Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/221

 DELABARRE AND WILDER] INDIAN CORN-HILLS

or more frequently as being placed four or five feet apart, implying regularly spaced parallel rows or ridges. In some parts of the country, however, the hills seem to have been placed much nearer together. Cyrus Thomas 1 quotes Sagard as describing the agri- culture of the Hurons in 1623-26, saying that they dug a round place at every two feet or less, "every year in the same places and spots."

Summarizing, then, from these varied accounts from men who have seen the actual cultivation of Indian corn in New England by the aborigines, before they were touched by white influence, we have a definite picture of isolated hills, each built by itself, and cultivated in the same place, year after year. There was no sug- gestion of either plowing or breaking up an entire area in which they would plant as we do, but the fabrication of these separate hills, some two to four feet apart, usually in rows running one way.

There is some suggestiveness even in the method employed by the Indians in first clearing a piece of forest land, as described by Champlain, where they cut down the trees three feet from the ground, and then burned the branches upon the stumps, for such a method would leave available places for the separate hills only between the tree trunks on an average of some four or five feet apart. Such a first establishment of a new field, with the position of the hills conditioned by the stumps, would account for fields with the hills irregularly placed but about so far apart, and the fields with the hills in rows would be found either in naturally clear meadow land where there were never trees, or in a field long cleared, from which the stumps had been long rotted out. From the first coming of the whites, however, the Indians were very anxious to make use of the superior methods of the new comers, and in fre- quent deeds one can find mention of plowing up of so many acres of land as part compensation for a land purchase. Sometimes this plowing was offered by the whites as part of the inducement to get the Indians out of the vicinity, as at Northampton, to be ex- plained later in connection with the removal of corn lands. .

Concerning the agricultural implements employed, the shells

1 " Handbook of American Indians," Bulletin 30, Bureau of American Ethnology, vol. i, p. 25.

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