The Indian’s Accomplishment in Agriculture
There can be no argument over the remarkable nature of certain things that the Indian farmer accomplished. Through long cultivation he produced the seedless pineapple. When he found that one form of manioc was poisonous, he took thought and devised a press for squeezing out the deadly cyanide while retaining the starch. Bruman calls this “one of the outstanding accomplishments of the American Indian.”[13] He says further:
The original process of plant selection seems to have been carried on more intensively in the Americas than elsewhere. The major crop plants were farther removed from their wild ancestors than those of any other part of the earth at the time of the discovery. Mention need only be made of corn, which is so distinct as to require classification in a unique genus, and of the potato, which resulted probably from the crossing of many and various Solanaceae.
[The Solanaceae include nightshade, jimson weed, tobacco, and others.] It is ironic that, as O. F. Cook has observed, the white potatoes grown each year are worth more than all the gold that the Spaniards took from the Incas.[14] This is probably still truer of Indian corn.
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATION OF THE CORN PLANT
From Fuch’s De Historia Stirpium, published in 1542, only fifty years after Columbus’s men first saw maize. Seven years earlier, Oviedo printed a drawing of an ear of corn. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)
On November 5, 1492, two Spaniards whom Columbus had sent into the interior of Cuba told him of “a sort of grain they call maiz which was well tasted, bak’d, dry’d, and made into flour.” Thus came the first news of what P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, authorities on corn, call “a cereal treasure of immensely greater value than the spices which Columbus traveled so far to seek.”[15]
The fact that corn is today the second most important food crop of the world is due to its unique adaptability. In 1492 at least seven hundred different varieties of this grain were growing in widely varied areas of half the western hemisphere. Today corn is grown on all the continents, and its habitats range from 58° north latitude in Canada and Russia to 40° south of the equator in Argentina.
Fields of maize are growing below sea level in the Caspian plain and at altitudes of more than 12,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes. Corn is cultivated in regions of less than ten inches of annual rainfall in the semi-arid plains of Russia, and in regions with more than 200 inches of rain in the tropics of Hindustan. It thrives almost equally well in the short summers of Canada and the perpetual summer of tropical Colombia.[16]
For the Gaspé Peninsula in the province of Quebec and for the Pyrenees Mountains there is a variety that matures in two months; for Colombia there is one that requires ten or eleven months. The height ranges from two feet to twenty; the leaves vary from eight to forty-eight; the number of stalks by a single seed, from one to twelve; the ears from three inches to three feet. Authorities used to list from five to eight basically different types of corn; the five are sweet, flour, dent, flint, and pop. “The Russians,” write P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, “have already collected more than 8,000 varieties.”[17]
“TURKIE CORNE”
By 1578, maize had spread so widely in the Old World that in Dodoen’s A Newe Herball the habitat of this “marvelous strange plant” was attributed to Turkey. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)
A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PICTURE OF CORN
Part of a page from Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum, published in 1640. (Courtesy of Harvard University Library.)
All the chief types of corn known today were developed by the Indians to suit the wide variety of lands and climates in which they lived. The feat seems all the more remarkable because botanists tell us that all these varieties had to be developed by keen observation and hard work from a single parent species—Zea mays L.—and modern man has never found corn in a wild form. This amazingly varied plant, which cannot properly seed itself and will die without man’s intervention, was evolved from a plant that is now apparently extinct.
In spite of the old saw about the staff of life, a starchy grain is not the ideal food; but corn, says Sauer, is the most useful of all American starches because in addition to its ease of storage “it contains also fat and protein and is a more nearly complete food than the others.”[18]