planting easier because the soil remained moist and soft. As they taught
the Pilgrims, they fertilized land (and got rid of weeds) by burning brush and
by burying fish heads in the hillocks in which they placed seed. Like con-
temporary European farmers, they let exhausted fields lie fallow temporarily.
Among the East Coast Indians, as among many tribal peoples, agricul-
ture was primarily woman’s work. While the women planted, weeded, har-
vested, and processed vegetables, the men hunted and fished. Wild turkey,
deer, bear, and a variety of smaller animals they found in the forests; and
beavers, otters, and fish from the rivers provided a high-protein, nutritious,
and abundant diet.
It followed that Indians were generally healthy. As Helen C. Rountree
and Thomas E. Davidson comment, “Indian people of both sexes were
healthier than early seventeenth century English people...[who] were
almost continually ailing: their diet was poor in fruits and vegetables for
most of the year.” Indian men, at about 5 feet 7^1 ⁄ 2 inches, were taller than
Englishmen by an average of 1 inch; Indian women on average were over 2
inches taller than Englishwomen. The early English visitors and colonists
marveled at the size and strength of the Indians. For example, William
Strachey described a meeting in what became Maryland where “inhabite a
people called the Sasquesahonougs.... Such great and well proportioned
men are seldome seene, for they seemed like Gyantes to the English [with
voices]... sounding from them (as yt were) a great voyce in a vault or caue
as an Eccoe.”
Along the Saint Lawrence, Champlain similarly found all the people
well-formed and proportioned in body, some of the men being very strong
and robust. And there are also women and girls who are very beautiful and
attractive in figure, coloring (although it is olive) and in features, all in pro-
portion; and their breasts hang down hardly at all, unless they are old.
Some of them are very powerful and of extraordinary height. The women
are equally well-formed, plump, and of a tawny complexion.Particularly striking to the early observers was the strength of the Indians
and their skill with their primitive weapons. George Percy described a test of
the Indians’ strength and skill with a bow and arrow in these words:
The Native Americans 11