s an
important article of diet in marshy places. Their cookery was not less
rude than their other habits, yet _pone_ and _hominy_ have been borrowed
from them, as also, it is said, the mode of _barbecuing_ meat. _Pone_,
according to the historian Beverley, is derived "not from the Latin
panis, but from oppone," an Indian word; according to Smith, _ponap_
signifies meal-dumplings. The natives did not refuse to eat grubs,
snakes, and the insect locust. Their bread was sometimes made of wild
oats, or the seed of the sunflower, but mostly of corn. Their salt was
only such as could be procured from ashes. They were fond of roasting
ears of corn, and they welcomed the crop with the festival of the
green-corn dance. From walnuts and hickory-nuts, pounded in a mortar,
they expressed a liquid called pawcohiccora. The hickory-tree is
indigenous in America. Beverley has fallen into a curious mistake in
saying that the peach-tree is a native of this country. Indian-corn and
tobacco, although called indigenous, appear to have grown only when
cultivated. They are never found of wild spontaneous growth. In their
journeys the Indians were in the habit of providing themselves with
rockahominy, or corn parched and reduced to a powder.

They dwelt in towns, the cabins being constructed of saplings bent over
at the top and tied together, and thatched with reeds, or covered with
mats or bark, the smoke escaping through an aperture at the apex. The
door, if any, consisted of a pendant mat. They sate on the ground, the
better sort on matchcoats or mats. Their fortifications consisted of
palisades ten or twelve feet high, sometimes encompassing an entire
town, sometimes a part. Within these enclosures they preserved, with
pious care, their idols and relics, and the remains of their chiefs. In
hunting and war they used the bow and arrow--the bow usually of locust,
the arrow of reed, or a wand. The Indian notched his arrow with a
beaver's tooth set in a stick, which he used in the place of a file. The
arrow was winged with a turkey-feather, fastened with a sort of glue
extracted from the velvet horns of the deer. The arrow was headed with
an arrow-point of stone, often made of white quartz, and exquisitely
formed, some barbed, some with a serrate edge. These are yet to be found
in every part of the country. For knives the red men made use of
sharpened reeds, or shells, or stone; and for hatchets, tomahawks of
stone, sharpened at one end or both.