In this chapter it is our purpose to discuss only the agricultural Indians and especially the Eastern Indians, who first came in contact with the invading white man and who led in such resistance as the red man could oppose to the ruthless trampling of his natural rights and the certain destruction of his race.
The diet of the red men varied with the season and the food supply, ranging from fully three-fourths vegetable in the South to fully three-fourths animal in the North, and in all their agriculture, corn was the most important plant known to them. They also cultivated beans, squash, pumpkins, sunflowers, gourds, tobacco and, in the South, the cotton plant. Eighteen varieties of cultivated plants were known to them and fully one hundred other plants, uncultivated, furnished them further addition to their food supply; among these, of course, being acorns, berries, wild fruits, nuts, roots and seeds.
Not only did they cultivate these plants, but they had developed an effective storage and preservative system. Corn, beans, acorns, chestnuts, etc., were dried upon mats in the open air and stored in granaries or cribs. Onions, artichokes, corn, etc., were buried in pits. Pumpkins and squash were covered with piles of leaves and hay. Peppers, gourds, grapes, passion flower, sunflowers and tobacco were hung up in their houses. Venison was dried in the sun, fish were cured in the smoke of a greenwood fire as also were oysters, which they strung on a string. Drinks they had none, except mild infusions of leaves and willow bark which they drank as medicine. Fermented or distilled liquors (fire water) were introduced by the white men.
