Warren County
Local History by Dallas Bogan |
Contributor: |
Dallas Bogan on 6 August 2004 |
Source: |
"The Pioneer Writings of Josiah Morrow" by Dallas Bogan |
Return to Index to see a list of other articles by Dallas Bogan |
Indian Corn Their Chief Crop--Clearing The Forests--Women Did The Field Work--No
Plows--Indian Hoes
of Bones and Shells--Planting Corn and
Fish in The Same Hill.
July 2, 1908
Before considering the subject of the manner in which the Indians raised their
corn crops, I quote from Carr-Lucien Lucien Carr, a careful writer on the manners
and customs of the native tribes of this country. He says in the Smithsonian
Report for 1891:
"The testimony is so uniform that of the main fact the cultivation of corn
in greater or less quantities by all the tribes living east of the Mississippi
and south of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes there cannot be a shadow of doubt.
All the writers agree upon the point and there is no room for a difference of
opinion except perhaps in regard to the amount grown. Upon this point too the
evidence is explicit. Instead of cultivating it in small patches as a summary
luxury, it can be shown on undoubted authority, that everywhere within the limits
named, the Indian looked upon it as a staple article of food both in summer
and in winter that he cultivated it in large fields and understood and appreciated
the benefits arising from the use of fertilizers. Indeed such was his proficiency
and industry that even with the rude and imperfect implements at his disposal,
he not only raised corn enough for his own use but, as a rule, had some to spare
to his need neighbors both red and white."
The clearing of the forest, preparatory to the cultivation of the soil, must
have been with the aboriginal tribes a slow and toilsome labor. They felled
trees by fire, burning around the trunk, then cutting away the charred part
with their stone axes, then burning again. If a canoe was to be made, the fallen
trunk was severed at the desired length by the same slow process and then the
canoe was dug out by repeated burnings and hackings. Opening a farm in the woods
even with the aid of a sharp, steel-edged ax is a patience trying task, and
it is not strange that the Indians did not like to undertake it. In Ohio they
fixed their villages on or near the treeless plains, which served for their
plantations of corn and vegetables.
It is true that many sites of the towns of the ancient tribes who built the
mounds of the Mississippi valley were found in dense forests and their earthworks
were overgrown with trees of a large size when they were first seen by white
men. Their extensive earthworks, such as that at Fort
Ancient, indicate an extensive population. They were too numerous
to live by hunting and fishing alone, and they as well as the more recent doubtless
grew large crops of corn. It has seemed to me not improbable that when Ohio
was thickly populated with Mound builders, the state was destitute of trees
except, perhaps along the streams, or at least that the treeless regions were
far more numerous and extensive than at a later period, and after that race
disappeared the forest spread from the banks of the streams over the highlands,
and covered their mounds and the sites of their towns and cornfields.
Our knowledge of how the Indians cultivated their corn is derived largely
from white men who lived among them as captives. Only a few such captives were
men of sufficient intelligence to write out their recollections of Indian modes
of life. Some of them, however, have left us accounts of their life among the
Indians which are not only interesting but valuable contributions to our knowledge
of the native red men.
Oliver M. Spencer, when a boy of eleven years was captured
by the Indians at Columbia and taken to the confluence of the Maumee and Auglaize
in northwestern Ohio, where he had his home until he was ransomed. It was in
this region that General Wayne found the most extensive fields
of corn that he had ever seen and from his home young Spencer
could see an extensive prairie covered with growing corn only two years before
the coming of Wayne's army. After his ransom Spencer became
a Methodist minister and wrote out an interesting account of his life among
the Indians. He says:
"The Indian women inhabiting the large villages, wherever it was practicable,
cultivated portions of the same fields, separated from each other only by spaces
of a few feet and varying in size according to the number and strength of the
families, seldom raising corn as an article of commerce but merely to furnish
food for their own sustenance. Around these fields they made no enclosures,
nor indeed, having no cattle, hogs or sheep, were fences necessary. As for their
few horses they were either driven out into the woods or secured near their
cabins and having bells on, were easily prevented from trespassing by the boys
whose duty it was, by turn, while amusing themselves with their bows and arrows,
to protect the fields."
The Indians fields were tilled by their women. The warrior, while he took
pride in broad fields as well as in extensive hunting grounds, was too much
of a philosopher, too brave and dignified to farm himself while he could get
his wife to do the field work. Some modern writers, in looking about for new
occupations for women, have suggested that certain departments of horticulture
or the cultivation of fruits, flowers and garden vegetables might afford an
agreeable, healthful and profitable employment for their delicate hands. But
the Indian, long ago, went further, and maintained that agriculture and horticulture,
the cultivation of corn and all sorts of vegetables, fell exclusively within
woman's sphere. And the Indians wife accepted the doctrine of her age without
a doubt of its correction, and she would have been deeply chagrined to have
seen her brave lord, even when not occupied with the duties of war or of the
chased, stoop to undignified work in the cornfield.
Without animal power, without the plow, without labor saving machinery, women
carried on agriculture in this country. With no better tools than a stack of
wood, sharpened by fire, a sea shell of a rude implement of flint or stone,
she bent over her long and painful summer's toil and thus produced, perhaps
one half of the food consumed by her tribe.
But it must not be supposed that because the Indian woman performed the field
labor that she was an over worked drudge or that her lot was much harder than
that of the pioneer white man's wife. Mary Jemison who was
taken captive in 1775 and adopted into the Senaca tribe says: "Our labor
was not severe and that of one year was exactly similar to that of the others
without that endless variety that is to be observed in the common labor of the
white people. Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to
procure and the cooking to perform, their task is not harder than that of the
white women, and their cares are certainly not half as numerous nor as great.
In the summer season we planted, tended and harvested our corn and generally
had our children with us, but we had no master to oversee us or to drive us
so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased. In order to expedite their
business and at the same time enjoy each others company the women all work together
in one field or at whatever job they may have on hand."
James Smith, who was a prisoner among the Delewares in Ohio
when a youth from 1755 to 1759, tells us that after his adoption into the tribe
he went out from the village one day to see the women hoe corn, and desiring
to gratify the ladies he himself took a hoe and worked for an hour or two, and
was highly praised for so doing. But when the warriors learned what he had done
they reproved him, and reminded him that he was a young man and a warrior, and
should never engage in women's work. He says: "They never had occasion
to reprove me for anything like this again as I never was extremely fond of
work."
There is hardly a doubt that the hoe Smith found in use by
the Indian women was the white man's hoe obtained from the French or English
traders. Long before the first white settlement in Ohio the habits of the Indians
had been modified by their contact with the Europeans.
But there is no reason to doubt that long before iron implements were introduced
among them the Indians used an implement fashioned something after the manner
of our hoes in the cultivating of their corn. General Fowke,
in his Archaeological History of Ohio, gives evidence that such implements were
made of stone, the shoulder blades of large animals, tortoise shells or mussel
shells perforated for the wooden handle. The Connecticut Indians used a hoe
made of horn with a handle of wood five feet long. Catlin says the Mandans raise
corn and pumpkins, their women using hoes made of the shoulder blade of the
buffalo or elk. Clam shells were used by the Virginia and New England Indians
in cultivating the ground and a hoe made of a mussel shell with a hole for the
insertion of a handle was found in a mound at Madisonville near Cincinnati.
The Indians cultivated their corn without the plow. Although rude wooden plows
and even the iron plowshare were in use in Bible lands from time immemorial,
when Columbus discovered America there was not a plow on the western continent.
The only substitute for the plow in America was found in Peru and it is described
by Prescott as simply a sharpened piece of timber with a cross piece about a
foot long from the end on which the plowman set his foot and to which was attached
a rope by which it was pulled along by half a dozen men.
The North American Indian had no horses or oxen. There were no native animals
strong enough for draught animals except the buffalo and the elk and they were
difficult to subjugate. They had no working animals, no farm animals for food
or clothing and no domesticated animals whatever except a small black dog.
Both in Virginia and New England the English emigrants found maize cultivated
by the Indians and the whites learned from the red men how to grow it.
Along the Atlantic and its estuaries the Indian method of planting corn was
to make openings ground about four feet apart, using for the purpose a large
clam shell. In these openings they dropped four, five or six grains and a fish,
sometimes two or three small fishes, and covered them over. The old chronicle
of the Pilgrims says that, after the manner of the Indians, they manured their
ground with herrings or rather shad, which they took in great abundance--every
acre taking a thousand of them and that an acre thus dressed would produce as
much corn as three acres without fish. The whites continue to plant fish and
corn together for more than one hundred and fifty years.
In an old book entitled "A Perfect Description of Virginia," published
in London in 1650, there is a glowing description of the crops then grown by
the colonists. "Their maize of Virginia corn," it says, "yields
them 500 to 1; they set it as we do garden peas; it makes good bread and malts
well."
I understand the statement that "they set it as we do garden peas,"
to mean merely that they planted it in hills and did not sow it broadcast, as
the English did the cereal grains.
The word "hill" means a separate place in which seeds are planted
is an Americanism, and probably originated from the planting of corn and forming
little hills over the seed, though we now speak of hills where the ground is
not elevated.
James Adair who lived with the northern Indians nearly forty
years says: "They plant their corn in straight rows, putting five or six
grains into one hole about two inches distant. They cover them with clay in
the form of a small hill; each now is a yard asunder and in the vacant ground
they plant pumpkins, watermelons, marshmallows, sunflowers and sundry sorts
of beans and peas, the last two of which yield a large increase."
According to Lucien Carr, some tribes had at least four different
kinds of corn and planting them at different times during the spring and early
summer, they not only had successive crops which they ate green so long as the
summer lasted, but they also raised enough for winter use.
Indian corn is the one food plant indigenous to the new world and in its gift
we have received from American aboriginal agriculture the most important food
plant in the world. In the number of farms in which it may be used as food the
abundance of its yield and the variety of climates in which it may be grown
it excels the date of Egypt, the rice of China and any of the cereals of the
old world. It is not only the most useful, but the most beautiful grain plant,
and as it is of American origin, a stalk of maize might well have been placed
on the seal of the United States rather than any wild bird or beast, a fitting
recognition of agriculture as the basis of national wealth.
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