THE most important task before the Cheyenne man
was to provide food for his family--his first thought
was to support life. It is commonly assumed that the
Indian lived solely by hunting and fishing, and subsisted alto-
gether on flesh, but this is not true. A considerable portion of
his sustenance was derived from the soil. Like most tribes, the
Cheyennes cultivated the ground, and raised corn, squashes,
beans, and tobacco. At their proper season, wild fruits and
roots were gathered, and these furnished an important part of
their living.

We learn only by tradition about the subsistence of the
Cheyennes before they reached the buffalo plains. They know
nothing about when or where they first obtained the corn, but
their old stories point to a long residence in a country where
the sugar-maple grows, and they say that sugar formed a part
of their food. They had always been hunters, and their code
permitted them to eat all flesh--most birds and mammals, as
well as fish and some reptiles, creatures which are an abomina-
tion to certain Plains tribes.

In that early period of their wanderings spoken of by the
Cheyennes as "long, long ago, when they were in the North,"
they say that they had little knowledge of large food animals.
There was a time when they subsisted almost wholly on small
animals with long ears--rabbits--and at another period they
lived chiefly on fish. At a later day, they visited in summer
lakes and streams, and gathered the eggs of wild fowl and
killed the young, not yet able to fly, as well as the adults when

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