A Cheyenne chief said: “White man, I have given you my robes, which my warriors have spent months in hunting, and which my women have slaved a whole year in dressing; and what do you give me in return? I have nothing. You give me fire-water, which makes me and my people mad; and it is gone, and we have nothing to hunt more buffalo with, and to fight our enemies.”[318] I never saw an Amerind smoke as much tobacco in a week as I have seen Americans or English smoke in a single day. Tobacco and the pipe were part of the Amerindian religious paraphernalia. The pipe seems not to have been much used for ordinary smoking among the Nahuatl or Mexican tribes, nor among the sedentary tribes of our South-west. They used the cigarette chiefly, leaving the pipe for ceremonials, while the West Indian tribes rolled the leaf up for smoking. Many Eastern tribes cultivated tobacco extensively and were able to sell it to traders. It was generally mixed with other leaves and bark for smoking, and among the Eskimo with wood. The exact place of the pipe in the ceremonials of the Eastern tribes is not yet thoroughly understood, but its function was always an important one.[319] Among the Iroquois, when the horizon was filled with “thunderheads,” or “sons of thunder,” in a period of drought, it was a custom to burn tobacco, as an offering to bring rain. Each family made an offering on its secret altar to Hinuⁿ, God of Thunder, and then bore a portion to the council-house, where a general offering was burned in the council fire. “While the tobacco was burning the agile and athletic danced the rain dance.”[320]