United States or Lesotho ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The table was a great clapboard set on four wooden legs; there were three-legged stools, and in the better sort of houses old-fashioned rocking-chairs. The couch or bed was warmly covered with blankets, bear-skins, and deer-hides. These clearings lay far apart from one another in the wilderness. Up to the door-sills of the log-huts stretched the solemn and mysterious forest.
The glances were explained a few minutes later when a pattering of hoofs came from the cedar forest, and a stream of mounted Indians poured into the glade. The ugly glade became a place of color and action. The Navajos rode wiry, wild-looking mustangs and drove ponies and burros carrying packs, most of which consisted of deer-hides.
Through the long, irksome winter, the frontiersmen remained crowded within the stockades. The men hunted, while the women made the clothes, of tanned deer-hides, buffalo-wool cloth, and nettle-bark linen. As soon as the great snow-drifts began to melt, and thereby to produce freshets of unexampled height, the gaunt settlers struggled out to their clearings, glad to leave the forts.
Where to-day only vacant holes stare at the visitor, at the hour on the day when our story begins, human eyes peered through. Other doors were closed by deer-hides or robes. Sometimes a man, a woman, or a child, would creep out of one of these openings, and climbing upward, disappear in the entrance of an upper tier of cave-dwellings.
"Why, sir, when I was out hunting yesterday, I went round to a spot where I had left a couple of deer-hides last week, that I might bring them home, and I found a letter stuck to them with a couple of thorns." "A letter, Malachi!" "Yes, sir, an Indian letter. Here it is." Malachi then produced a piece of birch bark, of which the underneath drawing is a fac-simile.
Deer-hides were pegged down to form a carpet upon the floors, and the walls were neatly covered with talipot leaves. The outhouses consisted of the kennel, stables for three horses, kitchen, and sheds for twenty coolies and servants. The fireplace was a rough piece of art, upon which we prided ourselves extremely. A party of eight persons could have sat before it with comfort.
Mary and Emma followed him, now and then stopping to pick a flower unknown to them: when they overtook John, he was standing immovable, pointing to a figure on the other side of the stream, as fixed and motionless as himself. The two girls started back as they beheld a tall, gaunt man, dressed in deer-hides, who stood leaning upon a long gun with his eyes fixed upon them.
Fur-hunting was once a profitable business for the Indians, who were clothed in bear and panther skins when the first white men came to California, and had many furs to trade or sell. The Indians trapped otters, beavers, and minks, and the squaws tanned the deer-hides to make buckskin shirts or leggings.
Young Dick and his father wore clothing which had been patched and repatched with anything Mrs. Stevens could push a needle through, until it would have been impossible to say what was the original material; but to a boy thirteen years of age this seemed a matter of little consequence, while his father preferred such a costume rather than exert himself to tan deer-hides for one more serviceable.
It was a chamber about fourteen feet long and ten feet wide, and its walls were whitewashed with burnt gypsum. Deer-hides and a mat plaited of yucca-leaves lay rolled up in one corner. A niche contained a small earthen bowl, painted white with black symbolic figures. A doorway to the right led into another compartment which seemed darker than the first.
Word Of The Day