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This is an extremely useful book which one returns to again and again as a reference work. Its scope is the broadest, taking in every aspect of Indian life as the early explorers and the colonists found it, from personal appearance and characteristics to diet and agriculture, social organization, and intertribal relations. In addition, the reader learns a great deal about the New England environment, its plants, natural resources, and forest composition, and how it was shaped by the Indians. Russell many times over fulfills his goal of dispelling ‘the all too common notion of native New England as peopled by a handful of savages wandering in a trackless wilderness’.