Evolution of American Agriculture/Chapter II
CHAPTER II
HEN MAN reaches a certain stage in development he adopts Agriculture. In Asia, herding undoubtedly preceded the cultivation of the soil, but in America the goat and the ox did not exist, and agriculture was immediately imposed upon the hunting age.
The trend of agriculture was evidently from the South toward the North, and especially is this Northward trend evident in the case of the Indian corn, the principal agricultural staple of the Indian dietary.
Without referring to the Aztec race (an agricultural people who inhabited Mexico and were distinct from the Indians), we may say that the inhabitant of this continent North of the Rio Grande lived in some twelve different ethnic, or radical environments which produced as many different types of Indians. Natural environment determines the nature of the food supply for man and determines also what his clothing needs to be, what shelter he requires, and, through these what his domestic industries, and personal and social customs shall be. So in the Arctic region, where the major portion of the year is intensely cold, where the country is a barren, treeless waste, we may find a people dependent entirely upon animal life for food, clothing and tentage, engaging in hunting, fishing and bird nesting and without suspicion that such a thing as agriculture can exist. But in a region like the Atlantic slope of the Appalachian Mountains, where there are rich lowlands, fertile foot hills, streams full of fish, abundant plant life, great forests, and a climate favorable to agriculture, we may expect to find a people with a considerable range of choice in their food supply, clothed in the lighter skins or even in woven cotton garments, and living in hovels constructed from wood or mud or other permanent material, and rendered sedentary by the practice of some form of agriculture, though hunting and fishing are yet followed as equal sources of subsistence.
Indeed, at the time of the landing of the first colonists upon these shores from England in 1607, we find that agriculture was a main source of life for all that Indian population along the St. Lawrence and around the Great Lakes, on the Atlantic Slope, throughout the Gulf Coast country, in the great Mississippi Valley (exclusive of the Great Plains), and in the Pueblo country of the arid Southwest, though interested writers and so-called historians would have us believe that they were principally nomads and that agriculture was the exception rather than the rule. In the Arctic region, in the Yukon MacKenzie section, on the Western plains, and in the Rocky Mountains conditions were unfavaroble to Indian agriculture, while on the North Pacific Coast, in the Columbia and Frazer River regions, and in California and Oregon, animal and native plant foods were so abundant and easily available that there was no inducement for the Indian to take up the cultivation of the soil.
In this chapter it is our purpose to discuss only the agricultural Indians and especially the Eastern Indians, who first came in contact with the invading white man and who led in such resistance as the red man could oppose to the ruthless trampling of his natural rights and the certain destruction of his race.
The diet of the red men varied with the season and the food supply, ranging from fully three-fourths vegetable in the South to fully three-fourths animal in the North, and in all their agriculture, corn was the most important plant known to them. They also cultivated beans, squash, pumpkins, sunflowers, gourds, tobacco and, in the South, the cotton plant. Eighteen varieties of cultivated plants were known to them and fully one hundred other plants, uncultivated, furnished them further addition to their food supply; among these, of course, being acorns, berries, wild fruits, nuts, roots and seeds.
Not only did they cultivate these plants, but they had developed an effective storage and preservative system. Corn, beans, acorns, chestnuts, etc., were dried upon mats in the open air and stored in granaries or cribs. Onions, artichokes, corn, etc., were buried in pits. Pumpkins and squash were covered with piles of leaves and hay. Peppers, gourds, grapes, passion flower, sunflowers and tobacco were hung up in their houses. Venison was dried in the sun, fish were cured in the smoke of a greenwood fire as also were oysters, which they strung on a string. Drinks they had none, except mild infusions of leaves and willow bark which they drank as medicine. Fermented or distilled liquors (fire water) were introduced by the white men.
Corn was the principal cultivated plant of the agricultural Indians. Evidently originated in the tropics, it had found its way Northward by the adoption of the tribes, to a point far up the Ottawa River in Canada, where it was observed by Cartier, the French explorer, as early as 1534. This plant has played a great part in the economic and political history of America and may be justly said to be the greatest food producing plant now grown. The Jamestown and Plymouth colonies only became permanent as they were able to get supplies of this cereal from the Indians and by adopting its cultivation in their early fields. Also in the wars which soon succeeded the settlements by the whites, the great Iroquois nation was only defeated by the complete destruction of its corn supply; and later, after the Revolution, when Mad Anthony Wayne was sent against the Indians of the Western Reserve, he only succeeded in his mission by cutting down and burning the thousands of acres of corn fields they had cultivated in the rich river bottoms.
The Indians, then, were not the wandering people we have been taught to believe them to have been, but were really fairly well advanced agriculturists, though they retained many of the characteristics of their former nomadic life. We now know that they practiced communal farming and lived in large villages surrounded by their extensive fields. The average per family seems to have been from two to two and one-half acres and the production of corn an average of about forty bushels per acre. And, when we consider that the soil was broken by means of wooden or stone mattocks and crude wooden spades, and that the cultivating was mostly done by the women and children with hoes made from clam shells and the shoulder blades of the bear and moose, we are forced to realize that they were a remarkably industrious people, and that, had they known the use of metals, they would have compared most favorably in productive ability with the Europeans who came to supplant them.
The cultured methods of the Indians have been but little changed by modern agriculture, and one tool of their invention, the "husking peg," is still in use wherever corn is harvested by "armstrong" methods, a fact that the boys of the A. W. O. are likely to appreciate.
An eminent writer on agriculture gives the following agricultural achievements of the Indians:- They reproduced wild plants under control.
- They propagated cultivated varieties of wild plants.
- They practiced plant breeding by seed selection.
- They planted seeds in hills, to give light, soil space and room for cultivation.
- They used crop fertilizers, such as fish buried in the hill with the seeds.
- They practiced good tillage.
- They practiced clean cultivation.
- They practiced multiple cropping (corn, beans, sunflowers, etc., in the same field.)
- They made clearings by girdling and burning.
- They invented the corn crib.
- They discovered the narcotic effect of tobacco.
- They cured tobacco by artificial heat.
- They made syrup and sugar by evaporating sap.
- They preserved fruits, etc., with syrup, wild honey, etc.
In the face of these achievements, who can doubt that the red man could have assimilated the civilization of the whites? Evidently there was no real effort on the part of the colonists, even of the hypen-religious Puritans, to find a reasonable basis on which the two races could work out a common destiny. The spirit of exploitation was rampant and the weaker, less advanced Indians went down before the superior shrewdness and unscrupulous ruthlessness of his Caucasian adversary. The history of the white man's dealings with the red man is a record of his cruelty, exploitation and dirty chicanery that bourgeois historians try hard to conceal, its last monumental infamy being the destruction of the buffalo during the seventies, by which act the Indians of the West were forced upon the reservation and reduced from freemen to that curious position of a "ward of the government"—"neither man nor boy; just hobbledehoy."
