Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: The Powhatans and other Woodland Indians as Travelers Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Helen C. Rountree # of Pages: 17 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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42 POWHATAN FOREIGN RELATIONS and avoided having children. They struck their own bargains with local Indian men, but when dealing with nonlocals they had to get their parents’ permission and also admit their town’s “king” as a paid go-between. The haggling for a night’s entertainment was done publicly, in a perfectly businesslike manner, with the ensuing consummation taking place either away from other young people or perhaps in the midst of a houseful of older people who politely took no notice. Trading girls were often known to retire after several years, becoming respectable married women in their communities. The Hurons likewise had some women, married and single, who engaged in short-term relations with visiting men; any children resulting had full rights in their mothers’ families." When no lodging was available with people along the way, Indian travelers camped out as best they might. Some*hardy souls did not bother with shelter, like the two men accompanying Benjamin Hawkins, who slept soundly on the unprotected ground all night during a heavy rain. Others took shelter in unused houses along the way, especially in bad weather. Such houses were frequently available, at least in the framework stage: we hear of “old hunting houses” in Virginia and isolated “cabins” north of there.*” Often travelers used temporary bark shelters on posts. Along Tonawanda Creck, there were “a great many [such] cabins ... erected along the road from time to time, both by the white people and the Indians”; any passerby was free to use them. Their construction was simple. Four poles or forked sticks were set in the ground, the two in front being longer than the two in back (five feet high in front, three and a half feet in back, set so as to make a rectangular enclosure about nine feet by six, according to John Heckewelder). The roof was added by cither of rwo methods. If the posts were forked sticks, poles were cut and laid across, connecting the forks; then strips of bark of the appropriate length were placed front-to-back across the poles, with more strips of bark for a floor and sometimes branches for the sides in inclement weather. If the posts were simply poles, a single piece of bark was cut and laid across them. John Bartram found that a tree a foot in diameter, with cuts around the base and also seven feet up, yielded a piece of bark that was seven feet by three-plus feet. The bark was detached from the tree, after making a lengthwise slit, using a sapling hewn into a wedge of about two feet in length, cut on the spot. When people reoccupied deserted houses with bark floors, it was advisable to turn over the bark on the ground, to scare off snakes. There also might be a problem with fleas left by the previous occupant. If rain was beginning and time was short, people cut four poles, set them in the ground, and threw a blanket over them. One Nanticoke Indian The Powhatans as Travelers 43 accompanying Bartram did this by using four saplings, with both ends thrust into the ground at intervals of two feet, making an impromptu barrel-vaulted frame whose cover would shed water.** Each person on a trip was responsible for his or her own bedding; if by chance it became wet, that was the owner’s hard luck. John Lawson found this out the hard way on a winter's day when a companion of his slipped on a single-pole Indian bridge and fell in. Lawson laughed so hard that he himself fell in. Both of them had to spend a horribly cold night in wet bedding. Of course their Indian guide had kept dry, since Indians in general, according to Lawson, were incredibly surefooted."’ Being physically fit was part of it, but wearing moccasins instead of leather boots must have helped. Travelers expecting to go long distances always carried at least some lightweight provisions and the weaponry to supplement them. Of the chinaroot bread and parched cornmeal used by hunters and warriors, the latter was more commonly taken. People traveling fase might carry and eat no other food; those with more leisure used it only when nothing else was available.” Indian men, being proficient hunters, expected to shoot their meat as they traveled. Usually they were successful, which is why Europeans were cager to hire them as “guides.””' At other times, though, the hunt brought in nothing. The party then had to live on what provisions they still had, forage for plant food, or go hungry until game became available again.” Berries in season would serve; Gabriel Arthur supported himself for the last several hundred miles coming home by eating huckleberries. Otherwise, people in distress turned to the dogs that went with chem, the leather of their clothing, “roots in the ground,” or the “barks of trees.” *' The roots were wild potatoes (wapatos, Sagittaria spp.) in some cases, and probably also groundnuts (Aptos americana), which can be roasted for a turniplike taste or, if time is short, eaten raw (in which state they leave an unpleasant rubbery film on one’s teeth), Tree bark, which most modern people think of as a food to eat only in pure desperation, is actually a nutritious alternative food, when the inner bark of the right trees—pines, maples, alders, birches, beech, spruces, poplars, lindens, willows, elms—is used. The twigs of mulberry trees and blackberry and raspberry bushes are edible. Several trees also produce sap that is sweet and drinkable: sycamore and all species of maple, birch, hickory, and walnut. A knowledgeable Indian person would not starve completely; the escaped war prisoners who suffered the worst privations, becoming mere skeletons before reaching safety (if they survived that long), were those who lacked knives.” Indian people's endurance was so practiced that they could go for longer