It was only in the extreme south of Canada or in British Columbia (potatoes only) that any agriculture was carried on and that the natives had maize, pumpkins, and pease to add to their dietary; but (as compared to the temperate regions of Europe and Asia) Nature was generous in providing wild fruits and grain without trouble of husbandry.  The fruits and nuts have been enumerated elsewhere, but a description might be given here of the “wild oats” (Avena fatua) and the “wild rice” of the regions of central Canada and the middle west.  The wild oats made a rough kind of porridge, but were not so important and so nourishing as the wild rice which is so often mentioned in the stories of the pioneers, who liked this wild grain as much as the Indians did.

This wild rice (Zizania aquatica) grew naturally in small rivers and swampy places.  The stems were hollow, jointed at intervals, and the grain appeared at the extremity of the stalk.  By the month of June they had grown two feet above the surface of the shallow water, and were ripe for harvesting in September.  At this period the Amerindians passed in canoes through the water-fields of wild rice, shaking the ears into the canoes as they swept by.  The grain fell out easily when ripe, but in order to clean it from the husk it was dried over a slow fire on a wooden grating.  After being winnowed it was pounded to flour in a mortar, or else boiled like rice, and seasoned with fat.  “It had a most delicate taste”, wrote Alexander Henry the Elder.

Fish was perhaps the staple of Amerindian diet, because in scarcely any part of the Canadian Dominion is a lake, river, or brook far away.  In the region of the Great Lakes fish were caught in large quantities in October, and exposed to the weather to be frozen at nighttime.  They were then stored away in this congealed state, and lasted good—­more or less—­till the following April.

Pemmican—­that early form of potted meat so familiar to the readers of Red-Indian romances—­was made of the lean meat of the bison.  The strips of meat were dried in the sun, and afterwards pounded in a mortar and mixed with an equal quantity of bison fat.  Fish “pemmican” was sun-dried fish ground to powder.

A favourite dish among the northern Indians was blood mixed with the half-digested food found in the stomach of a deer, boiled up with a sufficient quantity of water to make it of the consistency of pease porridge.  Some scraps of fat or tender flesh were shredded small and boiled with it.  To render this dish more palatable they had a method of mixing the blood with the contents of the stomach in the paunch itself, and hanging it up in the heat and smoke of the fire for several days—­in other words, the Scotch haggis.  The kidneys of both moose and buffalo were usually eaten raw by the southern Indians, for no sooner was one of those beasts killed than the hunter ripped up its belly, snatched out the kidneys, and ate them warm, before the animal was quite dead.  They also at times put their mouths to the wound the ball or the arrow had made, and sucked the blood; this, they said, quenched thirst, and was very nourishing.