It would be hazardous to attempt any estimate of the quantity of corn raised, even by any one tribe. The Sauk and Foxes appear to have depended more on products of the soil than did their neighbors. The four hundred acres raised near where Sauk City now stands, is good evidence of a total product of no slight proportions, for these Indians had many other villages scattered along the line of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. Speaking of these tribes as a whole, Worden remarks: “The Sacs and Foxes raise corn, beans and melons, and derive a great part of their subsistence from agriculture and gardening.”[13] Indian improvidence is usually spoken of as though the red man had no regard whatever for the morrow; but Pike credits the Osage with the virtue of rigid economy in saving their corn and beans for seasons when the chase is likely to fail in supplying the larder.[14] The same author mentions the drying of pumpkins, for winter use, by the Indians of the plains. In the same strain Father Allouez, who visited the Western Indians in the early part of 1670, says of the Outagami: “These savages * * * are settled in an excellent country,—the soil, which is black there, yielding them Indian corn in abundance. They live by hunting during the winter returning to their cabins towards its close, and living there on Indian corn that they had hidden away the previous Autumn; they season it with fish.”[15] Again, in speaking of the Oumamis, [Miami], he mentions the fact that on the first of May they still had corn which they offered him to eat; and of the Potawatomi, that their land is “very good for Indian corn, of which they plant fields, and to which they very willingly retire to avoid the famines that are too common in these quarters.” These famines were usually the result of drouth which, by drying up the forage plants, drove the big game away to other sections,[16] leaving the poor Indians dependent on fish and the grain in stock—the latter being, unhappily, seldom or never found in quantities sufficient to tide over a famine of any consequence.[17] A traveller in 1669 makes this record on his visit to Green Bay: “I found here only one village of different nations—Ousaki, Pouteouatami, Outagami, Orenibigoutz (i. e. Ouinipegouk)—about six hundred souls. * * * All these Nations have their fields of Indian corn, squashes, beans, and tobacco.”[18] In 1793, Robert Dickson wrote of the Indians near Portage: “At the Falls of the Fox River there is a portage of three-quarters of a mile. The Indians here raise Indian corn, squash, potatoes, melons, and cucumbers in great abundance, and good tobacco. On the low lands by the river great quantities of wild oats [rice] grow.”[19]