For navigating streams and rivers, lakes and bays, they constructed canoes of birch bark sewed together with thongs of deerskin and smeared at the joints with spruce-tree gum.
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Traits of Character.%--Living an outdoor life, and depending for daily food not so much on the maize they raised as on the fish they caught and the animals they killed, the Indians were most expert woodsmen.

They were swift of foot, quick-witted, keen-sighted, and most patient of hunger, fatigue, and cold.

White men were amazed at the rapidity with which the Indian followed the most obscure trail over the most difficult ground, at the perfection with which he imitated the bark of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the call of the moose, and at the catlike tread with which he walked over beds of autumn leaves the side of the grazing deer.
[Illustration: Ornamental pipe] [Illustration: Quiver, with bows and arrows] Courage and fortitude he possessed in the highest degree.

Yet with his bravery were associated all the vices, all the dark and crooked ways, which are the resort of the cowardly and the weak.