When she wished to
boil it she filled a large calabash-rind with water, put in it the
materials of her stew, and threw stones into the fire to heat. When very
hot these stones were raked out with a loop of twisted green reed or
willow-shoots and put into the water. When enough had been put in to
make the water boil, it was kept boiling by changing the cooled stones
for hotter ones until the meat was cooked.
Many of the baskets made by the squaws were curiously decorated, and
made of fine reed or fiber sewed in coils with very fine grass-thread,
so that they were both light and strong. There were cone-shaped
carrying-baskets borne on the back with a loop passed around the
forehead; in these the squaws carried grain, fruit, nuts or occasionally
babies. There were baskets for sifting grain and meal, and a sort of
flask that would hold water. The materials were gathered from mountains,
valleys and plains over a range of hundreds of miles--grasses here, bark
fiber there, dyes in another place, maguey leaves in another, and for
black figures in decoration the seed-pods called "cat's claws" or the
stems of maiden-hair fern. A design was not copied exactly, but each
worker made the pattern in the same general form and sometimes improved
on it. There was a banded pattern in a diamond-shaped criss-cross almost
exactly like the shaded markings on a rattlesnake-skin.
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