USA > Massachusetts > The story of western Massachusetts, Volume I > Part 7
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Bradford said that on one of the first exporing trips of the Pilgrims on Cape Cod, they came upon "heaps of sand, newly paddled with their hands, which we, digging up, found in them, divers fair Indian baskets, filled with corn and some in ears, of divers colors, a very goodly sight, having never seen such before". Shortly after, they found "more of their corn and of their beans, of various colors".
Acorns in the natural state contain far too much tannic acid to be palatable. The natives first roasted them that they might be thoroughly dried. In December, 1620, at their first coming, the Pilgrims found baskets of roasted acorns which the Indians had buried for future use. With a mortar and stone pestle, the dried nuts were ground into meal and then boiled or soaked in water for a day or two to dissolve out the bitter substances. After draining, the material was moulded into cakes and baked or mixed with other food.
It would naturally be expected that the Indians would make use of the nut of the shagbark hickory, the king of all New England walnuts and evidence found about old camp sites confirms that expectation. Williams makes no mention of walnuts as food, merely saying that of them the Indians "make an excellent oil for many uses but especially for the annointing of their heads". The meat of the nut was undoubtedly used also for food, just as were the chest- nuts and acorns.
The Pynchon document therefore suggests that the Indians had available, tobacco, acorns, walnuts, beans, squashes, corn, pumpkins, cranberries, maple sugar, ground nuts, venison and fish. Probably salmon and shad were relied on when those fish came up the river at spawning time. At other seasons trout, bass, pickerel and other well-known varieties could be had in abundance.
This dietary list is considerably amplified and extended by Roger Williams in his Key Into the Language of America, a phrase- book published in 1643. After giving the meaning of an Indian word, he frequently added a short paragraph explanatory of the unfamiliar object mentioned. By bringing together these terse notes, quite a complete picture of Indian life is drawn. The following excerpts, appearing in quotation marks, are from that source, except as other- wise noted. Slight paraphrasing has been necessary to fit them to the context, but the meaning has in no way been altered.
"From thick, warm valleys where they winter, the Indians remove a little nearer to their summer fields; when it is warm spring, then they remove to their fields where they plant corn. When a field is to be broken up they have a very loving, sociable, speedy way to despatch it. All the neighbors, men, and women, forty, fifty, a hun- dred, join and come in to help freely. With friendly joining they break up their fields, build their forts, hunt the woods, stop and kill fish in the rivers".
"The women set, plant, weed, hill and gather and barn all the corn and fruits of the field, yet, sometimes the man himself, either out of love to his wife or care for his children or being an old man,
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WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS
will help the woman, which, by the custom of the country they are not bound to. The women beat all the corn by hand. They plant it, dress it, gather it and barn it. It is almost incredible what burdens the poor women carry of corn, of fish, of beans and a child besides. Not- withstanding our hoes, the Indian women to this day use their natural hoes of shells and wood".
Elsewhere, Williams qualified this, saying that "some old and poor women, fearful to leave the old tradition, use wooden hoes to this day".
"The woman of the family will commonly raise two or three heaps of twelve, fifteen or twenty bushels a heap and much more if she have help of her children, which they dry in round broad heaps. They dry the corn carefully upon heaps and mats many days before they barn it up, covering it with mats at night and opening when the sun is hot".
"Their corn be of divers sorts and colors. Indian corn, keeping the body in a constant looseness, it is the opinion of some skillful in physic, that if the use of it were known and received in England, all of it, either boiled in milk or buttered, it might have thousands of lives, occasioned by the binding nature of English wheat. I cannot hear of any disease of the stone amongst the Indians, the corn of the country being an admirable cleanser and opener."
"Nokehick is parched meal, which is a ready, very wholesome food, which they eat with a little water, hot or cold. I have traveled with near two hundred of them at once near one hundred miles through the woods, every man carrying a little basket of this at his back and sometimes in a leather girdle about his middle, sufficient for a man three or four days. With a spoonful of this meal and a spoonful of water from the brook, have I made a good dinner and supper".
"Nasaump is the parched meal, boiled with water at their houses, which is the wholesomest diet they have. From this, the English call their samp, which is Indian corn, beaten and boiled and eaten hot or cold with milk or butter, which are mercies beyond the natives plain water and which is a dish exceeding wholesome for the English bodies".
In his essay for the Royal Society, John Winthrop said in 1662 that Indian corn was of a "great variety of colors, the white and vellow being most common. There are many other colors, as red, blue, olive and greenish and some very black. The natives thresh it out as they gather it and dry it well upon mats in the sun and then bestow it in holes in the ground, which are their barns, and so it keeps very well till they use it. For their food, sometimes they boil it whole, and then eat it with fish or venison instead of bread, or only that without other food. Sometimes they bruise it in a mortar and then boil it. A very common way is by parching it among the ashes, by putting it amongst the hot embers. This they beat in their wooden mortars with a long stone for a pestle into a fine meal, which is a constant food amongst them. Being put into a bag for their
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journey, it is at all times ready and may be eaten dry or mixed with water. The best food which the English make of corn is that they call samp. They first water the corn, then they beat it with a mortar to about the bigness of rice. This is boiled or stewed, into which, if milk or butter be put, either with sugar or without it, it is a food very pleasant and wholesome, being easy of digestion, and hath no
Cup of Indian Pottery
Found in Indian Grave on Long Hill by Harry Andrew Wright, 1896.
quality of binding the body. This was the most common diet of the planters, at the first beginning in these parts and is still in use. At the beginnings of these plantations, where this food was most in use, it was very rare that any were troubled with the stone, and amongst the Indians that eat no other sort of corn but that, the English have been informed by them, that the disease of the stone is very seldom known amongst them".
Winthrop added that "the Indians have another sort of this corn which they call pondomenast. The English call it sweet corn. These ears, while they are green and sweet, they roast before the
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fire, or covered with embers, and so eat the corn, picking it off the roasted ears as they eat it".
One has but to scan the pages of Evelyn's or Pepys' dairies to realize the dread of gall-stones of the Englishman of that age. Evelyn said that in Paris, on May 3, 1650, "At the hospital of La Charitie I saw the operation of cutting for the stone. A child of eight or nine years underwent the operation with most extra- ordinary patience, expressing great joy when he saw the stone was drawn. I gave Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been subject to this deplorable infirmity." On June 10, 1669, Pepys showed to Richard Evelyn "a stone as big as a tennis ball" which had been removed from his own body. It would seem that tennis balls must have been smaller in those days, or else the journalist exaggerated quite a bit. All that, it must be recalled, was two centuries before ether was used in surgery. The usually accurate and observing Pepys recorded on March 27, 1668 that he had seen "the stone cut lately out of Sir Thomas Adams's body, very large indeed, bigger than a fist, and weighing over twenty five ounces". This was removed during a post-mortem examination, but it was reported that death was from another cause and that the deceased had no suspicion that he harbored a gall-stone.
Roger Williams concluded his observations on corn by saying that "of blackbirds there be millions, which are great devourers of the Indian corn as soon as it appears out of the ground. Against the birds, the Indians set their corn deep enough so that it may have a strong root, not so apt to be plucked up, yet not too deep, lest they bury it and it never come up. Also they put up little watch houses in the middle of their fields, in which they or the biggest of their children lodge and early in the morning, prevent the birds. To keep the little birds away from their corn, the Indians keep tame hawks about their houses".
"Although the crows do the corn some hurt, yet scarce one native amongst an hundred will kill them because they have a tradition that the crow brought them at first a grain of Indian corn in one ear and an Indian or French bean in the other, from the great God's field in the southwest, from whence they hold came all their corn and beans".
"They generally all take tobacco and it is commonly the only plant which the men labor in, the women managing all the rest. They say they take tobacco for two causes; first against the toothache, which they are impatient of. Secondly to revive and refresh them, they drinking nothing but water. The toothache is the only pain that will force their hearts to cry. In this pain they use a certain dried root, not unlike ginger".
"Some do not take tobacco, but they are rare birds, for generally all the men throughout the country have a tobacco bag with a pipe in it, hanging at their back. Sometimes they make great pipes, both of wood and stone, that are two feet long, with men or beasts carved, so big and massive that a man can be mortally hurt by one of them,
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but these commonly come from the Mauquauwogs, three or four hundred miles from us. They are joyful in meeting others in travel and will strike fire with stones or sticks, to take tobacco and discourse a little together".
"The strawberry is the wonder of all the fruits growing naturally in these parts. It is of itself so excellent that one of the chiefest doctors of England (William Butler) was wont to say that God could have made, but God never did make a better berry. In some parts, where the natives have planted, I have many times seen as many as would fill a good ship, within a few miles compass. The Indians bruise them in a mortar and mix them with meal and make strawberry bread".
It should not be inferred from this that the Indians cultivated fields of strawberries. "Where the natives have planted"; that is, where they settled, conditions about their fallow fields became ideal for the natural spread of the wild strawberry. On the day of the first arrival of the Winthrop fleet at Salem in 1630, "most of the people went on shore upon the land of Cape Ann, which lay very near, and gathered store of fine strawberries".
"Attitaash are hurtleberries (huckleberries) of divers sorts, sweet like currants, some opening and some of a binding nature. Sautaash are these currants dried by the natives and so preserved all the year, which they beat to powder and mingle with their parched meal and make a delicate dish which is as sweet to them as plum or spice cake is to the English".
"The Indians, having abundance of geese, swans, brants and ducks upon their waters, kill them with their bows and arrows, being hardened to endure the weather and wading, lying and creeping on the ground. Cormorants they take in the night time where they are asleep on the rocks, off at sea, and bring in great store of them at break of day".
In the fall of 1621, Bradford said,-"Now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when we first came, but afterwards decreased by degrees".
"The Indians lay nets on the shore and catch many fowl upon the plains, feeding under oaks, upon acorns, as geese, cranes, turkeys and others. Pigeons breed abundantly and by reason of their delicate food, especially in strawberry time, they are a delicate fowl and because of their abundance and the facility of killing them, they are and may be plentifully fed on".
Bradford added that "besides water fowl, there was great store of wild turkeys, of which we took many".
"The natives take great pains in their fishing, especially in watching by night. They lay their naked bodies many a cold night on the cold shore about a fire of two or three sticks, and oft in the night, search their nets and sometimes stay long in frozen water. They will set their nets thwart some little river or cove wherein they kill bass at the fall of the water, with their arrows or sharp sticks, especially if headed with iron gotten from the English. The
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Indians and English too, make a dainty dish of the head of the bass, the brains of it being sweet as marrow".
"Of bream there is abundance, which the natives dry in the sun and smoke and some English salt it. Either way, they keep all the year".
"Clams are a sweet kind of shellfish which the Indians delight in, both summer and winter and at low water the women dig for them. This fish and the natural liquor of it, they boil and it makes their broth and their nasaump, which is a kind of thickened broth, and their bread seasonable and savory, instead of salt".
"Divers parts of this country abound with sturgeon, yet the natives, because of the goodness and greatness of it, will neither furnish the English with so many nor so cheap that any great trade is likely to be made of it. The natives venture, one or two in a canoe with an harping iron, or such like instrument and stick this fish and so haul it into their canoe. Sometimes they take them by their nets which they make of strong hemp".
"Paponaumsuog is a winter fish which comes up in the brooks and rivulets. Some call them frost fish from their coming up from the sea into fresh brooks in times of frost and snow". This was the fish now known as the tomcod.
"Qunosuog is a fresh water fish for which the Indians break the ice in fresh water ponds, when they also take many other sorts, for to my knowledge, the country yields many other sorts of fish which I mention not". The name qunosuog is derived from qun- nosu,-"he is long", and this fish was the pickerel.
"At the end of the year, they sometimes remove to a hunting house and forsake it not until snow lies thick and then, men, women and children will travel home, thirty, fifty or sixty miles through the snow, but their great remove is from their summer fields to warm and thick woody bottoms where they winter".
"The natives hunt two ways. First, they pursue their game, especially deer (which is the general and wonderful plenteous hunting) in twenty, forty, fifty, yea, two hundred or three hundred in a company, as I have seen when they drive the woods before them".
"Secondly, they hunt by traps of several sorts, to which purpose, after observing in springtime and summer, the haunt of the deer, then about harvest they go, ten or twenty together and sometimes more, and women and children also, if it be not too far. There they build little hunting houses of bark and rushes (not comparable to their dwelling houses) and so each man takes his bounds of two, three or four miles, where he sets thirty, forty or fifty traps and baits them with that food the deer loves, and once in two days he walks his round to view his traps. They are very tender where their traps lie and what comes at them for they say the deer (whom they conceive have a divine power) will soon smell and be gone. When a deer is caught by the leg in a trap, sometimes there it lies a day before the Indian comes and so lies a prey to the ranging wolf and other wild beasts who seize up the deer and rob the Indian. Upon this, the
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Indian makes a falling trap with a great weight of stones and so sometimes knocks the wolf on the head, with a gainful revenge, especially if it be a black wolf, whose skins they greatly prize".
Williams certainly contradicted himself as to the number of deer to be had. They could hardly have been "wonderful plenteous", if it was necessary to organize a band of three hundred to travel sixty miles to secure them. It might be argued that, as the Narra- gansetts lived by the sea, it was necessary to journey up into the hills to find their haunts, but this is hardly tenable, for even today there is on Cape Cod, slightly better deer hunting than there is in the Berkshire Hills.
Barnstable County, in Massachusetts (Cape Cod), and Rhode Island are physically quite similar, both being flat, open country, with sparse forest and in the seventeenth century they were prob- ably much the same as today. Berkshire County, in Massachusetts, however, was and is almost wholly made up of heavily wooded mountains, not unlike the traditional haunt of the Scottish deer, yet today, each county apparently offers an equal lure and home to the wild deer.
Massachusetts has an annual open season of one week for deer hunting, all kills being registered and the number of deer taken in each county must in theory indicate the comparative number existing in each county. In the three years, 1936, 1937 and 1938, the average annual kills in Berkshire County were seven hundred thirty and in Barnstable County, two hundred twenty. Based on the area in each county, that would equal almost exactly three-quarters of one deer per square mile in each county, the odds slightly favoring Barn- stable County, the exact figures being for Berkshire .730 and for Barnstable .757 for each square mile.
Hunting not being permitted in Rhode Island there are no sta- tistics for comparison with conditions in Massachusetts. Even were such to be had, they would be of little value, as in the opinion of competent observers, the deer population in Rhode Island has under- gone much change in the past fifteen years.
One familiar with the habits of wild deer would feel confident that in the seventeenth century, the number of deer in the open coastal regions of New England must have greatly exceeded that of the hill country. It would appear that Williams was misled by tales of things "wonderful plenteous" in some mythical, far away region, the truth of which he had no opportunity to check. It can, at least, be confidently asserted that documentary evidence indicates that in Colonial days, wild deer were far less plentiful than is commonly supposed.
Deer were so scarce that the Indians bitterly resented the killing of them by the settlers, which was, at the most, merely a provision for household needs. Such a situation could not have been occasioned by the operations of professional hunters as such activities were frowned on by the authorities, the settlers being expected to occupy their time in producing something for the
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common good, rather than in merely providing for their own sub- sistence. As early as 1633, the Massachusetts General Court pro- vided that "no person shall spend his time idly or unprofitably and for this end, the constable shall take knowledge of offenders, especi- ally of common coasters, unprofitable fowlers and tobacco takers".
Lionel Gardiner told of a conference among the Indians at which they said,-"Our fathers had plenty of deer, our woods were full of turkeys, our coves with fish and fowl. We are resolved to fall upon the English at one appointed day and kill men, women and children, but no cows, for they will serve to eat until our deer be increased again".
Conservationists contend that there are today more wild deer in the Eastern states than there were in Colonial times, but such a definite statement is wholly unjustified, there being no true basis for comparison, as no wild-life census was ever taken in that early period. In prehistoric days the Indians annually burned over the land to keep it open, which brought in the young plant shoots the deer loved. For similar reasons, the deer followed the axe and the plow of the pioneers and with the opening up of the country, under protective game laws, they undoubtedly have increased in recent years. It is probably true that in the Eastern states they are today more plentiful than they were a hundred years ago.
The Pynchon deed suggests that the Indians had available, fifteen nourishing items, as follows,-
Tobacco
Cranberries Salmon
Corn
Ground nuts Shad
Beans
Acorns
Trout
Squashes
Walnuts
Fresh water bass
Pumpkins
Venison
Pickerel
To these should be added the twenty-one items from the foregoing contemporary sources,-
Sweet corn Chestnuts
Turkeys
Parched meal
Geese
Sea Bass
Samp
Cormorants
Bream
Strawberries Swans
Clams
Huckleberries Brants
Sturgeon
Currants
Ducks
Tomcod
Dried berries
Pigeons
Maple sugar
Here was certainly a balanced ration; brawn and muscle build- ing. Fish, flesh, fowl, vegetables, fruits, berries and nuts. Sugar, starch, proteins, vitamins. A wealth of food for immediate con- sumption and ample supplies for drying, smoking and preserving for future use. Many a pioneer in America has perished of starva- tion in a land of plenty for lack of the knowledge necessary to take advantage of the bounteous offerings of nature. There is not a piece of woodland or an abandoned field that does not at some season
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produce some species of wild fruits or roots that are edible raw, or that may be prepared readily for sustenance. Some of our finest horticultural varieties have been developed from the native wild species, just as, through the ages, corn was developed by the Ameri- can natives from the tiny teosinte grass. Though it might be a problem for the novice to secure subsistence in the northern regions during the winter months, yet even then the experienced woodsman would find it reasonably easy to at least sustain life.
The thirty-six items mentioned by no means include all that were to be had by the Indians. O. P. Medsger, in Edible Wild Plants lists two hundred thirty-two to be found in northeastern America.
82 edible plants
36 roots and tubers
18 edible nuts
75 pot herbs
12 edible seed pods
9 sugars and gums
Among the better known are-
Wild plum
Checkerberry
Wild onion
Beach plum
Wintergreen berry
Hog peanut
Cherry Grapes
Jerusalem artichoke
Gooseberry Hazle nuts
Indian cucumber
Black currant
Beech nuts
Arum
Elderberry Lupine pods
Salsify
Raspberry Wild beans
Milkweed
Many are familiar with the delicious flavor of milkweed. When the shoots are young and tender and but a few inches high, they are boiled, changing the water once or twice to remove the milky juice. Served on toast, only the initiated would realize that they were not eating the finest asparagus. A good brown sugar can be made from the milkweed blossoms and the tuberous roots were cooked and eaten by the Indians.
The common vetch and other members of the pea family also were used for nourishment by the Indians. Besides starch, they contain much protein, so necessary for growth and repair of the body.
"Whoever cometh in when they are eating, they offer them to eat of that which they have, thoughi but little enough prepared for themselves. If any provision of fish or flesh comes in, they make their neighbors partakers with them. If any stranger comes in they give him to eat of what they have. Many a time, and at all times of the night (as in travel I have happened upon their houses) when nothing hath been ready, they and their wives have risen to prepare me some refreshing. It is a strange truth, that a man shall gen- erally find more free entertainment and refreshing amongst these barbarians than amongst thousands that call themselves christians".
Why Williams made no mention of beaver flesh as a food used by the Indians is an enigma for it was of much importance to them. The meat was excellent and the tail considered a delicacy. Josselyn,
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in 1672, said that "the tails are flat and covered with scales, which being flayed off and the tail boiled, proves exceeding good meat, being all fat and sweet as marrow".
It was certainly not an oversight on Williams' part for he spoke of that "beast of wonder" but made no reference to it as food. Quite possibly that was simply because the beaver was primarily
Heads Built up of Plaster on Connecticut Valley Indian Skulls By Dr. Harris Hawthorne Wilder, Smith College.
trapped for its fur, and the flesh being merely a by-product, it was accepted as a matter of course.
The fact remains that in all his observations, Williams men- tioned but one meat-venison. The Indians appear to have been pretty much vegetarians, so unused to fish or flesh that when such a rare gift of the Gods came their way, it was made the occasion for a community feast. "If any provision of fish or flesh comes in", said Williams, "they make their neighbors partakers with them".
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