ith which they had to work. In the art of making pictographs,
for instance, they excelled all other tribes, except perhaps the Kiowas,
a plains tribe of Colorado and western Kansas. On the hides of buffalo,
deer, and antelope which formed their tents, the Dakotas painted
calendars, which had a picture for each year, or rather for each winter,
while those of the Kiowas had a summer symbol and a winter symbol.
Probably these calendars reveal the influence of the whites, but they at
least show that these people of the plains were quickwitted.

Farther south the tribes of the plains stood on a much lower level than
the Dakotas. The Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, describes the Yguases
in Texas, among whom he lived for several years, in these words: "Their
support is principally roots which require roasting two days. Many are
very bitter. Occasionally they take deer and at times fish, but the
quantity is so small and the famine so great that they eat spiders and
eggs of ants, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes, and vipers that kill
whom they strike, and they eat earth and all that there is, the dung of
deer, things I omit to mention and I earnestly believe that were there
stones in that land they would eat them. They save the bones of the fish
they consume, the snakes and other animals, that they may afterward beat
them together and eat the powder." During these painful periods, they
bade Cabeza de Vaca "not to be sad. There would soon be prickly pears,
although the season of this fruit of the cactus might be months distant.
When the pears were ripe, the people feasted and danced and forgot their
former privations. They destroyed their female infants to prevent them
being taken by their enemies and thus becoming the means of increasing
the latter's number."

East of the Great Plains there dwelt still another important type of
Indians, the people of the deciduous forests. Their home extended from
the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. As we have already seen, the
Iroquois who inhabited the northern part of this region were in many
respects the highest product of aboriginal America. The northern
Iroquois tribes, especially those known as the Five Nations, were second
to no other Indian people north of Mexico in political organization,
statecraft, and military prowess. Their leaders were genuine diplomats,
as the wily French and English statesmen with whom they treated soon
discovered. One of their most notable traits was th