Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/75

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MORGAN]
MARQUETTE'S ACCOUNT.
53

these tribes and its universality. They went to a village of seven houses of the Chilluckittequaw tribe and to the house of the chief. "He received us kindly," they remark, "and set before us pounded fish, filberts, nuts, the berries of the sacacommis, and white bread made of roots. * * *  The village is a part of the same nation with the village we passed above, the language of the two being the same, and their houses of similar form and materials, and calculated to contain about thirty souls. The inhabitants were unusually hospitable and good humored."[1] While among the Shoshonees, and before arriving at the Columbia, they "reached an Indian lodge of brush inhabited by seven families of the Shoshonees. They behaved with great civility, and gave the whole party as much boiled salmon as they could eat, and added a present of several dried salmon and a considerable quantity of chokechinies ;"[2] and Captain Lewis remarks of the same people, that "an Indian invited him into his bower, and gave him a small morsel of boiled antelope, and a piece of fresh salmon roasted. This was the first salmon he had seen, and perfectly satisfied him that he was now on the waters of the Pacific."[3] Thus far among the tribes we find a literal repetition of the rule of hospitality as practiced by the Iroquois. Mr. Dall, speaking of the Aleuts, says, "hospitality was one of their prominent traits,"[4] and Powers, of the Porno Indians of California remarks, that they would always divide the last morsel of dried salmon with genuine savage thriftlessness," and of the Mi-oal′-a-wa-gun, that, "like all California Indians, they are very hospitable."[5]

Father Marquette and Lieutenant Joliet, who first discovered the Upper Mississippi in 1673, had friendly intercourse with some of the tribes on its eastern bank, and were hospitably entertained by them. "The council being over, we were invited to a feast, which consisted of four dishes. The first was a dish of sagamite—that is, some Indian meal boiled in water and seasoned with grease—the master of ceremonies holding a spoonful of it, which he put thrice into my mouth and then did the like to M. Joliet. The


  1. Travels, etc., p. 375-376.
  2. Ib. p. 288.
  3. Ib. p. 208.
  4. On tho Remains of Later Prehistoric Man, Alaska Ter., Smithsonian Cont., No. 318, p. 3. Travels, etc., Phila. ed., 1796, p. 171.
  5. Powell's Contributions to North American Ethnology, Power's Tribes of California, vol. iii, p. 153.