Labor was divided between the men and the women (and children). Men did
the hunting, fighting and made the weapons. The women (and children) did
the other work—the housework, planting and harvesting the crops,
dressing deer and buffalo skins, making twine from bast, weaving cloth
and, on the hunt, carrying the house parts and setting up the camp.
Buffalo meat was preserved by drying and smoking it over a fire in the
hunting camp. Vegetable foods, corn, beans and squash were dried or
parched and buried in containers or in lined pits in the ground and
covered over. Watermelons, muskmelons (?), gourds and tobacco were also
grown. Wild strawberries, paw paws, pecans, lotus roots, wild tubers,
grapes and plums formed part of their diet.
The winter buffalo hunt usually took place a long way from the village.
The hunting units each consisted of several families under a rigid
police system and regulation to prevent the herd from being stampeded by
an over-eager family before all were amply provided with meat.
Violations of hunting regulations were punished by destruction of the
offender’s property to which no resistance was ever attempted. The group
surrounded the herd, at times encircling it with fires made at intervals
near which the hunters stood and killed the stampeding animals. At times
as many as 120 buffalo were killed in a day. The women cut out the
tongues, skinned the animals, and, peeling off the sides of meat, dried
and smoked them on wooden grates over a slow fire. The smoked sides were
carried back to the village on the back, or when practicable in dugout
boats. Carcasses and bones were left on the hunting grounds. Other
animals were stalked by one or two hunters. Dog meat was considered a
great delicacy.
Fish were caught in nets, by hook and line, speared or shot with bow and
arrow. They were dried for preservation. Maple trees were tapped late in
the winter, the sap caught in bark containers and made into a maple
drink or reduced by boiling to syrup and sugar. Corn was ground into
meal and baked into bread, or prepared as hominy.
Vessels and utensils were made of wood or clay, ladles from a section of
the buffalo skull. Fire was produced by the hand drill in the usual
manner.
The cabin type seems to have varied at different periods or in different
tribes. In early times, cabins had rectangular floors and vaulted
(barrel-shaped) roofs. They were roofed and floored with “double-mats”
of flat rushes and were impervious to wind or rain. Occasionally they
were erected on low mounds (two feet high) to keep the floors dry. Large
cabins of the vaulted type had four fires, with one or two families at a
fire.
Bark-covered hemispherical huts or wigwams may have been used on hunting
trips. They were apparently common in some villages in 1723.
Overland travel was on foot. On streams the dugout boat was propelled by
pole and possibly by paddle. Large boats were 40 to 50 feet long,
capable of carrying 40 to 50 men. While dugouts were admirably suited
for travel and trade between the Illini tribes along the Illinois and
Mississippi rivers, they were, on account of their weight and
unwieldiness in portaging, generally useless in raids against enemies.
[Illustration: Fig. 33. Native Illini artifacts. A, Indian-made gun
flint; B, C, D, chipped flint arrowheads; E, flint scraper; F,
grooved abrader of sandstone; G, expanded base drill (grip only,
point broken off); H, I, polished stone pendants. From Illini
village site near mouth of Kaskaskia River, Randolph County.]