_Tortillas_ were made of maize, “shelled and soaked in an alkali to remove the hull, then repeatedly washed in cold water.”[315] This product was then ground on a metate, beaten into flat cakes, and baked on an earthen griddle called _comalli_. _Tiste_ was parched corn ground with chocolate and sugar and mixed with water. _Atolli_ was a drink made of cornmeal cooked in water. _Chocolatl_ was prepared “by grinding equal parts of cacao beans and seeds of _pochotl_ or _sequoia_, which were then boiled. This liquid was shaken up to make it frothy, mixed with dough made of maize and then submitted to a new cooking to thicken it.”[316] No tribe learned to use the milk of any animal. The bison was about the only native animal that offered any. In the whisky of the whites they found their fate, and this has done more than any other single cause except smallpox to destroy the race. For it they exchanged tobacco, and the white man smokes as the Amerind drinks. [Illustration: UTE WOMAN CARRYING CHILD] Beckwourth, referring to the trading of the mixture of alcohol and water called whisky on the frontier in his day, to the natives, remarks: “This trading whisky for Indian property is one of the most infernal practices ever entered into by man. Let the reader sit down and figure up the profits on a forty-gallon cask of alcohol, and he will be thunderstruck, or, rather, whisky-struck. When disposed of, four gallons of water are added to each gallon of alcohol. In two hundred gallons there are sixteen hundred pints, for each one of which the trader gets a buffalo robe worth five dollars! The Indian women toil many long weeks to dress these sixteen hundred robes. The white trader gets them all for worse than nothing, for the poor Indian mother hides herself and children in the forests until the effect of the poison passes away from the husbands, fathers, and brothers who love them when they have no whisky, and abuse and kill them when they have.... In short, the sixty gallons of fire-water realised to the company over eleven hundred robes and eighteen horses, worth in St. Louis six thousand dollars.”[317] [Illustration: KEOKUK, A SAUK CHIEF George Catlin ] These were the honourable methods employed by the fur companies. They secured from the Amerinds thousands on thousands of dollars’ worth of valuable property for, as Beckwourth says, “worse than nothing,” and no man knew better than he the fearful effect of the fire-water on the native. To-day there are a great many white men engaged in the same traffic, despite the government’s efforts to crush it out. And still we cannot understand why the “Indian has degenerated”!