HODDENTIN A PREHISTORIC FOOD.
The peculiar manner in which the medicine-men of the Apache use the hoddentin (that is, by putting a pinch upon their own tongues); the fact that men and women make use of it in the same way, as a restorative when exhausted; its appearance in myth in connection with Assanutlije, the goddess who supplied the Apache and Navajo with so many material benefits, all combine to awaken the suspicion that in hoddentin we have stumbled upon a prehistoric food now reserved for sacrificial purposes only. That the underlying idea of sacrifice is a food offered to some god is a proposition in which Herbert Spencer and W. Robertson Smith concur. In my opinion, this definition is incomplete; a perfect sacrifice is that in which a prehistoric food is offered to a god, and, although in the family oblations of everyday life we meet with the food of the present generation, it would not be difficult to show that where the whole community unites in a function of exceptional importance the propitiation of the deities will be effected by foods whose use has long since faded away from the memory of the laity.
The sacred feast of stewed puppy and wild turnips forms a prominent part of the sun dance of the Sioux, and had its parallel in a collation of boiled puppy (catullus), of which the highest civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries of pagan Rome partook at stated intervals.
The reversion of the Apache to the food of his ancestors—the hoddentin—as a religious offering has its analogue in the unleavened bread and other obsolete farinaceous products which the ceremonial of more enlightened races has preserved from oblivion. Careful consideration of the narrative of Cabeza de Vaca sustains this conclusion. In the western portion of his wanderings we learn that for from thirty to forty days he and his comrades passed through tribes which for one-third of the year had to live on "the powder of straw" (on the powder of bledos), and that afterwards the Spaniards came among people who raised corn. At that time, Vaca, whether we believe that he ascended the Rio Concho or kept on up the Rio Grande, was in a region where he would certainly have encountered the ancestors of our Apache tribe and their brothers the Navajo. The following is Herrera's account of that part of Vaca's wanderings: "Padeciendo mucha hambre en treinta i quatro Jornadas, pasando por una Gente que la tercera parte del Año comen polvos de paja, i los huvieron de comer, por haver llegado en tal ocasion."[330]
This powder (polvo) of paja or grass might at first sight seem to be grass seeds; but why not say "flour," as on other occasions? The phrase is an obscure one, but not more obscure than the description of the whole journey. In the earlier writings of the Spaniards there is ambiguity because the new arrivals endeavored to apply the names of their own plants and animals to all that they saw in the western continent. Neither Castañeda nor Cabeza de Vaca makes mention of hoddentin, but Vaca does say that when he had almost ended his journey: "La côte ne possède pas de maïs; on n'y mange que de la poudre de paille de blette." "Blette" is the same as the Spanish "bledos."[331] "Nous parvînmes chez une peuplade qui, pendant le tiers de l'année, ne vit que de poudre de paille." "We met with a people, who the third part of the yeere eate no other thing save the powder of straw."[332]
Davis, who seems to have followed Herrera, says: "These Indians lived one-third of the year on the powder of a certain straw.... After leaving this people they again arrived in a country of permanent habitations, where they found an abundance of maize.... The inhabitants gave them maize both in grain and flour."[333]
The Tusayan Indians were formerly in the habit of adding a trifle of chopped straw to their bread, but more as our own bakers would use bran than as a regular article of diet.
Barcia[334] makes no allusion to anything resembling hoddentin or "polvos de bledos" in his brief account of Vaca's journey. But Buckingham Smith, in his excellent translation of Vaca's narrative, renders "polvos de paja" thus: "It was probably the seed of grass which they ate. I am told by a distinguished explorer that the Indians to the west collect it of different kinds and from the powder make bread, some of which is quite palatable." And for "polvos de bledos": "The only explanation I can offer for these words is little satisfactory. It was the practice of the Indians of both New Spain and New Mexico to beat the ear of young maize, while in the milk, to a thin paste, hang it in festoons in the sun, and, being thus dried, was preserved for winter use."
This explanation is very unsatisfactory. Would not Vaca have known it was corn and have said so? On the contrary, he remarks in that very line in Smith's own translation: "There is no maize on the coast."
The appearance of all kinds of grass seeds in the food of nearly all the aborigines of our southwestern territory is a fact well known, but what is to be demonstrated is the extensive use of the "powder" of the tule or cat-tail rush. Down to our day, the Apache have used not only the seeds of various grasses, but the bulb of the wild hyacinth and the bulb of the tule. The former can be eaten either raw or cooked, but the tule bulb is always roasted between hot stones. The taste of the hyacinth bulb is somewhat like that of raw chestnuts. That of the roasted tule bulb is sweet and not at all disagreeable.[335]
Father Jacob Baegert[336] enumerates among the foods of the Indians of southern California "the roots of the common reed" (i.e., of the tule).
Father Alegre, speaking of the tribes living near the Laguna San Pedro,[337] in latitude 28° north—two hundred leagues north of the City of Mexico—says that they make their bread of the root, which is very frequent in their lakes, and which is like the plant called the "anea" or rush in Spain. "Forman el pan de una raiz muy frecuente en sus lagunas, semejante á las que llaman aneas en España."[338]
The Indians of the Atlantic Slope made bread of the bulb of a plant which Capt. John Smith[339] says "grew like a flag in marshes." It was roasted and made into loaves called "tuckahoe."[340]
Kalm, in his Travels in North America,[341] says of the tuckahoe:
It grows in several swamps and marshes and is commonly plentiful. The hogs greedily dig up its roots with their noses in such places, and the Indians of Carolina likewise gather it in their rambles in the woods, dry it in the sun, grind, and make bread of it. Whilst the root is fresh it is harsh and acrid, but, being dried, it loses the greater part of its acrimony. To judge by these qualities, the tuckahoe may very likely be the Arum virginianum.
The Shoshoni and Bannock of Idaho and Montana eat the tule bulb.[342]
Something analogous to hoddentin is mentioned by the chronicler of Drake's voyage along the California coast about A. D. 1540. Speaking of the decorations of the chiefs of the Indians seen near where San Francisco now stands, he says another mark of distinction was "a certain downe, which groweth up in the countrey upon an herbe much like our lectuce, which exceeds any other downe in the world for finenesse and beeing layed upon their cawles, by no winds can be removed. Of such estimation is this herbe amongst them that the downe thereof is not lawfull to be worne, but of such persons as are about the king, ... and the seeds are not used but onely in sacrifice to their gods."[343]
Mr. Cushing informs me that hoddentin is mentioned as a food in the myths of the Zuñi under the name of oneya, from oellu, "food."
In Kamtchatka the people dig and cook the bulbs of the Kamtchatka lily, which seems to be some sort of a tuber very similar to that of the tule.
"Bread is now made of rye, which the Kamtchadals raise and grind for themselves; but previous to the settlement of the country by the Russians the only native substitute for bread was a sort of baked paste, consisting chiefly of the grated tubers of the purple Kamtchatkan lily."[344]