Their skin was
copper-coloured, their lips and noses were thin, and
their hair in nearly all cases was straight and black.
When the Europeans first saw the Algonquins they had
already made some advance towards industrial civilization.
They built huts of woven boughs, and for defence sometimes
surrounded a group of huts with a palisade of stakes set
up on end. They had no agriculture in the true sense,
but they cultivated Indian corn and pumpkins in the
openings of the forests, and also the tobacco plant, with
the virtues of which they were well acquainted. They made
for themselves heavy and clumsy pottery and utensils of
wood, they wove mats out of rushes for their houses, and
they made clothes from the skin of the deer, and
head-dresses from the bright feathers of birds. Of the
metals they knew, at the time of the discovery of America,
hardly anything. They made some use of copper, which they
chipped and hammered into rude tools and weapons. But
they knew nothing of melting the metals, and their
arrow-heads and spear-points were made, for the most
part, not of metals, but of stone. Like other Indians,
they showed great ingenuity in fashioning bark canoes of
wonderful lightness.
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