Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/195

Rh in 1534, he says the Indians gave him great quantities of good food and palatable bread. The next year when he was taken by them to their village, Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal, he describes far-stretching fields covered with ripening maize, — probably one of the last crops of that soon after war-havocked region.

The early Jesuit missionaries all write of well-cultivated fields cared for by the natives; who pursued the same course as our frontiersmen have followed ever since, — girdling and then burning the trees, leaving the stumps to decay, grubbing up bushes, and then planting. Sagard, a Recollet missionary in 1625, gives a very particular account of the Hurons as dividing their lands into lots which were well cultivated.

The first act of the Plymouth Pilgrims in the extreme needs of their first winter here was a trespass upon the contents of a pit of corn buried by the Indians, though they afterwards made payment for what they appropriated. The friendly natives taught the Plymouth people how “to set corn,” — that is, to plant the kernels of maize, which was a strange grain to them. The beautiful streams, the Town Brook and the Jones River, poured in in the springtime, in season for planting, immense shoals of alewives. One or two of these, fish were put with the kernels into each drill, and served for an enriching manure. A brook running in from the Mystic, near the classic grounds of Harvard College, still bears the name of Alewife Brook. The first white settlers found the natives drawing from it a fertilizer for a wide extent of their planting grounds. The Pilgrims very often sent their shallops to the coast of Maine to buy corn of the Indians. When the first settlers of Connecticut were once in dread of famine, they sent up the river from Hartford and Windsor to Pocumtock, now Deerfield, and the river Indians brought down to them fifty canoe-loads of corn. In Governor Endicott's raid on the natives in Block Island, mention is made of two hundred