CHAPTER VIII
A GROUP OF STOCK-FOOD TREES—THE MESQUITES
Southern California has the carob for its bran tree, the corn and cotton belts have the honey locust for their bran tree, and the area between has the frost-resisting mesquites with their crops of beans. When one considers the ancient use of the mesquite, its present use, and its remarkably useful and promising qualities, it becomes difficult to understand why it also has been so greatly neglected by the scientific world.
VALUE TO INDIAN AND FRONTIERSMAN
In analysis and use the mesquite beans are much like those of the old carob in the Old World. (See analysis, page 302.) They have chiefly been food for beast, but food for man also to a considerable extent. Some Indian tribes have had mesquite bread as a staple food for an unknown period of time.[1]
A caravan of forty-niners[2] seeking the golden sands of California lost some of their oxen as they toiled under terrible privation down the Gila River valley in southern Arizona; but when they reached the Colorado, near the present city of Yuma, they came upon a "grove of hundreds of acres of Mosquit Beans. These trees were full of beans and hundreds of bushels lay on the ground. These beans were reputed to be excellent feed for the cattle. . . . We remained at this place seven days, and our cattle gained strength and flesh remarkably fast, and with the two hundred bushels of beans we had
- ↑ "The Pima and Papago Indians in Arizona have always made use of mesquite beans as food for themselves and their stock, particularly horses; and I think they are yet quite an important article of subsistence among the Papagos." (Levi Chubbuck.)
- ↑ Unpublished journal of Charles Pancoast of Salem, N. J.
