they were very careful to preserve as they gathered the acorns from it
late in the fall, October and November. The oak tree furnished them
with the staff of life, as it was from the acorn they made all their
bread and mush and this bread they could take for use on long journeys
on their hunting trips. They would wrap up a large lump of dough and
placing it in a cool place, keep it for several days before it would
begin to spoil or sour. From this dough they made their mush by taking
a piece about the size of a tea cup and put it into one of the baskets,
fill it nearly full with water, then take some wash stones taken from
the river or creek and put them in the fire until they were hot and
often red-hot when they would take two sticks and lift them out, drop
them into the basket and stir the whole briskly with a paddle, made for
this purpose, they would soon have it boiling and by putting in another
stone and with a little more stirring they would soon have the basket
of mush cooked. They call this mush Ka-go and it is very nutritious
and gives great power of endurance. After the basket of mush has been
set aside for thirty or forty minutes it is then dipped out into small
baskets made for the purpose and of size to fit the stomach. One person
serves, handing out the mush together with a piece of dry salmon or
venison or different things that may be prepared for eating. The acorn
furnishes the bread to all the Klamath river Indians.
All the oak timber was owned by the well-to-do families and was divided
off by lines and boundaries as carefully as the whites have got it
surveyed today. It can easily be seen by this that the Indians have
carefully preserved the oak timber and have never at any time destroyed
it.
The Douglas fir timber they say has always encroached on the open
prairies and crowded out the other timber, therefore they have
continuously burned it and have done all they could to keep it from
covering all the open lands. Our legends tell when they arrived in the
Klamath river country that there were thousands of acres of prairie
lands and with all the burning that they could do the country has been
growing up to timber more and more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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