Their ideas of medicine and surgery were much mixed up with a belief in magic and in the mysterious powers of their “medicine men”.  This person, who might be of either sex, certainly knew a few simple medicines to be made from herbs or decoctions of bark, but for the most part he attempted to cure the sick or injured by blowing lustily on the part affected or, more wisely, by massage.  A universal cure, however, for all fevers and mild ailments was sweating.  Sweating huts were built in nearly every settlement.  They were covered over in a way to exclude air as much as possible.  The inside was heated with red-hot stones and glowing embers, on to which from time to time water was poured to fill the place with steam.  The Amerindians not only went through these Turkish baths to cure small ailments but also with the idea of clearing the intelligence and as a fitting preliminary to negotiations—­for peace, or alliance, or even for courtship.  In many tribes if a young “brave” arrived with proposals of marriage for a man’s daughter he was invited to enter the sweating house with her father, and discuss the bargain calmly over perspiration and the tobacco pipe.

Tobacco smoking indeed was almost a religious ceremony, as well as a remedy for certain maladies or states of mind.  The “pipe of peace” has become proverbial.  Nevertheless tobacco was still unknown in the eighteenth century to many of the Pacific-coast and far-north-west tribes, as to the primitive Eskimo.  It was not a very old practice in the Canadian Dominion when Europeans first arrived there, though it appeared to be one of the most characteristic actions of these red-skinned savages in the astonished eyes of the first pioneers.  They used pipes for smoking, however, long before tobacco came among them, certain berries taking the place of tobacco.

The Amerindians of the southern parts of Canada and British Columbia were more or less settled peoples of towns or villages, of fixed homes to which they returned at all seasons of the year, however far afield they might range for warfare, trade, or hunting.  But the more northern tribes were nomads:  people shifting their abode from place to place in pursuit of game or trade.  Unlike the people of the south and west (though these only grew potatoes) they were not agriculturists:  the only vegetable element in their food was the wild rice of the marshes, the sweet-tasting layer between the bark and the wood of certain trees, and the fruits or fungi of the forest or the lichen growing on the rocks.  Though these people might in summertime build some hasty wigwam of boughs and moss, their ordinary dwelling place was a tent.

The Wood Indians, or Opimitish Ininiwak, of the Athapaskan group (writes Alexander Henry, sen.) had no fixed villages; and their lodges or huts were so rudely fashioned as to afford them very inadequate protection against the weather.  The greater part of their year was spent in travelling from place to place in search of food.  The animal on which they chiefly depended was the hare—­a most prominent animal in Amerindian economy and tradition.  This they took in springes.  From its skin they made coverings with much ingenuity, cutting it into narrow strips and weaving this into the shape of a blanket, which was of a very warm and agreeable quality.