turn the potato into a vegetable that was safe to eat. All the Europeans who
met the Indians were impressed by their knowledge of edible and medici-
nal plants. In plants they were relatively rich, but in animals they were poor.
They had no animals comparable to the goats, sheep, horses, donkeys, wild
asses, camels, or elephants of the Old World. Their only domesticated ani-
mal was the dog.
The most distinctive Indian food crop, corn (in Algonquian,maize),
was first domesticated in Mexico about 3000 B.C.E. and slowly made its
way all over both North and South America, growing in an astonishing
variety of climates and altitudes. The English marveled at its fecundity: it
produced a far higher yield than European food grains. In 1587, in “A
Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Viriginia,” Thomas
Hariot exclaimed, “It is a graine of marvellous great increase: of a thou-
sand, fifteene hundred, and some two thousand folde.” For the East Coast
Indians, corn was life: they pounded it to make bread, boiled it to make
gruel, and treated it with wood ash to make hominy.
They also ate a variety of tubers, gourds, pumpkins, and squashes (in
the Narragansett dialect of Algonquian,askútasquash); they demonstrated
their feel for agronomy by planting the lima bean and the kidney bean in
the same fields with squash and corn to enrich the soil. And just as they
combined these plants in the fields, they also did in the cooking pot, mak-
ing mixtures of vegetables like succotash (Narragansett, msiquatash).
Farther north, Indians harvested the misnamed “wild rice” (Zizania aquat-
ica) from marshes and ponds. Wild rice had the great advantages of being
highly nutritious, growing in very cold areas, and being sown simply by
scattering some of each crop back into the water.
Having no draft animals, Indians did not use the plow. Neither did they
have iron with which to make alternative implements. Their common tool
was a pointed stick with which they punched in the earth holes into which
seeds were dropped; they weeded furrows with a sort of hoe and dug with a
tool comparable to a spade. With these wooden tools, it was easy to plant
around trees or stumps, so although they cleared considerable stretches of
agricultural land, much of their produce came from wooded terrain. Rather
than trying to “fight” the trees as the white colonists would do, the Indians
made a virtue out of forested land: they had learned that some shade made
10 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA