Part 5 (1/2)
CHAPTER VI
INDIAN CORN
A great field of tall Indian corn waving its stately and luxuriant green blades, its graceful spindles, and glossy silk under the hot August sun, should be not only a beautiful sight to every American, but a suggestive one; one to set us thinking of all that Indian corn means to us in our history. It was a native of American soil at the settlement of this country, and under full and thoroughly intelligent cultivation by the Indians, who were also native sons of the New World. Its abundance, adaptability, and nouris.h.i.+ng qualities not only saved the colonists'
lives, but altered many of their methods of living, especially their manner of cooking and their tastes in food.
One of the first things that every settler in a new land has to learn is that he must find food in that land; that he cannot trust long to any supplies of food which he has brought with him, or to any fresh supplies which he has ordered to be sent after him. He must turn at once to hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, planting, to furnish him with food grown and found in the very place where he is.
This was quickly learned by the colonists in America, except in Virginia, where they had sad starving-times before all were convinced that corn was a better crop for settlers than silk or any of the many hoped-for productions which might be valuable in one sense but which could not be eaten. Powhatan, the father of the Indian princess Pocahontas, was one of the first to ”send some of his People that they may teach the English how to sow the Grain of his Country.” Captain John Smith, ever quick to learn of every one and ever practical, got two Indians, in the year 1608, to show him how to break up and plant forty acres of corn, which yielded him a good crop. A succeeding governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale, equally practical, intelligent, and determined, a.s.signed small farms to each colonist, and encouraged and enforced the growing of corn. Soon many thousand bushels were raised.
There was a terrible Indian ma.s.sacre in 1622, for the careless colonists, in order to be free to give their time to the raising of that new and exceedingly alluring and high-priced crop, tobacco, had given the Indians firearms to go hunting game for them; and the lesson of easy killing with powder and shot, when once learned, was turned with havoc upon the white men. The following year comparatively little corn was planted, as the luxuriant foliage made a perfect ambush for the close approach of the savages to the settlements. There was, of course, scarcity and famine as the result; and a bushel of corn-meal became worth twenty to thirty s.h.i.+llings, which sum had a value equal to twenty to thirty dollars to-day. The planters were each compelled by the magistrates the following year to raise an ample amount of corn to supply all the families; and to save a certain amount for seed as well.
There has been no lack of corn since that time in Virginia.
The French colonists in Louisiana, perhaps because they were accustomed to more dainty food than the English, fiercely hated corn, as have the Irish in our own day. A band of French women settlers fairly raised a ”petticoat rebellion” in revolt against its daily use. A despatch of the governor of Louisiana says of these rebels:--
”The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an article of food; but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for this food a dogged aversion, which has not been subdued. They inveigh bitterly against His Grace, the Bishop of Quebec, who, they say, has enticed them away from home under pretext of sending them to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise.”
This hatred of corn was shared by other races. An old writer says:--
”Peter Martyr could magnifie the Spaniards, of whom he reports they led a miserable life for three days together, with parched grain of maize onlie”--
which, when compared with the diet of New England settlers for weeks at a time, seems such a bagatelle as to be scarce worth the mention of Peter Martyr. By tradition, still commemorated at Forefathers' Dinners, the ration of Indian corn supplied to each person in the colony in time of famine was but five kernels.
The stores brought over by the Pilgrims were poor and inadequate enough; the beef and pork were tainted, the fish rotten, the b.u.t.ter and cheese corrupted. European wheat and seeds did not mature well. Soon, as Bradford says in his now famous _Log-Book_, in his picturesque and forcible English, ”the grim and grizzled face of starvation stared” at them. The readiest supply to replenish the scanty larder was fish, but the English made surprisingly bungling work over fis.h.i.+ng, and soon the most unfailing and valuable supply was the native Indian corn, or ”Guinny wheat,” or ”Turkie wheat,” as it was called by the colonists.
Famine and pestilence had left eastern Ma.s.sachusetts comparatively bare of inhabitants at the time of the settlement of Plymouth; and the vacant cornfields of the dead Indian cultivators were taken and planted by the weak and emaciated Plymouth men, who never could have cleared new fields. From the teeming sea, in the April run of fish, was found the needed fertilizer. Says Governor Bradford:--
”In April of the first year they began to plant their corne, in which service Squanto stood them in great stead, showing them both ye manner how to set it, and after, how to dress and tend it.”
From this planting sprang not only the most useful food, but the first and most pregnant industry of the colonists.
The first fields and crops were communal, and the result was disastrous.
The third year, at the sight of the paralyzed settlement, Governor Bradford wisely decided, as did Governor Dale of Virginia, that ”they should set corne every man for his owne particuler, furnis.h.i.+ng a portion for public officers, fishermen, etc., who could not work, and in that regard trust to themselves.” Thus personal energy succeeded to communal inertia; Bradford wrote that women and children cheerfully worked in the fields to raise corn which should be their very own.
A field of corn on the coast of Ma.s.sachusetts or Narragansett or by the rivers of Virginia, growing long before any white man had ever been seen on these sh.o.r.es, was precisely like the same field planted three hundred years later by our American farmers. There was the same planting in hills, the same number of stalks in the hill, with pumpkin-vines running among the hills, and beans climbing the stalks. The hills of the Indians were a trifle nearer together than those of our own day are usually set, for the native soil was more fertile.
The Indians taught the colonists much more than the planting and raising of corn; they showed also how to grind the corn and cook it in many palatable ways. The various foods which we use to-day made from Indian corn are all cooked just as the Indians cooked them at the time of the settlement of the country; and they are still called with Indian names, such as hominy, pone, supp.a.w.n, samp, succotash.
The Indian method of preparing maize or corn was to steep or parboil it in hot water for twelve hours, then to pound the grain in a mortar or a hollowed stone in the field, till it was a coa.r.s.e meal. It was then sifted in a rather closely woven basket, and the large grains which did not pa.s.s through the sieve were again pounded and sifted.
Samp was often pounded in olden times in a primitive and picturesque Indian mortar made of a hollowed block of wood or a stump of a tree, which had been cut off about three feet from the ground. The pestle was a heavy block of wood shaped like the inside of the mortar, and fitted with a handle attached to one side. This block was fastened to the top of a young and slender tree, a growing sapling, which was bent over and thus gave a sort of spring which pulled the pestle up after being pounded down on the corn. This was called a sweep and mortar mill.
They could be heard at a long distance. Two New Hamps.h.i.+re pioneers made clearings about a quarter of a mile apart and built houses. There was an impenetrable gully and thick woods between the cabins; and the blazed path was a long distance around, so the wives of the settlers seldom saw each other or any other woman. It was a source of great comfort and companions.h.i.+p to them both that they could signal to each other every day by pounding on their mortars. And they had an ingenious system of communication which one spring morning summoned one to the home of the other, where she arrived in time to be the first to welcome fine twin babies.
After these simple stump and sapling mortars were abandoned elsewhere they were used on Long Island, and it was jestingly told that sailors in a fog could always know on what sh.o.r.e they were, when they could hear the pounding of the samp-mortars on Long Island.
Rude hand-mills next were used, which were called quernes, or quarnes.
Some are still in existence and known as samp-mills. Windmills followed, of which the Indians were much afraid, dreading ”their long arms and great teeth biting the corn in pieces”; and thinking some evil spirit turned the arms. As soon as maize was plentiful, English mills for grinding meal were started in many towns. There was a windmill at Watertown, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1631. In 1633 the first water-mill, at Dorchester, was built, and in Ipswich a grist-mill was built in 1635.
The mill built by Governor John Winthrop in New London is still standing.