the valley of the lower Ohio, as in the vicinity around Evansville, there are almost solid forests of pecan. I have seen one tree there six feet in diameter; I have seen them towering twenty or perhaps thirty feet above the top of the white oak forest. This locality is one of many.[1]
Occasional trees are very productive and yield nuts of fine flavor. Mr. J. F. Wilkinson, of Rockport, Indiana, an intelligent and careful observer, says:
"I have gathered the crop from a particular tree four years
- ↑ "Up to four or five years ago wild pecan trees were very abundant along all the streams in certain sections in southwestern Missouri, particularly Bates County. They were so abundant that it was the practice of many rural residents to harvest the pecans in the fall by cutting down the trees. . . . In many a wood-chopper's cabin these wild pecans filled an important place in the dietary of the family. The same was true with the early settlers along the botiom lands of the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers in the state of Missouri. Within my own recollection I have known where families looked upon their winter supply of nuts, including the wild hazel nut, black walnuts, and pecans, as necessities rather than luxuries. Of course, this order of things is entirely changed now except in remote regions." (Letter from W. L. Howard, Assistant Professor of Pomology at the University of California, January 16, 1917.)
Professor C. J. Posey, University of Kansas, tells me that between 1881 and 1886, when he was a boy, on the Kaskaskia bottoms fifty miles east of St. Louis, the land law was that each man had to fence his own crops against roving stock. The bottoms were open, chiefly wooded, and it was customary to let the hogs run. The farmers would gather up the sows and pigs in the spring before the young had left their mothers. Each owner marked his own with his particular brand, usually nicking their ears. He would let them run, giving them a little feed so that they would stay within reach. In the autumn the young were nearly as wild as deer and were sometimes ready to be slaughtered without feeding but were fed a little at the edge of the clearing to keep them within reach.
"With a little corn for bait, the farmer would go to the rail fence at the edge of the clearing and holler. With merry grunts up gallops your year's meat supply 1"
No wonder the early settlers of Illinois settled in the timbered lands along the streams and thought the prairie worthless. (See J. Russell Smith, North America, p. 297.) By 1918 all this had changed. Each man had to fence in his own stock and waste became property.
As late as 1910 some persons known to Professor Posey were making ten dollars or fifteen dollars a day gathering pecans, then the nuts became so valuable that the owners began to keep the people away from their trees.
As boys Professor Posey and his brother gathered ten to fifteen bushels of hickory nuts in a day.
