"Some of the tribes do," replied Mr. Tucker. "The Sioux and the Mandans have always had their corn-fields, but as usual the women have to do all the work. Do you know, Rob, that the corn is a native plant of North and South America, yet it has never been found wild?"
"Do tell us about it," said Mrs. Thompson; and Kate asked if there were not some legend connected with it, "for there is not a thing that they eat, without its wonderful story."
"Certainly," replied Mr. Tucker. "There is a beautiful legend among the Sioux, which I learned from them when I was among them in 1840, and as it is not late yet, if you like, I will tell it to you."
"Do! do!" all exclaimed in chorus.
"Of course," began Mr. Tucker, "among the Indians the origin of corn is wrapped up in the supernatural legends of the race, of which there are several, differing materially, however, in their details. Strange as it may seem, nowhere in all the vast domain of both Americas, has a wild species of corn been discovered; and yet the inhabitants of these continents have used it from the earliest times, of which even history has no record. Yet, at some time in the unchronicled past it must have grown wild. An unknown benefactor of his race—one whose name not even tradition preserves, excepting in unintelligible myths—saw somewhere, the feathery tassels and glossy blades with their silken ears amidst the foliage of a sedgy river bank, and owing to his first care, the wild plant, after many ages, has become the maize of commerce, and the king of all the cereals of the nineteenth century.
"When Columbus found the New World, corn was the staple food of all tribes of Indians from the far north to the extreme south, who attempted to cultivate the soil at all.
"The celebrated Père Marquette, the Catholic priest who passed his life among the savages, met with it at every point, on his memorable journey down the Mississippi River, in 1763. It has been exhumed from tombs of a greater antiquity than those of the Incas of Peru. Darwin discovered heads of it embedded in an ancient beach that had been upheaved eighty-five feet above the sea-level.
"That Indian corn is indigenous to America, has never been questioned by botanists, for Europe knew nothing of it until Columbus returned home from our shores.
"Longfellow has poetically told of one of the Indian traditions of the origin of corn, in his Hiawatha's Fasting.
"The legend was first transmitted to the white men by Rattlesnake, and strange to say, he was a chief of the Kansas or Kaw tribe of Indians. He related it on an island at the mouth of the Kansas River, in 1673, as is recorded in the old French manuscript of an early traveller.