Notes on the Iroquois

Notes on the Iroquois, by Henry R. Schoolcraft, offers contributions to the statistics, aboriginal history, antiquities and general ethnology of Western New-York. The text says that society in the Iroquois cantons, viewed in its extremes, still exhibits no unequivocal vestiges of the tie which bound them to the hunter state. The text says the uncertain and scanty reward of time and labor which the chase affords is less and less relied on, in the precise ratio that the bands and neighborhoods advance in agriculture and the arts.

Smoking pipes are called a branch of Indian art, carved in various forms of steatite, serpentine, indurated clay, limestone, sandstone and other bodies. The text names the red sedimentary compact deposit found on the high dividing ridge between the Missouri and Mississippi, called the Coteau du Prairie, as a very favorite material. The text says Christianity very much prospered during the four years next preceding the past, and the number of church members during that period was nearly tripled.