“It was this sticky, rising liquor taken off the boiling corn to keep and return to it, that was used to rub over a newly made pot. When this was done, the pot was ready to boil corn in.
“After using a pot, it was usually rubbed over with the residue of the boiled corn meal, or mush, because this made the pot look better and last longer.
“The skimmed-off liquor from a pot of boiling corn meal was also fed to a baby whose mother had died, and whose family could not hire a woman to nurse it.”
[17] Measuring from center of corn hill to center of next corn hill.—G. L. W.
[18] “I have raised white beans mostly of late years because it is easier to sell them to white men. This summer, however (1913), I planted several acres also to other kinds of our Hidatsa beans, red, black, spotted.
“I find that the black beans have yielded best, next the red, then the spotted, last of all the white. I have observed before that this is true; that black beans yield the most.”—WOLF CHIEF
[19] Slough grass, a species of Spartina.
[20] Buffalobird-woman here means a three-section stage. A stage of four sections would be forty feet or more in length.—G. L. W.
[21] “The first that rakes are mentioned in the stories of my tribe so far as I know, is in the tale of ‘The Grandson.’ There is a little lake down near Short River where lived an old magic woman, whom we call Old-woman-who-never-dies. There is a level piece of ground near by, about five miles long by one and a half mile wide. This flat land was the garden of Old-woman-who-never-dies. Her servants were the deer that thronged the near-by timber. These deer worked her garden for her. All buck deer have horns; and with their horns the deer raked up the weeds and refuse of Old-woman-who-never-dies’s garden.
“Now deer shed their horns. Old-woman-who-never-dies got these shed horns and bound them on sticks and so we got our first rakes. Her grandson saw what she did and afterwards taught the people to make rakes also.
“In later times we learned to make rakes of ash wood instead of horns; but we still reckon the teeth to mean the tines of a deer’s antler. Sometimes deer have six, sometimes seven tines on an antler. So we make our ash rakes, some with six, some with seven teeth.