the wild cherries
were pounded up, stones and all, made into small cakes and dried for use
in soups and for mixing with the pounded jerked meat and fat to form a
much-prized Indian delicacy.

Out on the prairie in July and August the women were wont to dig
teepsinna with sharpened sticks, and many a bag full was dried and put
away. This teepsinna is the root of a certain plant growing mostly upon
high sandy soil. It is starchy but solid, with a sweetish taste, and is
very fattening. The fully grown teepsinna is two or three inches long,
and has a dark-brown bark not unlike the bark of a young tree. It can be
eaten raw or stewed, and is always kept in a dried state, except when it
is first dug.

There was another root that our people gathered in small quantities. It
is a wild sweet potato, found in bottom lands or river beds.

The primitive housekeeper exerted herself much to secure a variety of
appetizing dishes; she even robbed the field mouse and the muskrat to
accomplish her end. The tiny mouse gathers for her winter use several
excellent kinds of food. Among these is a wild bean which equals in
flavor any domestic bean that I have ever tasted. Her storehouse is
usually under a peculiar mound, which the untrained eye would be unable
to distinguish from an ant-hill. There are many pockets underneath, into
which she industriously gathers the harvest of the summer.

She is fortunate if the quick eye of a native woman does not detect her
hiding-place. About the month of September, while traveling over the
prairie, a woman is occasionally observed to halt suddenly and waltz
around a suspected mound. Finally the pressure of her heel causes a
place to give way, and she settles contentedly down to rob the poor
mouse of the fruits of her labor.

The different kinds of beans are put away in different pockets, but
it is the oomenechah she wants. The field mouse loves this savory
vegetable, for she always gathers it more than any other. There is also
some of the white star-like manakcahkcah, the root of the wild lily.
This is a good medicine and good to eat.

When our people were gathering the wild rice, they always watched for
another plant that grows in the muddy bottom of lakes and ponds. It is
a white bulb about the size of an ordinary onion. This is stored away
by the muskrats in their houses by the waterside, and there is often a
bushel or more of the psinchinchah to be found within. It seemed as if
everybody was go