Page:Evolution of American Agriculture (Woodruff).djvu/23

Rh Corn was the principal cultivated plant of the agricultural Indians. Evidently originated in the tropics, it had found its way Northward by the adoption of the tribes, to a point far up the Ottawa River in Canada, where it was observed by Cartier, the French explorer, as early as 1534. This plant has played a great part in the economic and political history of America and may be justly said to be the greatest food producing plant now grown. The Jamestown and Plymouth colonies only became permanent as they were able to get supplies of this cereal from the Indians and by adopting its cultivation in their early fields. Also in the wars which soon succeeded the settlements by the whites, the great Iroquois nation was only defeated by the complete destruction of its corn supply; and later, after the Revolution, when Mad Anthony Wayne was sent against the Indians of the Western Reserve, he only succeeded in his mission by cutting down and burning the thousands of acres of corn fields they had cultivated in the rich river bottoms.

The Indians, then, were not the wandering people we have been taught to believe them to have been, but were really fairly well advanced agriculturists, though they retained many of the characteristics of their former nomadic life. We now know that they practiced communal farming and lived in large villages surrounded by their extensive fields. The average per family seems to have been from two to two and one-half acres and the production of corn an average of about forty bushels per acre. And, when we consider that the soil was broken by means of wooden or stone mattocks and crude wooden spades, and that the cultivating was mostly