The field work was performed by the women, not from any necessity
of a slavish condition or an enforced obedience, but because,
where the men and boys must be warriors and hunters, the women
and girls felt that it was their place and their duty to perform
such menial labor as, to their unenlightened nature, seemed
hardly suitable to those who were to become chiefs and heroes.
These sturdy forest-folk of old Virginia, who had reached that
state of human advance, midway between savagery and civilization,
that is known as barbarism, were but a small portion of that
red-skinned, vigorous, and most interesting race familiar to us
under their general but wrongly-used name of "Indians." They
belonged to one of the largest divisions of this barbaric race,
known the Algonquin family--a division created solely by a
similarity of language and of blood-relationships--and were,
therefore, of the kindred of the Indians of Canada, of New
England, and of Pennsylvania, of the valley of the Ohio, the
island of Manhattan, and of some of the far-away lands beyond the
Mississippi.
So, for generations, they lived, with their simple home customs
and their family affections, with their games and sports, their
legends and their songs, their dances, fasts, and feasts, their
hunting and their fishing, their tribal feuds and wars.
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