peditions would have been impossible had it not been for the stored-up foods procured from the Indian tribes of the regions visited. Lewis and Clark, in their expedition of 1804, obtained ears of corn from the Mandans of the Missouri, who " dug it up in front of their lodges, where they had buried it the winter before." Elsewhere the service of "wild-rice" to the early settlements of the West and Northwest has been referred to. As is well known, the European settlers took over from the aborigines of the regions in North America occupied by them numerous food-plants with the methods of cultivating them in vogue there. The complete list of these has never been drawn up. Besides this, they used, as did the Indians before them, without cultivation, many roots, etc., some of which were at times very. important items in their food-supply. But maize with its products undoubtedly heads the list.

The number of food substances produced from maize by the Indians and borrowed from them temporarily or permanently by the whites is quite large, and includes many roasted, baked, boiled, and steamed dishes, some of which contained also other ingredients such as beans, or other vegetables, meat, and the like. The following list cannot be said to be by

any means exhaustive: Boiled corn and corn-soups, bread and cakes of divers sorts, corn-meal, hominy, hulled corn, mush and porridge, parched corn, roasted ears, etc.; in

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addition, all the concoctions in which cornstarch figures, together with such recent developments as "Karo: corn-syrup," etc. If one were to take away from European civilization in North America all memories of Indian pudding, rye and Indian, Boston brown bread, corn-dodgers and cornmeal muffins, corn-flakes, johnnycake, hoe-cake, pone suppawn, ashcake, samp, succotash, sagamité, mush, hominy and hominy grits, etc., what a void there would be! And in the list must go also pop-corn, that sine qua non of youthful Americans. From the corn-plant white men's ingenuity has been able to extract sugar, syrup, brandy, etc.

To-day the New England dinner is incomplete, for a large part of the year, without squash in some form or other, and time was when pumpkinpie was almost a sacred dish. There are also to be mentioned pumpkinbread, pumpkin-sauce, etc.; in 1671 Josselyn could already speak of pumpkin-sauce as 'an ancient New England standing-dish." Even

"Boston baked beans " had their start with the red man, for the common haricot kidney-bean is of American origin. From maize, squash, pumpkin, beans, the European population of America, and those added to it from Africa, have derived an infinite variety of foods. Tobacco, being hardly a food, will not be discussed at length here, but out of it also the whites have managed to ex

tract a great many things, mostly, perhaps, rather evil than good.

A food plant, known by the Indians before the coming of the whites, but not extensively utilized over a large portion of the continent, is the so-called "wild-rice" (Zizania aquatica) of the Great Lakes, which has been made the subject of an extensive monograph by Professor Professor Jenks, who considers it from the point of view of primitive economics - he also advocates its cultivation on a large scale by the whites as a valuable addition to the food supply of the country. The impression made by this plant upon the Indians of the region where it chiefly flourishes, as also upon their white successors, has been so great that Professor Jenks feels justified in stating that "more geographic names have been derived from wild-rice in this relatively small section of North America than from any other natural vegetable product throughout the entire continent." The use of wild-rice by the Indians seems to have been stimulated not a little by the pressure of the whites, forcing them more and more into closer quarters in this region, and cutting off some of their resources, especially hunting. The population of the wild-rice region was comparatively dense and the Indians are described by several authorities as marked by physical well-being, due probably to this abundant food, so easily procured and needing so little preparation, etc. In the early history

of the West and Northwest wild-rice has been a factor of survival for the pioneer movements of American civilization. Both Henry (1775) and Carver (1776) record the fact that the great expeditions to the rivers of the West and the preservation of the "infant colonies" beyond the settled East would not have been possible without this cereal. Wild-rice is now used to some extent by white people and is on sale in a number of towns in the Western States.

In the Rocky Mountain region a very large proportion of the food of the Indian tribes consisted of roots and bulbs, which were eaten raw or cooked, fresh or dried, and were sometimes preserved in great quantities for future consumption. It is from their habit of gathering such roots that the so-called "Digger Indians " (the term has been applied to many distinct tribes) received that name. During the early settlement of this country by the whites, many of these plant-foods were more or less used by them.

Most extensive use of the bulbs (steamed in order to be made palatable) of several species of the camas, a plant of the hyacinth family, which fairly pullulates in the meadows of the Rocky Mountain region, was and is still made by the Indians of the country. The "camas prairies " are famous in the reports of early settlers and explorers. To the Canadian French hunters and trappers, voyageurs, and coureur des bois of

the West the camas was known as

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pomme blanche,' pomme des prairies," and was also much used by them and the métis of the country. Another root of the Columbia-Oregon region, almost equalling the camas in importance as food among the Indians, is the kouse, or "biscuit-root" (so called because a sort of thin bread or cake was made from it), the scientific name of which is Peucedanum ambiguosum. The voyageurs and their kindred also made use of the "kouse," which they called "racine blanche." A third plantfood of value was furnished by the roots of the "Indian turnip " or "prairie potato" (Psoralea esculenta), used by the Plains Indians from Canada to Texas, with some of whom it was "dried, pounded to meal, and cooked with jerked meat and corn." The Sioux Indians were particularly fond of it. The "Indian turnip, "“ Dakota turnip " (tipsinna is its Sioux name), besides serving at times to help out the diet of the whites of the country in the early days, seems to have been the subject of an interesting experiment in the Old World. In his History of Minnesota (1858), Mr. E. D. Neill says (p. 506):

"This root has lately acquired a European reputation. Mr. Lamare Picot, of France, has, within a few years past, introduced it into his native country, and the Savans of Paris, it is said, have given it the name of Picotiana. It has been supposed that this dry prairie root might yet take an important place among the vegetables which are cultivated for the support

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of human life; but this expectation will probably end in disappointment."

In the Rocky Mountain country and in the Utah-Arizona region the Indian tribes used for food several species of Calochortus, the Kutenai, of British Columbia, e. g., boiling and eating the bulbs of C. elegans. The starchy bulbs of this plant, known to the whites as "wild sago," are said to have formed a large portion of the food-supply of the Mormons during the first few years of their residence in Utah. They have also been made in Utah. use of occasionally by other whites in the extreme West.

In the East such root-foods as the tawkee or tuckahoe (species of Arum and Orontium) were occasionally used by the whites-another name was "hopnuts," a corruption of the designation of the plant in the language of the Delaware Indians. The Swedish settlers in New Jersey

in the early years of the Eighteenth century made some use of such foods.

The Seminole Indians of Florida obtained from the starchy bulbous roots of a cycadaceous plant (Zamia integrifolia)

a flour known as

"coonti," of which a sort of bread much used by them was made. The apparatus employed in its preparation was quite extensive. Coonti-bread has been used considerably by the white and negro population of this region of the United States. Mr. Walter Hough, writing in 1907, in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Pt. ii., p. 396) says: "A

demand among the whites for coontiflour has led to the establishment of several mills in Florida."

As Professor H. W. Henshaw and the present writer have shown, we owe the making of maple-sugar and maple-syrup to the Indians of eastern North America. In the Eastern States and in the Canadian Provinces of Ontario and Quebec the production of these articles of food is one of the important local industries, and Vermont has come to be styled sometimes "the maple-sugar State." In early New England, as is still the case in parts of Canada, the modi operandi of the production of maple-sugar, etc. smacked altogether of the Indian. "Sugaring-off parties" are still atare still attractions in the region of the " sugar bush."

The use of clams, together with Indian methods of procuring and cooking them, came to the whites from the aborigines, and the modern "clam-bake" has assumed great importance at seaside summer resorts and as a festive occasion even far inland. "Planked fish," is likewise borrowed from the aborigines.

Storage, Preservation of Food, Etc. In a new country it is of decided advantage to the immigrants to become acquainted as early as possible with the methods of storing and preserving foods and other things in use among the natives, which have been developed in harmony with the climatic and other conditions of the

environment. In these matters the European settlers learned several lessons from the Indians. The term

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cache," borrowed by AmericanEnglish from Canadian-French, a derivative from the French verb cacher (" to hide "), was early used to designate a common Indian practice of storing or hiding anything (food in particular) in holes made in the ground, under heaps of stones, in natural cavities in the rocks and elsewhere, in hollow trees, etc. All over the country, at some time or other, this practice has been in vogue among the white settlers and others, who simply adopted the custom of the aborigines. As early as 1578, Martin Frobisher found the Eskimo of Baffinland hiding quantities of fish and flesh under great heaps of stones, and this sort of cache has been long practiced by Arctic hunters, explorers, and seekers for the North Pole. The caching of food for the return journey, another custom now in vogue in the Arctic regions, was known to several of the Indian tribes of Canada and the adjoining country. In noticing the word cache in his Dictionnaire Canadien-Français, published in 1894, S. Clapin says (p. 64): "In early colonial times many caches were made, around the houses, in the thickets, forest, etc., in order to save the property of the settlers from the depredations of the savages." And, like the "savages," the settlers often show great ingenuity in protecting

99 barns were neither more nor less than holes made in the ground in which corn and other foods were cached. So numerous were they in the fields that they are sometimes referred to as menaces to travel for both man and beast. Not only did the whites profit by this method of storage for the preservation of their harvests, but, in times of scarcity, they resorted to stealing from "the Indian barns," which usually furnished a goodly supply.

For the preservation of fish and meat, various methods (drying, curing, freezing, etc.) were in vogue among the Indians, and several of these have been adopted by the European settlers and their descendants. E. D. Neill, in his History of Minnesota (1858, p. 432) has the following interesting passage:

"Not less than thirty thousand (i. e. fish) were taken this fall for the winter supply of the four houses here. They are called tullibees, the only name save the Indian (Elonibins) that I have ever heard. They will average from one to three pounds as they are taken from the water. The manner of curing them is merely to hang them in the air to freeze-a simple rather than a safe way. The trader with whom I pass the winter has now upon the scaffold about ten thousand." *

In the West and Northwest, again,

This is quoted from a letter of Rev. Mr. Boutwell under date of 1833.

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the whites copied methods of sundrying and curing of fish; and also of the meat of various animals — hence jerked beef" and the like, though the term jerked" is of South American (Quechuan) origin.

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As the name (Cree pimikân) indicates, pemmican is derived from the Indians of the Canadian Northwest. Its use by the whites began early in the history of the development of that country; and "pemmican" is now manufactured to order for Arctic expeditions, etc. It was originally a simple mixture of pulverized meat and melted fat, packed into skin bags and kept dry. Of these the Indians had several kinds, including sweet pemmican, fish-pemmican, berrypemmican, etc. Pemmican has been of great service to the whites and métis in the commercial and economic beginnings of the Great West, etc.

In the storage and preservation of maize and its products many devices of Indian origin have been or are now in use among the whites. The method of storing corn in pits or trenches in the ground was in common use among the Algonkian and Iroquoian tribes, from whom it passed over to the Europeans. As A. C. Parker notes: "The custom of caching vegetables in the ground is, of course, now followed by white people generally." According to Miss Alice C. Fletcher,† "the ordinary corn-cribs, set on

Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other FoodPlants, p. 36.

Handbook of American Indians, pt. i., p. 25.