. Very pleasing specimens of ancient Peruvian feather work are recovered from graves at Ancon and elsewhere, and the method of inserting the feathers is illustrated in the Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.[42] In few instances has such work been recovered from mounds or burial places, but there can be no doubt that the mound-building tribes were experts in this art. Frequent mention is made of the feather work of the natives by the earliest explorers of the Mississippi valley, and the character of the work may be gathered from the extracts already given and from those which follow.
John Smith, speaking of the feather work of the Virginia Indians, says:
We haue seene some vse mantels made of Turky feathers, so prettily wrought and woven with threads that nothing could be discerned but the feathers.[43]