Day-to-Day Life 
The main food staples found in the pantry were dried, smoked salmon and meats. The space beneath the sleeping decks formed cupboards for the firewood and above the sleeping quarters hanging shelves were erected to store food.
In late summer and fall salmon fishing kept most people busy. Smoking salmon with cherry and crab apple wood was a popular way to flavour and preserve fish. Fish that was smoked for a week would last for a year. Salmon would also be cut, stretched and hung to dry on racks in the hot and windy season of July. Winds were hot enough to allow natural oils of the fish to act as a preserver. Depending on the weather and location of the racks the fish would take one to three weeks to dry and be good for two years. Preserved fish would be placed in a storehouse. After the salmon, small task groups were formed for berry picking and hunting.
Most food was processed where it was harvested and transported back to the longhouse to be stored. Groups of women and men went into the mountains for several days in late summer. They picked huckleberries that were piled on a thick cedar bark mat, which was held 4 feet above a fire by a wooden rack. The huckleberries were dried for two or three days, and then brought back to the longhouse.
June and elder berries were crushed with small stone hammers in a basket or wooden bowl, spread on maple leaves in the sun to dry, and then stored away in the form of flat cakes (an early version of the fruit bar).
Roots were found locally and the most important was the bracken fern, the long rhizomes were dug out by women using hardwood digging sticks and cooked and stored away in the pantry.
Wild potatoes and wild onions and would be found in the pantry.
A moss found hanging from certain trees high in the mountains, was boiled black then put on platters to dry in the form of cakes, and was known as moss bread.
Hazelnuts were picked in mid September and put away to ripen.
Soapberries were stored and when whipped would foam up and look like ice cream.
Hesqueat Root Digger
Source: Northwestern University Library
Photo by: E.S. Curtis
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