The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi.  In this region it was far more general and its results were far more important than is commonly supposed.  To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively small areas were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay chiefly in New Mexico and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri Rivers.  The rest of that region was tenanted by non-agricultural tribes—­unless indeed the slight attention paid to the cultivation of tobacco by a few of the west coast tribes, notably the Haida, may be considered agriculture.  Within the first mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps all, practiced agriculture to a greater or less extent, though unquestionably the degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of support differed much with different tribes and localities.

Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an important—­and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most important—­part of the food supply.  The accounts of some of the early explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture was more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great extent, and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois and some of the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn in great quantities.  The practice of agriculture to a point where it shall prove the main and constant supply of a people, however, implies a degree of sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had not attained and an amount of steady labor without immediate return which was peculiarly irksome to them.  Moreover, the imperfect methods pursued in clearing, planting, and cultivating sufficiently prove that the Indians, though agriculturists, were in the early stages of development as such—­a fact also attested by the imperfect and one-sided division of labor between the sexes, the men as a rule taking but small share of the burdensome tasks of clearing land, planting, and harvesting.

It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice of the hunter’s or fisher’s art.  Admitting the most that can be claimed for the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that, whether because of the small population or because of the crude manner in which his operations were carried on, the amount of land devoted to agriculture within the area in question was infinitesimally small as compared with the total.  Upon a map colored to show only the village sites and agricultural land, the colors would appear in small spots, while by far the greater part of the map would remain uncolored.