The squaws were gentle, humble, and submissive; they bore without a murmur pain, labour, hunger, and fatigue, and seemed to perform every task with patience and good humour.

They made the canoes, in which the men sometimes assisted them, pitched the tents, converted the skins of the animals which the men shot into clothes, cooked the victuals, manufactured baskets of every kind, wove mats, dyed the quills of the porcupine, sewed the mocassins, and in short performed a thousand tasks which it would be difficult to enumerate.
Of the ordinary household work, such as is familiar to European females, they of course knew nothing; they had no linen to wash or iron, no floors to clean, no milking of cows, nor churning of butter.
Their carpets were fresh cedar boughs spread upon the ground, and only renewed when they became offensively dirty from the accumulation of fish bones and other offal, which are carelessly flung down during meals.

Of furniture they had none, their seat the ground, their table the same, their beds mats or skins of animals,--such were the domestic arrangements of the Indian camp.

_[FN: Much improvement has taken place of late years in the domestic economy of the Indians, and some of their dwellings are clean and neat even for Europeans.]_ In the tent to which Catharine belonged, which was that of the widow and her sons, a greater degree of order and cleanliness prevailed than in any other, for Catharine's natural love of neatness and comfort induced her to strew the floor with fresh cedar or hemlock every day or two, and to sweep round the front of the lodge, removing all unseemly objects from its vicinity.

She never failed to wash herself in the river, and arrange her hair with the comb that Louis had made for her; and took great care of the little child, which she kept clean and well fed.