commonly travelled to feed, or find water. Bear they caught in dead-falls, which were so unfailing that they have retained their use to this day, in preference to the steel traps of the pale faces.
Their old men tell of using a kind of arrow in hunting for the larger animals in those primitive days, which I have never seen described in books. The arrow is made with a circular hole bored or burnt in the end, in which was loosely inserted a finely barbed bone. Being shot into an animal, the arrow would fall off leaving the barb in the body, and as the animal moved this would gradually work into its vitals and soon deprive it of life.
In those days their shirts and leggins were made of finely dressed deer and elk skins sewed together with the sinews of these animals. They made their wigwam covering of birch bark and rushes; their canoes of birch bark and thin strips of cedar wood, sewed together with the small roots of the pine tree, and gummed with the pitch of the pine, balsam, or tamarac. They made kettles from clay and pulverized stone, and judging from specimens found occasionally throughout the country, they give evidence of much proficiency and ingenuity in this line of manufacture. Copper, though abounding on the lake shore, they never used for common purposes;[1] considering
- ↑ The tribes of the lakes were workers in copper at an early period. Champlain in an account published in 1613, at Paris, writes: "Shortly after conferring with them about many matters concerning their wars, the Algonquin Savage, one of their chiefs, drew from a sack a piece of copper a foot long, which he gave me. This was very handsome and quite pure. He gave me to understand that there were large quantities where he had taken this, which was on the bank of a river, now a great lake. He said they gathered it in lumps, and having melted it, spread it in sheets, smoothing it with stones."
Pierre Boucher, the grandfather of Sieur Verendrye, the explorer of the Lake Winnipeg region, in a book published in 1664, at Paris, writes that "in Lake Superior there is a great island fifty leagues in circumference, in which there is a very beautiful mine of copper. There are other places in those quarters where there are similar mines; so I learned from four or five Frenchmen, who lately returned. They were gone three years, without finding an opportunity
