course
of ten days. Well content with their accumulated treasures, both the
women and the men are in a particularly happy mood, and many a wild song
is heard to echo over the placid lake. As the evening approaches, day
after day they seek out some convenient landing place, and, pitching the
wigwams on the beach, spend a goodly portion of the night carousing and
telling stories around their camp fires, resuming their voyage after a
morning sleep, long alter the sun has risen above the blue waters of
the east. Another sunset hour, and the cavalcade of canoes is quietly
gliding into the crescent bay of Mackinaw, and, reaching a beautiful
beach at the foot of a lofty bluff, the Indians again draw up their
canoes,--again erect their wigwams. And, as the Indian traders have
assembled on the spot, the more improvident of the party immediately
proceed to exhibit their sugar and furs, which are usually disposed of
for flour and pork, blankets and knives, guns, ammunition, and a great
variety of trinkets, long before the hour of midnight.

* * * * *

=_Ephraim C. Squier, 1821-._= (Manual, p. 504.)

From "Aboriginal Monuments of the West."

=_267._= INDIAN POTTERY.

The site of every Indian town throughout the west is marked by the
fragments of pottery scattered around it; and the cemeteries of the
various tribes abound with rude vessels of clay, piously deposited with
the dead. Previous to the discovery, the art of the potter was much more
important, and its practice more general than it afterwards became, upon
the introduction of metallic vessels. The mode of preparing and moulding
the materials is minutely described by the early observers, and seems to
have been common to all the tribes, and not to have varied materially
from that day to this. The work devolved almost exclusively upon the
women, who kneaded the clay and formed the vessels. Experience seems to
have suggested the means of so tempering the material as to resist
the action of fire; accordingly we find pounded shells, quartz, and
sometimes simple coarse sand from the streams mixed with the clay.
None of the pottery of the present races, found in the Ohio valley,
is destitute of this feature; and it is not uncommon, in certain
localities, where from the abundance of fragments, and from other
circumstances, it is supposed the manufacture was specially carried on,
to find quantities of the decayed shells of the fresh water molluscs