The squaws are very ingenious in many of their handiworks.  We find their birch-bark baskets very convenient for a number of purposes.  My bread-basket, knife-tray, sugar-basket, are all of this humble material.  When ornamented and wrought in patterns with dyed quills, I can assure you, they are by no means inelegant.  They manufacture vessels of birch-bark so well, that they will serve for many useful household purposes, such as holding water, milk, broth, or any other liquid; they are sewn or rather stitched together with the tough roots of the tamarack or larch, or else with strips of cedar-bark.  They also weave very useful sorts of baskets from the inner rind of the bass-wood and white ash.

Some of these baskets, of a coarse kind, are made use of for gathering up potatoes, Indian corn, or turnips; the settlers finding them very good substitutes for the osier baskets used for such purposes in the old country.

The Indians are acquainted with a variety of dyes, with which they stain the more elegant fancy-baskets and porcupine-quills.  Our parlour is ornamented with several very pretty specimens of their ingenuity in this way, which answer the purpose of note and letter-cases, flower-stands, and work-baskets.

They appear to value the useful rather more highly than the merely ornamental articles that you may exhibit to them.  They are very shrewd and close in all their bargains, and exhibit a surprising degree of caution in their dealings.  The men are much less difficult to trade with than the women:  they display a singular pertinacity in some instances.  If they have fixed their mind on any one article, they will come to you day after day, refusing any other you may offer to their notice.  One of the squaws fell in love with a gay chintz dressing-gown belonging to my husband, and though I resolutely refused to part with it, all the squaws in the wigwam by turns came to look at “gown,” which they pronounced with their peculiarly plaintive tone of voice; and when I said “no gown to sell,” they uttered a melancholy exclamation of regret, and went away.

They will seldom make any article you want on purpose for you.  If you express a desire to have baskets of a particular pattern that they do not happen to have ready made by them, they give you the usual vague reply of “by-and-by.”  If the goods you offer them in exchange for theirs do not answer their expectations, they give a sullen and dogged look or reply, “Car-car” (no, no), or “Carwinni,” which is a still more forcible negative.  But when the bargain pleases them, they signify their approbation by several affirmative nods of the head, and a note not much unlike a grunt; the ducks, fish, venison, or baskets, are placed beside you, and the articles of exchange transferred to the folds of their capacious blankets, or deposited in a sort of rushen wallets, not unlike those straw baskets in which English carpenters carry their tools.