age, engaging in hunting, fishing and bird nesting and without suspicion that such a thing as agriculture can exist. But in a region like the Atlantic slope of the Appalachian Mountains, where there are rich lowlands, fertile foot hills, streams full of fish, abundant plant life, great forests, and a climate favorable to agriculture, we may expect to find a people with a considerable range of choice in their food supply, clothed in the lighter skins or even in woven cotton garments, and living in hovels constructed from wood or mud or other permanent material, and rendered sedentary by the practice of some form of agriculture, though hunting and fishing are yet followed as equal sources of subsistence.
Indeed, at the time of the landing of the first colonists upon these shores from England in 1607, we find that agriculture was a main source of life for all that Indian population along the St. Lawrence and around the Great Lakes, on the Atlantic Slope, throughout the Gulf Coast country, in the great Mississippi Valley (exclusive of the Great Plains), and in the Pueblo country of the arid Southwest, though interested writers and so-called historians would have us believe that they were principally nomads and that agriculture was the exception rather than the rule. In the Arctic region, in the Yukon MacKenzie section, on the Western plains, and in the Rocky Mountains conditions were unfavaroble to Indian agriculture, while on the North Pacific Coast, in the Columbia and Frazer River regions, and in California and Oregon, animal and native plant foods were so abundant and easily available that there was no inducement for the Indian to take up the cultivation of the soil.
