Excerpt from A History of Alabama: For Use in Schools, Based as to Its Earlier Parts on the Work of Albert J. Pickett Besides the building of houses and the making of weapons, canoes, and clothing, the principal industries were hunting, fishing, and a simple form of agriculture. The fertile soil made quick returns. Peas, beans, squashes, pumpkins, and corn were grown. Persimmons were made into cakes. Corn was pounded in mortars. In dig ging they used rude hoes made of fish-bones or wood. The planting was done chie y by women.

The sun was an Object of worship, and the moon and certain stars were regarded with great rever ence. In several places temples were found, filled with the bones of the dead. The religious cere monies were curious and fantastic. But for our purposes it will be best to study the Indians of Alabama, not at this early time, but some two hundred years later, when white men had begun to make settlements among them. For this later period we have sources of information more various and far more trustworthy than the narratives of the Spanish expedition. At the out set, however, we are confronted with the question whether the same races which De Soto found were still inhabiting the lands along the Alabama River in the eighteenth century. The two answers to this question can be considered more intelligently when we have taken a View of the various tribes as they existed at the later period. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books.

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