happened that after the moose had taken several large leaps it came under the branch of a tree, which, striking the wolverene, broke his hold and tore him off; and by his tracks in the snow it appeared he went off another way with short steps, as if he had been stunned 12 by the blow that had broken his hold. The Indians were wonderfully pleased that the moose had thus outwitted the mischievous wolverene.”

The early French writers all notice the skill and ingenuity of the savages, in adapting their mode of life to their environment. Nicholas Denys, who came to Acadia in 1632, gives a very entertaining and detailed account of their ways of life and of their skillful handicraft. The snowshoe and the Indian bark canoe aroused his special admiration. He says they also made dishes of bark, both large and small, sewing them so nicely with slender rootlets of fir that they retained water. They used in their sewing a pointed bodkin of bone, and they sometimes adorned their handiwork with porcupine quills and pigments. Their kettles used to be of wood before the French supplied them with those of metal. In cooking, the water was readily heated to the boiling point by the use of red-hot stones which they put in and took out of their wooden kettle.

Until the arrival of Europeans the natives were obliged to clothe themselves with skins of the beaver and other animals. The women made all the garments, but Champlain did not consider them very good tailoresses.

Like most savage races the Indians were vain and consequential. Biard relates that a certain sagamore on hearing that the young King of France was unmarried, observed: “Perhaps I may let him marry my daughter, but the king must make me some handsome presents, namely, four or five barrels of bread, three of peas and beans, one of tobacco, four or five cloaks worth one hundred sous apiece, bows, arrows, harpoons, and such like articles.”

Courtship and marriage among the Maliseets is thus described by John Gyles: “If a young fellow determines to marry, his relations and the Jesuit advise him to a girl, he goes into the wigwam where she is and looks on her. If he likes her appearance, he tosses a stick or chip into her lap which she takes, and with a shy side-look views the person who sent it; yet handles the chip with admiration as though she wondered from whence it came. If she likes him she throws the chip to him with a smile, and then nothing is wanting but a ceremony with the Jesuit to consummate the marriage. But if she dislikes her suitor she with a surly countenance throws the chip aside and he comes no more there.”

An Indian maiden educated to make “monoodah,” or Indian bags, birch dishes and moccasins, to lace snowshoes, string wampum belts, sew birch canoes and boil the kettle, was esteemed a lady of fine accomplishments. The women, however, endured many hardships. They were called upon to prepare and erect the cabins, supply them with fire, wood and water, prepare the food, go to bring the game from the place where it had been killed, sew and repair the canoes, mend and stretch the skins, curry them and make clothes and moccasins for the whole family. Biard says: “They go fishing and do the paddling, in short they undertake all the work except that alone of the grand chase. Their husbands sometimes beat them unmercifully and often for a very slight cause.”

Since the coming of the whites the Maliseets have had few quarrels with the neighboring tribes of Indians. They entertained, however, a dread of the Mohawks, and there are many legends that have been handed down to us which tell of their 13 fights with these implacable foes. One of the most familiar—that of the destruction of the Mohawk war party at the Grand Falls—told by the Indians to the early settlers on the river soon after their arrival in the country and has since been rehearsed in verse by Roberts and Hannay and in prose by Lieut.-Governor Gordon in his “Wilderness Journeys,” by Dr. Rand in his Indian legends and by other writers.

John Gyles, the English captive at Medoctec village in 1689, relates the following ridiculous incident, which sufficiently shows the unreasonable terror inspired in the mind of the natives of the river in his day by the very name of Mohawk:

“One very hot season a great number of Indians gathered at the village, and being a very droughty people they kept James Alexander and myself night and day fetching water from a cold spring that ran out of a rocky hill about three-quarters of a mile from the fort.[1] In going thither we crossed a large interval corn field and then a descent to a lower interval before we ascended the hill to the spring. James being almost dead as well as I with this continual fatigue contrived (a plan) to fright the Indians. He told me of it, but conjured me to secrecy. The next dark night James going for water set his kettle on the descent to the lowest interval, and ran back to the fort puffing and blowing as in the utmost surprise, and told his master that he saw something near the spring which looked like Mohawks (which he said were only stumps—aside): his master being a most courageous warrior went with James to make discovery, and when they came to the brow of the hill, James pointed to the stumps, and withal touched his kettle with his toe, which gave it motion down hill, and at every turn of the kettle the bail clattered, upon which James and his master could see a Mohawk in every stump in motion, and turned tail to and he was the best man who could run the fastest. This alarmed all the Indians in the village; they, though about thirty or forty in number, packed off bag and baggage, some up the river and others down, and did not return under fifteen days, and the heat of the weather being finally over our hard service abated for this season. I never heard that the Indians understood the occasion of the fright, but James and I had many a private laugh about it.”

Until quite recently the word “Mohawk,” suddenly uttered, was sufficient to startle a New Brunswick Indian. The late Edward Jack upon asking an Indian child, “What is a Mohawk?” received this reply, “A Mohawk is a bad Indian who kills people and eats them.” Parkman describes the Mohawks as the fiercest, the boldest, yet most politic savages to whom the American forests ever gave birth and nurture. As soon as a canoe could float they were on the war path, and with the cry of the returning wild fowl mingled the yell of these human tigers. They burned, hacked and devoured, exterminating whole villages at once.

A Mohawk war party once captured an Algonquin hunting party in which were three squaws who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt the captors took the infants, tied them to wooden spits, roasted them alive before 14 a fire and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them, were met with mockery and laughter. “They are not men, they are wolves!” sobbed one of the wretched women, as she told what had befallen her to the Jesuit missionary.

Fearful as the Maliseets were of the Mohawks they were in turn exceedingly cruel to their own captives and, strange as it may appear, the women were even more cruel than the men. In the course of the border wars English captives were exposed to the most revolting and barbarous outrages, some were even burned alive by our St. John river Indians.

But while cruel to their enemies, and even at times cruel to their wives, the Indians were by no means without their redeeming features. They were a modest and virtuous race, and it is