eated with red-hot
stones and glowing embers, on to which from time to time water was
poured to fill the place with steam. The Amerindians not only went
through these Turkish baths to cure small ailments but also with the
idea of clearing the intelligence and as a fitting preliminary to
negotiations--for peace, or alliance, or even for courtship. In many
tribes if a young "brave" arrived with proposals of marriage for a
man's daughter he was invited to enter the sweating house with her
father, and discuss the bargain calmly over perspiration and the
tobacco pipe.

Tobacco smoking indeed was almost a religious ceremony, as well as a
remedy for certain maladies or states of mind. The "pipe of peace" has
become proverbial. Nevertheless tobacco was still unknown in the
eighteenth century to many of the Pacific-coast and far-north-west
tribes, as to the primitive Eskimo. It was not a very old practice in
the Canadian Dominion when Europeans first arrived there, though it
appeared to be one of the most characteristic actions of these
red-skinned savages in the astonished eyes of the first pioneers. They
used pipes for smoking, however, long before tobacco came among them,
certain berries taking the place of tobacco.

The Amerindians of the southern parts of Canada and British Columbia
were more or less settled peoples of towns or villages, of fixed homes
to which they returned at all seasons of the year, however far afield
they might range for warfare, trade, or hunting. But the more northern
tribes were nomads: people shifting their abode from place to place in
pursuit of game or trade. Unlike the people of the south and west
(though these only grew potatoes) they were not agriculturists: the
only vegetable element in their food was the wild rice of the marshes,
the sweet-tasting layer between the bark and the wood of certain
trees, and the fruits or fungi of the forest or the lichen growing on
the rocks. Though these people might in summertime build some hasty
wigwam of boughs and moss, their ordinary dwelling place was a tent.

The Wood Indians, or Opimitish Ininiwak, of the Athapaskan group
(writes Alexander Henry, sen.) had no fixed villages; and their lodges
or huts were so rudely fashioned as to afford them very inadequate
protection against the weather. The greater part of their year was
spent in travelling from place to place in search of food. The animal
on which they chiefly depended was the _hare_--a most promi