United States or Andorra ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I had the privilege of visiting two “camping” parties one of forty-eight Indians, at Tak-o-si-mac-la’s cane field, on the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp; the other of twenty-two persons, at a Koonti ground, on Horse Creek, not far from the site of what was, long ago, Fort Davenport. I found great difficulty in reaching the “camp” at the sugar cane field.
Each of these holes was the property of some one of the squaws or of the children of the camp. For each of the holes, which were to serve as mortars, a pestle made of some hard wood had been furnished. The first step in the process was to reduce the washed Koonti to a kind of pulp. This was done by chopping it into small pieces and filling with it one of the mortars and pounding it with a pestle.
They can stir the soup while it is boiling; they can aid in kneading the dough for bread; they can wash the “Koonti” root, and even pound it; they can watch and replenish the fire; they contribute in this and many other small ways to the necessary work of the home. I am not to be understood, of course, as saying that the little Seminole’s life is one of severe labor.
Their vegetables are chiefly sweet potatoes, large and much praised melons and pumpkins, and, if I may classify it with vegetables, the tender new growth of the tree called the cabbage palmetto. Among roots, there is the great dependence of these Indians, the abounding Koonti; also the wild potato, a small tuber found in black swamp land, and peanuts in great quantities.
Now perhaps they gather upon some rich Koonti ground, that they may dig an extra quantity of this root and make flour from it; now, that they may have a sirup making festival, they go to some fertile sugar cane hammock; or again, that they may have a hunt, they camp where a certain kind of game has been discovered in abundance.
They had been forced to leave their homes to secure an extra supply of Koonti flour, because, as I understood the woman who told me, some animals had eaten all their sweet potatoes. The lodges of this party differed from those of the southern Indians in being covered above and around with palmetto leaves and in being shaped some like wall tents and others like single-roofed sheds.
The Seminole, however, though observing meal times with some regularity, eats just as his appetite invites. If it happens that he has a side of venison roasting before the fire, he will cut from it at any time during the day and, with the piece of meat in one hand and a bit of Koonti or of different bread in the other, satisfy his appetite.
"Red-winged blackbird," said Keela. It was eminently fitting, thought Diane, and glanced at Keela's hair and cheeks. There was a wild duck roasting in the hub of coals from the burning spokes came the smell of cedar. The Indian girl majestically broke a segment of koonti bread and proffered it to her companion.
It is said to yield a starch equal to that of the best Bermuda arrowroot. White men call it the “Indian bread root,” and lately its worth as an article of commerce has been recognized by the whites. There are now at least two factories in operation in Southern Florida in which the Koonti is made into a flour for the white man’s market.
These lodges, placed very close together and seemingly without order, were almost all made of white cotton cloths, which were each stretched over ridge poles and tied to four corner posts. The lodges were in shape like the fly of a wall tent, simply a sheet stretched for a cover. At a Koonti ground on Horse Creek I met the Cat Fish Lake Indians.
Word Of The Day