Singing valleys; the story of corn

**»**«

THE STORY OF CORN
by DOROTHY GILES

Singing Valleys is American history in
terms of the role played by corn. It is a
pageant of struggle and achievement,
feuds and reconciliations, facts- and
legend. The story of corn is the story of
the birth, the growth and the constant re-
generation of a nation.

Throughout the pattern of the history
of the entire American continent the
motif of the humble cornstalk can be
traced. The Aztec and Mayan civiliza-
tions were based on corn, and even to-
day the sacred Mayan rite of planting
four kernels to each mound is still ob-
served by farmers. Corn saved the first
settlers in America, opened the wilder-
ness to wave after wave of migration and
gave life and sustenance to the pioneers
and their descendants. Corn seed was
easily transported, quickly cultivated and
readily adapted to many varieties of soil.
It flourished everywhere and its fruit be-
came not only one of the basic nutriments
of the nation, but also a vital factor in
our folklore, history and culture. Corn is
to this day the chief product of every
state in the union.

Singing Valleys is a source of informa-
tion and excitement, action and humor,
science and anecdote.

A RANDOM HOUSE BOOK

From the collection of the

PreTinger
v Jjibrary

San Francisco, California
2006

Ualleu

u 0 0

THE STORY OF CORN

". . . the valleys also are covered
over with corn; they shout for joy,
they also sing."

PSALM 65:13

THE STORY OF CORN

by Dorothy Giles

RANDOM HOUSE • NEW YORK

f

FIRST PRINTING

COPYRIGHT, 1940,
BY RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

Published simultaneously in Canada by
the Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC.

To my mother
IDA WEBB GILES

and to all others who, like her, preserve
the tradition received from their fore-
fathers who cleared the fields, broke the
ground and sowed with the first corn
the seeds of American liberty.

Contents

PAGE

"First the blade . . ." 3

I. Early Corn Planters 8

II. Mexican Maize Fields 22

III. Corn Conquers Virginia 43

IV. The Seeding of New England 60
V. America Climbs the Cornstalk 82

VI. Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 100

VII. The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 114

VIII. Millions in Tassel 134

IX. Hogs and Hominy 147

X. The Mills Grind Slowly 165

XL The Mills Become Towns 178

XII. With Milk and Sugar Blest 194

XIII. Corn-Makers 213

XIV. The Courtship of the Corn 234
XV. Cornfed Culture 242

XVI. Some American Corn Gods 256

XVII. Maize Magic in American Folklore 273

XVIII. Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 285

XIX. Yellow Bread 305

XX. Sweet Corn Ripe 322

XXI. Enemies in the Field 333

XXII. Tomorrow's Harvest 346

Bibliography 353

Index 357

L/a

THE STORY OF CORN

"First the blade .

IN APRIL, under the spring rains, the passive cornfields lie
on the countryside in sodden brown patches. Ribbons of
darker brown — roads, rutted by the frost and by wagon wheels
— bind them to the scattered farmhouses and barns. The sky
drops down until it seems to smother the earth. All the bright,
song-filled space, the home of the bee, the meadow lark and
the hawk, is filled with drifting mist.

At this season the country is lonelier than at any other time
of the year.

The towns feel this. They draw away from the farmlands
and huddle about the white-spired churches. The houses press
shoulder to shoulder, turning their backs on the pitiful
stretches of naked, wet earth, as men turn their eyes from
sight of a drowned man.

But late in April a day comes when the low-hanging mists
lift and draw together into a black ball. There is a roll of
thunder, followed by a vicious downpour of rain. It rains
harder then than on any day since the break-up of winter.
Dusk draws in, night falls; the downpour goes on. The long
fingers of the rain beat on the tin and shingled roofs. They
flatten the cornlands to a muddy brown sea.

Sometime between midnight and dawn the rain stops, and
it is very still. The stillness wakes the men who have been
waiting for this to happen. They stumble out of bed and pull
aside the curtains and peer out at the flooded world. In the
east a pale sun is struggling through the clouds. It strikes across
the slimy fields. A crow, hunched on the ridge-pole of a barn,
flies down the shaft of light and pecks at a lump of wet earth.

4 Singing Valleys

That day the sun shines all the day, and a warm mist rises
from the fields. This is not like the mists the clouds dropped;
it smells different. The men stand at the barn doors and sniff
it knowingly, then they turn and take down the plowshares
from where they have hung all winter. They rub the blades;
they work with oil cans and pots of axle grease. They lift the
hoods of tractors and examine cylinders and carburetors.

May comes, and an army rides out into the fields. Every
country lane jingles with its passing. Bright blades rip wide
the patient earth . . . the harrows comb it. ... In Maine,
in Oregon, in Michigan, the petals of a million blossoming
apple trees drift across the new-plowed fields. On the crest of
a rounded hill a man, with a sack of corn slung across his
chest, moves rhythmically, with out-flung arm, along the raw
furrows.

The nights grow warm. By Illinois farmhouses the lilacs
smolder into bloom. The wild grape and the scuppernong
blossom over tumbled stone walls along the Monongahela
and the Mississippi, filling the night with heady fragrance.
And in Connecticut, in Kansas, in South Dakota, in Tennes-
see, farmers meeting at crossroads draw up, cast weather-wise
eyes at the sky and greet each other, "Corn-growin' weather."

July. The cornlands are a sea of tossing green. Green ripples
where the breeze strikes. Crisp green streamers crackling under
the noon suns . . . ' 'Seems like you can fairly hear the corn
a-growin'." At sunset men lean on fence rails measuring the
strong, upward thrust of the jointed stalks . . . fifteen, eight-
een, twenty feet high. Cautiously they begin to count the
harvest.

Every day now the sun grows hotter and hotter. The soil
dries and powders. The sharp green of the corn leaves fades.
The leaves droop and hang listlessly against the stalks. Over in
the west clouds pile up. There is a roll of distant thunder, and
across the sultry horizon a warning yellow streak — "cyclone."
In the hearts of men, women, children, fear is born. "If it
hits the corn!"

"First the blade . . ." 5

August. The dog-star blazes in the southern sky. The corn
stands still. The sea of green breaks into a froth of pale tassels
and every thread of these is fringed with gold. Here is dust
richer than any Klondike yield; the wealth of Montezuma; the
treasure of the Gran Quivira which lured Coronado across a
thousand miles of desert. He saw the green maize fields of
Kansas and never knew that his eyes beheld a wealth beyond
Spain's greediest dreams.

Now the silk-veiled, nubile ears lean out from the towering
stalks, at once eager and shy, waiting for the bridegroom's
coming. Down from the proud tassels floats the pollen.

Under the cloudless August skies, under the still, hot moons,
through dusk and dawn, priested by the evening and the morn-
ing stars, the great marriage is made. For this the earth was
torn by plowshares and harrows; for this men bent the knee
and plodded after beasts through smoking furrows. For this,
frost, thaw, wind, rain, cloud, sun and a numberless host of
insects have worked together. Eternal male, eternal female;
forever seeking, finding, giving, receiving. . . .

"After that, the full corn in the ear." Within the close-
sheathed green wombs the kernels form and swell. Deeper
into the earth drive the roots, urged on by the needs of the
new life which is to come. A hush falls over the world; the
hush that precedes birth. The corn gathers to herself all her
strength. Her time is close, now.

September. The harvest moon rides into the eastern sky
and a billion, billion wombs deliver life. Out from the spent
cornfields it pours on the backs of men and beasts, in carts,
in trucks, in barrows. It fills the barns. It runs in a golden
stream along the highways to the towns. It brims the holds
of ships and barges. It pours over the sides of laden freight
cars. All these bear it away to the hungry mills.

The harvest moon wanes; the Moon of Hunters takes the
sky. Frost sears the fields and sets the maples aflame. Bitter-
sweet blazes where the scuppernong lured the June bees. In

6 Singing Valleys

and out between the girdled stocks the pumpkins lie like
fallen suns. The sun withdraws into his house of the south.
The darts of the wild geese pierce the sky, flying after him.
They dare not stop to glean, for the snow is on their tails —
a scud of white flakes across the Black Hills. Then comes the
wind, echoing the long-drawn hoot of the great Arctic owl.

The cornfields shudder and lie still. Over the face of them a
white sheet is drawn. Once more the ancient doubt uncoils in
the minds of men, "Is this the end?"

"Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless
it die." Persephone must first descend into hell before she can
bring again the crocus and the shadbush flower.

Already death is swallowed up in victory. Even while the
blizzards howl, the tall silos stand guard beside the barns.
Within them the cut green corn steams and steeps, giving
forth its rich juices for the beasts in the stalls. In the mills
the turbines turn hour after hour, day after day. The meal flows
out in a golden stream, and every grain of it is life. Men,
seated at desks in distant cities, men whose eyes have never
rested on the green cornlands, turn the harvest into figures
and gamble with them. Chemists in quiet laboratories sift the
golden grains through their retorts and read there a future the
sower never dreamed of. To factory workers it is employment,
to bankers it is dollars, to politicians it is votes, to the war-
makers it is men, guns, victory.

For corn is bread and ham and eggs and milk and cream
and cheese. Corn is sugar and starch. Corn is clothing for men's
bodies and shelter above their heads. Corn is oil and wine.

Corn is life.

Its life is the life of men. Sown in weakness, it is raised in
power. It dies, yet it lives. It is eaten; and lo! of it there springs
a greater life. It is Isis. It is Demeter. It is that Queen of
Heaven to whom the women of the Hebrews offered little
cakes of their baking. It is the eternal Mother, at once benefi-
cent and terrible, on whose fecundity man must depend for
his existence, but of which he is forever deeply afraid.

"First the blade . . ." 7

To us, in America, it is the strength of our past, the power
of our present, the security of our future. For corn is the sym-
bol of American democracy. And the story of corn is the story
of the American people.

I
Early Corn Planters

CORN, in the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the
translators of the King James Bible, means loosely, any
sort of edible grain. It conveys no exact meaning that a
botanist can analyze. To the primitive Saxons who devised
the word, and took it with them from the shores of the
Baltic to England, it probably stood for wild barley, or for
the split wheat which was the "corn" for which Israel sent
his sons to Egypt. Split wheat and barley were the grains
known to the early Europeans.

Language knows no accidents. It was not by slip of tongue
that "corn" became the common English name for the yellow
kernels which the Spaniards had called for a century by the
Haitian name mahiz. To those gentlemen of Devon who
sailed with Sir Richard Grenville to the Plantations in Virginia,
to Drake's seamen, ready to mutiny on account of moldy
bread and maggoty beef, the green maize fields that spread
around every Indian village in the New World meant salvation
from scurvy and famine, renewed bodily strength, and renewed
faith in the emprise which had brought them across the
Atlantic. All this they expressed when they called the maize
by that satisfying round monosyllable which had represented
bread and life to their Saxon forebears: Korn.

Long before the first white men came to the Americas,
maize was known to and grown by all the Indian tribes between
the St. Lawrence and Lake Titicaca. Each tribe had its own
name for it. Though phonetically different, all these names
carried one signifiance. Whether spoken by Inca, Aztec, Creek,
Sioux, Crow, Mohawk, Iroquois or Algonquin, the name for

8

Early Corn Planters 9

the maize meant "She Who Sustains Us," "Our Mother,"
"Our Life."

The first European to make mention of the grain was
Columbus. In his Journal under date of November 5, 1492,
while at Cuba, he records: "There was a great deal of tilled
land sowed with a sort of beans and a sort of grain they call
'Mahiz/ which was well tasted baked or dried, and made
into flour."

When the Admiral returned to Palos from that first venture,
the reyes catolicos, having driven the Moors from Andalusia,
were holding court in Barcelona. Summoned there, Columbus
was received as one who had added to Castile and Aragon a
new world. There were triumphal processions, banners, a rain
of flowers. The senoritas leaned from their balconies to stare
at the bronzed seamen, and at the six grinning Caribs, covered
for modesty's sake in leathern breeches and vests. Later, in
the palace, the sovereigns received the Admiral with honors
usually reserved for princes. He was directed to sit in their
presence and to recount to them the wonders of the voyage
and explain the spoils he had brought home: stuffed tropical
birds and small animals, a handful of pearls, some gold trinkets
— among these, perhaps, one of the small gold frog-images of
the rain-god, which the islanders used to honor for the benefit
of their maize fields. There were also bunches of medicinal
herbs and spices, and some cobs of yellow mahiz which, the
Navigator explained, was the principal food of the peoples of
the New World.

It is not likely that the maize kernels which Queen Isabella
nibbled experimentally excited much comment. Spain wanted
gold. And more gold. There were the long wars against the
Moors to be paid for. Too, the Hapsburg marriage of the
Infanta Juana, with the chance it offered of an empire on
the other side of the Pyrenees, needed to be safeguarded. Only
gold could do that. Columbus was ordered back to the Indies
almost immediately. The directions given him were explicit.
He was to find El Dorado and carry it home to Spain. Caribs

io Singing Valleys

and corn were all well enough as the trimmings of adventure,
but his business was gold.

Columbus never brought any great wealth into the greedy
harbor of Cadiz. That remained for the conquistadores who
followed in his wake, and who settled on Mexico and Peru
like a swarm of hungry bees. Back and forth they went, from
Brazil, from Panama, from Yucatan, from Lima and Cuzco
to Lisbon and Cadiz. The road running northward from Cadiz
through Estremadura to the cities of Old Castile became
known as the Silver Road for the mule trains laden with
bullion that passed over it. Not a little of the horde was
dropped by the way. Every village church in the province took
its toll in silver altars and ceilings and crucifixes and candle-
sticks— votive offerings from the men of those parishes who
had sailed with Pizarro and Cortes.

The silver was mixed with maize.

In the half-century after Columbus opened the sea-track
to the West, Europe had discovered a new source of wealth
in foodstuffs and spices. The Portuguese stumbled on it first
when they wrested the power in the Orient from the Arabs
and sent that first fleet of three caravels, under Serrano, on
a friendly visit to the Moluccas. The ships came back with
"as heavy a load of nutmegs and cloves as it was safe to carry."

There was money in peppercorns, money in ginger. Sugar
could be as profitable as pearls. Portuguese and Spanish sea
captains, sailing on voyages of discovery financed out of the
national treasury or by some merchant company, were in-
structed to keep an eye out for foreign spices or foods which
might prove profitable in the European markets.

Accordingly the silver ships sailing from the Indies for
Spain carried maize. Some of it fed the crews on the homeward
voyage. Some of it trickled up the Silver Road. Landowners
in Estremadura tried planting it — without success. The soil
was too arid, the rainfall insufficient. But over the mountains
toward the coast the grain flourished. Maize is still a staple
farm crop in the Minho Province of Portugal, and along the

Early Corn Planters 11

historic Pilgrims' Way to the shrine of St. James at Cam-
postella in Spanish Galicia stand old corncribs of lichened
stone built to receive the maize harvests of three centuries ago.

For a century and more after Columbus's first recorded
mention of maize, the grain was brought to Europe in a dozen
different ways, and through a dozen different ports.

Dominican friars, returning from the missions in Yucatan
to report in Salamanca and in Rome, brought handfuls of
yellow kernels to show what food nourished the obstinate
heathen. Dutch merchantmen, who had captured Portugal's
commercial empire in the East, sailed westward in search of
wider trade. They put in at the islands, where they bartered
beads and mirrors for sacks of maize. These, carried to the
trading posts on the Delaware and the Hudson, became money
with which to buy beaver. English slave traders, like Sebastian
Cabot, purchased cargoes of human flesh in the Congo for
maize grown on the plantations where the wretched blacks
were to labor under the overseers' whips. John Leo, who
visited Africa in 1535, tells of a tribe living two hundred miles
inland, on the Niger, who had "a great store of a round and
white kind of pulse, the like whereof I never saw in Europe."
The native name for it was manputo (Portuguese grain). Leo
explains in a footnote: "This is called maiz in the West
Indies." Barbary pirates, preying on the treasure ships coming
heavily laden from Mexico and Peru, seized the grain in their
holds only a little less greedily than they snatched the bars of
bullion. The Turks scattered maize across northern Africa.
They carried it to Constantinople and up the Danube into
the present-day Roumania and Hungary, then part of the Otto-
man Empire. The Balkan peasants grow maize today as their
Turkish masters taught them to do. And at harvest the husk-
ing ears are hung from the house eaves to dry in the sun,
exactly as the Iroquois hung them from the front of their
Long House; as the Aztecs hung them from their terraced
pueblos; as the Maya hung them in Chichen Itza and in

12 Singing Valleys

Palenque and in Copan two, perhaps three, thousand years
ago.

In the course of these European wanderings the grain was
called by a variety of names: Guinney wheat, Indian barley,
Turkic wheat (Everything strange and seemingly crude was
accredited to the Turks, it seemed — even the national fowl of
Yucatan), and wherever Spanish was spoken, mahiz.

Tobacco, potatoes, corn — these three the Americas have
added to the world's store. All three have made political his-
tory. Sea captains and merchants took to smoking long-
stemmed pipes of the fragrant weed, and out of the smoke
rings they puffed the fetters of the African slave trade were
forged. Sir Walter Raleigh planted in his kitchen garden at
Youghal a bushel of the queer brown tubers brought to him
from Peru. Three months later he and his friends sat down to
dine off a platter of the food which was to nourish Sinn Fein.
The Spaniards who followed Pizarro and Coronado, the
Frenchmen who sailed with Champlain, Raleigh's Virginians,
Brewster's Puritans, Penn's Quakers, the Swedes on the Dela-
ware, the Dutch on the Hudson, all found in the red man's
maize a food which sustained them while they conquered
those who gave it them to eat. They rose up refreshed, and
built the cities of the new world on the cornfields.

So the grain which had been called "Our Life," "Our
Mother," "She Who Sustains Us" kept faith with its name.

The part the maize had played in the founding of the Amer-
ican colonies was well known to historians by the middle of
the eighteenth century when Linnaeus published his Species
Plantarum. Linnaeus had at his command numerous old
herbals like Gerarde's which contains a drawing of "Turkic
Wheat" scarcely to be distinguished from illustrations of
American corn in seedsmen's catalogues today. He had, too,
specimens and letters from botanists all over the world, in-
cluding his pupil Peter Kalm whom he had sent on a tour of
the American colonies.

Linnaeus turned the maize kernels in his thin scholar's

Early Corn Planters 13

fingers. He was a man of cities, whose life had been lived within
university walls. Gazing over them he had glimpsed snow
peaks, blue fjords and the neat barley fields of the Scandinavian
peasants. Only from books and travelers' tales did he know of
the land of the Plumed Serpent, where the mulberry and
banana trees spread over crumbling cities whose very names
were lost. The Franciscan Provincial and Bishop, de Landa,
had told of them, in his Apologia after he had been repri-
manded for his cruelty to the Indians of Yucatan. His book,
with its amazingly detailed picture of the life of the Indians of
that part of the world, was circulated widely in Europe. De
Landa revealed on every page the importance of the maize to
the Indians of Central America. He credited the maize, as their
chief food, with the fecundity of the Indian women. "They
are excellent nurses first because from the maize they take
away the milk and thicken it at the fire making a sort of curd
for morning use and this they drink hot. This produces plenty
of milk. And again because their constant grinding of the
maize without tying up the breasts causes them to grow large
and thus hold a great deal of milk. . . ." He described the
planting and harvest festivals of the maize fields; how a man's
wealth was in his granary and milpas (cornfield); how these
savages, too ignorant to know about money, used maize for
barter because it was the one thing of which every man stood
in need and of which a man could not have too much. Bitterly
he told how he had tried to stop the Indians' worship of the
Earth Mother and her son, the "Young Green God," which
was a deification of the maize plant.

Other priest-chroniclers of the Mexican and Peruvian con-
quests had added their evidence to de Landa's complaint. No
matter how these doughty Christians had preached, threat-
ened, punished, burnt at the stake, the Indians continued to
pay homage to Cinteotl, the maize-god, and to the fecund and
terrible Coatlicue, Mother Earth. Even those Indians who
obligingly accepted the Christian God and the saints still kept

14 Singing Valleys

up their devotions to Coatlicue and Cinteotl, protesting that
if they forgot these older divinities there might be no harvest.

With all these tales in mind, Linnaeus sought for a Greek
word which would tell the story. He found zea, which means
''the cause of life." His pen wrote it down. It was one way of
saying what the various Indian names for the maize implied.
Zea mays. That said it. That linked the old world and the new.
It gave the new world's grain the dignity of classic tradition;
and it also kept the memory of a race of copper-colored men
who built, out of the maize, a civilization which antedated
that of Western Europe.

Zea mays ... it might even be translated, "That which
caused the Maya to live."

"The destiny of nations," said Brillat-Savarin, "depends on
the way they nourish themselves."

The history of the peoples of the three Americas is the story
of a civilization which was cornfed from its beginnings.

Let us look at those beginnings.

Of all the lost peoples of antiquity none so stirs the imagina-
tion as do the Maya. Remnants of their amazing civilization
lie in the tangled jungles of Guatemala and in the thorny
scrub of Yucatan. What more may lie below the waters of the
Caribbean and the Pacific is surmise. Under the jungle floor
of Guatemala are to be found traces of ancient roads which
come up out of one sea, cross the isthmus, to be lost again
under the further waters. The isthmus as it is today is only the
serpentine backbone of a country that once was; a skeleton
from which the seas have licked away the flesh.

Certainly the story of a prehistoric continent shattered by a
series of earthquakes and finally submerged under the sea, the
waters of which were turned to mud so that no ship could pass
through them, appears too frequently and too widely to be
dismissed as pure fantasy. One of the treasures of the British
Museum is a roll of parchment painted with hieroglyphics by
Mayan scribes, no one knows how many centuries ago. It de-

Early Corn Planters 15

scribes in vivid detail the cataclysm which "in the year of 6
KAN, on the nth, Mulac, in the month Zac" — approximately
3,500 years ago — destroyed the Land of Mu and some 64,000,-
ooo of its inhabitants.

Whether the Maya of Guatemala, where the oldest ruins
on the isthmus have been uncovered, were survivors of the
lost Land of Mu, or whether they arrived on the Pacific shore
long after Mu was a legend, matters little here. Survivors or
immigrants, they found growing on the highlands above the
Gulf of Tehuantepec that from which a new empire was to
grow.

What they found were two grasses. Today these parents
of the maize have botanical names: euchlaena mexicana and
euchlaena luxurians. The latter is the parent whom the child
most resembles. The two are not found together, and native,
anywhere else in the world. Therefore, botanists agree that
the marriage between them, and the birth of their child, the
maize, could only have taken place in this particular section
of the western hemisphere.

Here, then, on the west coast of Mexico, in the temperate
highlands above the Pacific, our corn was born. And here,
with the first corn, the glory, the power and the fabled wisdom
of the Maya had their beginning.

Was the cross-fertilization which produced the grain ac-
complished by accident of wind and insect? Or did man have
a hand in it? It may be that some wandering hunter remem-
bered the sweet taste of bread eaten in Mu or in some land
west of the Pacific. Perhaps he remembered that that bread
had been made of meal ground from millet seeds. Teased by
these memories, prompted by the stirrings of genius, he may
have experimented with the pollen of the two tasseled grasses
which he found growing on the Cordilleras. Intent or acci-
dent? At this distance, what does it matter? One man, how-
ever ignorantly, served Nature. One man scratched a hole in
the red earth, dropped into it a few of the seeds he had
mated, and waited for results. One man measured the height

16 Singing Valleys

of the first cornstalks — stronger and taller than either of the
wild parents; watched the ears break out and fill; felt through
the husks the kernels form, waited for these to ripen. One man
went up and down the corn rows and gathered the first harvest.
One man, using the jawbone of a deer, scraped the dried
kernels from the cobs into a basket.

Then, his ingenuity exhausted, he handed the basket to a
woman.

Perhaps she, too, drew on some dim, racial memory. She
spread the grain on a sloping stone, and with a smaller stone
pounded and rolled it to a coarse meal. This she mixed with
spring water and shaped between her palms into cakes. She
heated stones in the fire and laid the "pones" on them, watch-
ing anxiously while the dough formed a crust that browned
and smelled surprisingly sweet. Proudly she lifted the first
baking from the stone and held it out to the man.

He bit into it. From his expression the woman knew at once
that it was good. So did the children. With a whoop they
snatched greedily at the other loaves.

Heretofore the man had been a wanderer, serving the stone
knife he carried, following the game wherever it led him. Now
the knife had a rival. It was no longer his sole source of life
and food. For he had corn. Urged by the memory of that sweet
taste on his tongue, he burned off a wider patch of forest land,
scratched the ground between the charred tree stumps with a
forked stick and scattered another, and a larger planting of the
seeds. While these were growing, he went into the forest for
game. But after every kill he hastened back to the clearing to
see how his new crop of bread was coming on. Then it oc-
curred to him to leave the woman there beside the cornfield,
to tend it while he was away. She was charged with the duty
of keeping off the deer which would have eaten all the green
stalks in a single night.

It was strange how the growing of grain changed man's
attitude toward the animals of the jungle. Heretofore he had
sought the deer, and his enemy had been the jaguar which

Early Corn Planters 17

preyed on them and cut down the man's food supply. But now
the deer menaced the man's corn. The jaguar which hunted
them became the friend and protector of the corn. Later, as we
shall see, the corn planters recognized this and repaid the
jaguar by awarding him a place among their gods.

But in the early days it was the woman who stood guard
beside the growing stalks. No doubt she took great credit to
herself for the whole matter. Womanlike, she may have ap-
propriated to herself the productive quality in the earth.

The man had no way of knowing it, but when he gave up
serving the knife-god and began to scratch the earth and sow,
he sowed with the first maize the seeds of a society in which
woman was to wield a power she never knew in the old
hunting-knife days. Not with an apple, but with bread, woman
tempted man and cost him his freedom.

Waiting for the second harvest, was it the man or the
woman who felt the first doubt? What if the miracle could not
be repeated? Suppose this new planting of grain would not
grow and produce ears as the first planting had done? Suppose
the earth withheld something that the plants needed? Suppose
some dark force came up out of the ground and destroyed
them?

There was one obvious reply to these fears. That was to
propitiate the First Cause of all things; that which, without
form, yet created all forms; that which was the beginning and
the end of all. The man and the woman knew dimly that this
First Cause existed. But it seemed very big and very far away.
Too remote and too impersonal to be concerned for one small
patch of green stalks in a world that was covered with forest
and jungle.

"After all" — if it was the woman who made the suggestion —
"when you put the seeds in the ground, you give them to the
earth. She is their mother. She nourishes them so they grow
strong, and bring forth seeds of their own. Let us make an
offering to the Earth Mother so she will feel pleased. Let us

i8 Singing Valleys

feed her, where we plant our corn, so she will be strong and
bring forth strong plants . . ."

The man agreed that there was wisdom in this. He and the
woman thought of ways of pleasing the Earth Mother. They
laid offerings of grain and meat on the ground where they
planted their corn. They sang songs to it. They danced and
made love on it.

But even with all this ritual, which may have pleased the
Earth Mother, for the corn grew and yielded a better harvest
than the first crop had produced, the man was not entirely
satisfied. "The Mother cannot bring forth young by herself,"
he reasoned. "She must be quickened by a husband before
she can give birth. The husband of the Earth Mother is the
Rain. Not the raindrops themselves, but the great body of
water in the sky from which the raindrops come."

And to prove how right he was, he pointed out to the
woman how the green grain sprang up after the rainy season,
and would not grow at all if planted when the weather was
hot and dry. . . . "You see, the Earth Mother does not do it
all by herself. She cannot. The great Serpent in the sky that
flashes out of the black stormclouds, the one we see sometimes
with clouds like feathers about him,* when the trade winds
begin to blow, has to do his part. We must include him in our
prayers. . . ."

How simple it was! Mother Earth and the Plumed Serpent
who sent the quickening showers; and born of them, for the
service of man, their son Ghanan, the Young Green God, who
was the maize plant. Sometimes this deity was called Yum
Kaax, "Lord of the Harvest Fields." But always he was thought
of as youthful and friendly, and closer to human beings than
his parents or any of the other deities. In the carvings, Ghanan
is the only one of the Mayan gods represented with a human
countenance. So far as is known, he himself never demanded
of his worshippers any human sacrifices.

As the centuries passed and civilization advanced, the Maya

* The sun when drawing water.

Early Corn Planters 19

were admixed with other tribes from the north. These brought
their divinities with them. The simple trinity which had suf-
ficed the corn-planters was invaded, and gave place to a com-
plex system of theology. According to the Aztecs, the great
inheritors of Mayan culture, the Earth Mother Coatlicue was
not the mother but the grandmother of the maize-god. It was
her son, the bloodthirsty god of war and his wife the witch-
goddess and queen of the underworld, called sometimes Heart
of the Earth, who became the parents of Cinteotl, which was
the Aztec name for Ghanan. Even the sex of the maize-god
was gradually lost sight of, so that Cinteotl was frequently
spoken of and represented as a goddess. Here again the
matriarchy, which tends to develop in every civilization that
is founded on agriculture, was at work.

But through all the migrations of the Maya, through the
invasions of Nahua tribes out of the north, through the empire
of the Toltecs and the amazing civilization which the con-
querors of the Toltecs, the Aztecs, set up in Mexico, Coatlicue
and the Plumed Serpent (Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl ) con-
tinued to hold first place in heaven, the place the corn had
given them.

Not only did the corn give the Maya their gods, it turned
them from hunters into farmers and villagers. In the strictest
sense they cannot be termed an agricultural people. Field agri-
culture, in which large tracts of land are worked, requires a
plow and the aid of domestic animals. In Peru, llamas were
occasionally harnessed, and men, too, pulled crude plows
through the terraced fields. But throughout the world of the
Maya there were no draft animals, and no field tools except
wooden rakes and planting sticks, and crude axes with which
to clear the brush.

Yet the maize flourished in the river valleys, up the hills
and on the tablelands. Like the mercy of God, it belonged to
no tribe or class. It yielded its bounty in proportion as the
seeker after that bounty labored for the blessing. More indus-
try and intelligence are necessary for the cultivation of every

2O Singing Valleys

other cereal. It was not even necessary to clear or turn over the
soil for corn. One had only to girdle the trees with a stone
hatchet to destroy the foliage and let in the sunshine, scratch
the surface of the soil, and drop the kernels into hills. After
that the maize took care of itself. To the ignorant savage who
knew no more of agriculture than this, the maize yielded him
enough to keep him from starvation. The husbandman who
had reached a higher degree of intelligence and who irrigated
his land and worked the hills with a hoe, gathered the harvest
into generous bins.

Ultimately, the corn's lavish rewards in return for very little
labor increased the population and the national wealth. It
made the Maya builders of cities. In Guatemala, along the
Montagua River in Honduras, and later in Yucatan, the corn-
planters developed a culture which is one of the world's
wonders. Perhaps 2000 years ago these early Americans drained
the jungle floor, built temples, paved avenues and developed
a communal life. They traded with other tribes living up and
down both coasts of the Americas. Europe may not have been
unaware of them. The sands of Panama have given up the
skeleton of a Roman galley, some bits of rusted armor and
coins bearing the inscription of Augustus Caesar. At a time
when the ancient Britons were painting their faces blue and
dressing in skins, the Maya were setting down their history and
religious philosophy in a form of picture writing which, ac-
cording to von Humboldt, they and the Egyptians must have
learned from the same source. They were designing intricate
sculptures to cover the facades of great, pyramided temples;
they were weaving and building. Their skill in mathematics
is revealed by their invention of the abstract conception of
zero, which made possible for them intricate astronomical cal-
culations, resulting in a continuous calendar.

On the east and west sides of the plaza of their city of
Uaxactun, built somewhere about 591 A.D., the arrangement
of temples and pyramids formed a giant sundial which deter-
mined the procession of the equinoxes and solstices through

Early Corn Planters 21

the year. By the shadows on the paved square the priests told
the times for planting and for harvest, and for the religious
ceremonies which attended these. The calendar of the Maya,
which antedated that of the Aztecs by at least five centuries,
was evolved by the corn planters to serve them in the maize
fields.

Through the first five centuries of the Christian era the
Maya flourished in Guatemala and Honduras. Their cities,
Palenque, Copan, Quirigua and others were thriving centers.
The denseness of the population is evidenced by the fact that
Copan and Quirigua are only twenty-five miles apart. To the
cities — to market and to attend religious ceremonies in the
temples — came the country folk. They came afoot, and in
sacks on their backs and in baskets balanced on their heads
they brought maize, which was the food of rich and poor alike,
and the chief article of trade.

They stopped and stared at the carvings on the temple of
Copan where the maize-god climbed over writhing serpents —
symbols, as everyone knew, of rain. They halted before the
figure of Ghanan, in his leafy headdress, holding in his hand
the day-sign (s?) Ik, which meant Life. Bowing reverently,
they scattered a few grains of maize before him, and mur-
mured thanks for a plentiful harvest.

What, they asked themselves in their well-fed security, was
there to fear so long as the rains came regularly and the corn-
fields continued to yield? What could possibly happen to a
people who had plenty to eat?

II
Mexican Maize Fields

MUCH was to happen. ... At the very time that the
agricultural Angles and Saxons were landing on the
shore of Britain, bringing with them the "korn" (millet or
barley) they had grown on the banks of the Elbe, the Maya
of Guatemala, builders of Copan, Palenque and a dozen other
cities, suddenly forsook the cities they had raised and migrated
eastward and northward into the isthmus of Yucatan.

Why they left the seat of their first empire remains a mys-
tery. The ruins of the cities show that they were not destroyed
by invaders, but deserted. Those who built them walked away
and left them standing there to become the haunt of snakes
and lizards. Those who had cleared the milpas that stretched
away from the cities on every side forsook the fields. The rains
brought the jungle closer and closer, until all mark of cultiva-
tion was blotted out under lush wild growth.

It was one of those extraordinary migrations which have
occurred several times in the history of the Maya. It may have
been inspired by some religious belief. Whatever the driving
force, it was sufficiently powerful to empty cities which had
had a population of thirty thousand, and to send a highly
civilized people into a new and unpromising wilderness.

Not all went, of course. Descendants of those who chose to
stay on the fields they had cleared, tilled and sown, rather than
set forth into the unknown, still live in the mountain villages
of Guatemala. They are not a pure race. The Maya strain has
been crossed by half a dozen later tribes. But as each wave of
invaders was less civilized than those in possession of the land,
the newcomers adopted the habits and customs of the older

22

Mexican Maize Fields 23

settlers. So among the natives of present-day Guatemala are
preserved folklore and folkways that originated in the far-off
days when the tribes came down from the Cordilleras to pay
homage to the Plumed Serpent and to the "Young Green
God/' Ghanan.

Their agricultural customs in particular are derived from
ancient Mayan sources. The tribes that invaded the land were
not corn-planters. They received the gift of bread from those
they conquered. From them, too, they learned to "make
milpas" by burning off the forest growth, and planting in the
ashes seeds of the maize. Even when the Spaniards came,
bringing a new law and a new religion, they, too, soon adapted
their ways of living to include certain of the native customs.
Through all the invasions and conquests the real conqueror
was the maize. It, not the laws laid down by the Spanish gov-
ernor or the Catholic Church, determined the seasons, gave
success or failure, poverty or wealth, happiness or sorrow.

With the desertion of the Guatemalan cities in the sixth
century A. D., the story of the Maya moves to Yucatan. There
the immigrants proceeded to build out of the native limestone
new cities that rivaled for size, elegance and culture the capi-
tals of their old empire. For the next five centuries, Chichen
Itza, Mayapan and Uxmal were to represent civilization in the
West. It, too, was a civilization founded on corn. The wan-
derers had carried Kukulkan, The Plumed Serpent, and
Ghanan with them. They built them temples in the new
cities that were more elaborate than the old shrines higher in
the hills. In Chichen Itza, in particular, the cult of the rain-
god assume an importance that it could only have had in a
land whose soil needed plentiful showers to make it produce.
Indeed, so urgent was their need of rain that, under Aztec in-
fluence, the Maya finally instituted human sacrifices to the
deity. In times of drought, a young and beautiful virgin was
cast into the sacred well at Chichen Itza as a bride and a bribe
for the rain-god. Some years ago, when this well was dredged,
the mud gave up not only a treasure of gold disks, turquoise,

24 Singing Valleys

masks, knives, bells of copper and gold,* but many pitiful
skeletons, the bones of the rain-god's brides.

The rise of great cities in Yucatan necessitated a vigorous
farming population round and about the cities, to feed the
townsfolk. True, the sea yielded fish, and the forests wild
game: "Yucatan" means "the Land of the Turkey and the
Deer." But, still, the chief staple of food was the maize. The
Maya of Yucatan were still corn-planters. They remained so up
to the time of the Spanish conquest.

Ninety-nine percent of what is known of the habits of the
Indians of Yucatan is derived from that Apologia of Bishop
Diego de Landa which was to inspire Linnaeus. De Landa was
sent out by the Franciscans to be Provincial of the Order in
Yucatan. He was a militant Christian who, if he could not con-
vert, burnt. In July, 1562, he held an auto-da-fe in the town of
Mani in which he destroyed, besides recalcitrant parishioners,
five thousand idols and twenty-seven Maya manuscript rolls.
Nor was his wrath directed only at idols and the books of
the pagan priests. His rule was so cruel that even Spain could
not stomach it. The Order recalled de Landa, and the Council
of the Indies reprimanded him severely. For ten years he re-
mained in Spain where he wrote his book, setting down in
detail all that he had learned of the Maya from his time among
them, and from what had been told him by two converts, one
of them a member of the famous Cocom family, one-time
lords of Mayapan.

De Landa's account leaves one in no doubt as to the basis
of Indian civilization in Yucatan. The life in the Maya vil-
lages was communal. Round about stretched the e/idos, the
town fields which were owned by the village and divided
among the freed men, each married man being allotted ap-
proximately four hundred square feet. Here were grown
squash, beans, okra, yams, tomatoes and various fruits. Farther
away, where the forest had been burned to make room for
them, lay the milpas (cornfields). Because the maize quickly

* In the Peabody Museum, Boston.

Mexican Maize Fields 25

exhausted the nitrogen in the soil, and because the Indians
did not know how to fertilize the cornfields, it was necessary
to start new milpas every third or fourth year, allowing the old
ones to lie fallow and renew themselves.

In the idiom of the natives: to live was "to make milpa." A
woman needed a man to "make milpa for her." A prudent
man was known by his full granary. He grew twice as much
maize as his family could eat. The surplus became money to
be bartered in the market for other goods. When one of the
villagers made the journey to the city, with his macapal (netted
bag) slung over his back and held by a band across the fore-
head, he thought nothing of carrying in it one hundred and
fifty pounds of maize. Then when he returned, walking with
that pigeon-toed gait and bent head that marks the macapal
bearers, the villagers would gather about him for news. Al-
ways the first question asked was, "What's the price of maize?"

The maize grown by the natives of Yucatan was of four
colors — white, red, yellow and blue. A religious significance
was attributed to the colors, which were also associated with
the four points of the compass and with the Four Bacabs, the
gods who held up the corners of the earth and so influenced
the winds and the rains. When the Indian went out to sow
he carried the seed in a sack slung over his shoulder. With a
sharp, pointed stick he made a hole in the ground, dropped
into this four, or sometimes five, grains of maize and covered
them over.

Four kernels of corn to a hill. The New England farmer
still plants his sweet corn that way. The way Squanto taught
the men of Plymouth to plant; the way John Smith learned
of Powhatan, and instructed the starving gentlemen of Vir-
ginia to follow for success with the crop. In the southern states
they have a rhyme for the ritual:

One for the squirrel, one for the crow,
One for the cut-worm and one to grow. . . .

In this connection, it is interesting to note that the sign

26 Singing Valleys

for the fifth day of the Mayan month of twenty days, was
written 0^ . It signified planting, and was presided over by
the Four Bacabs. The four grains of maize in the hill are easy
to read. So to this day in thousands of American gardens, the
Mayan planting-gods are honored.

Transcribing from Bishop de Landa's book:

The winter begins with St. Francis' Day (October fourth) and
lasts until the end of March. There is sown a certain kind of maize
at St. Francis' Day which is harvested early. . . . There is a short
hot spell at the end of January lasting into February when there is
no rain except at the change of the moon. . . . The rains come
from April to September. Then most of the crops are sown and
mature. . . . The natives go into the milpas and cut the brush in
the autumn. . . . This is burned in March and April, at which
time they hold ceremonies connected with planting. . . . The
sowing is done in the dry ground before the rains. . . . They take
little care of the fields after they are sown except to clear away the
second growth of brush. . . . The ears are ripe in November. . . .
The men go into the fields and bend the stalks downward, pulling
the ears of maize down so the birds cannot peck at them. . . .
When the ears are harvested they are stored upright and close to-
gether in well-constructed granaries. . . .

The Indian women put maize to soak the night before in lime
water, and in the morning it is soft and half-cooked. It has lost its
husk and nib. Then they grind it on stones and make it into balls
for the use of laborers, travelers and sailors. . . . This keeps sev-
eral months, except for souring. Of this they take a lump, dissolve
it in a gourd or vessel and drink the liquor, it being of excellent
taste, every morning. . . . From the maize that is more fully
ground they take away the milk and thicken it at the fire making
a sort of curd for morning use; and this they drink hot. Upon what
is left from morning they put water for drinking through the day,
since they are not accustomed to drink water alone. . . . They also
toast the maize and then grind and mix it with water into a very
refreshing drink, putting into it a little Indian pepper, or cacao.
. . . Out of maize and ground cacao they make a sort of froth that
is very delicious, and with which they celebrate their festivals. . . .

Mexican Maize Fields 27

From the cacao they extract a grease much like butter, and this
mixed with maize forms another agreeable drink. . . . They pre-
pare many kinds of bread, good and healthful, except it is not
good when cold. The Indian women are kept busy making bread
twice a day. They have not learned how to make a flour that can
be kneaded like wheat flour.

Nor, according to the observing de Landa, did a man's need
of maize cease with death. The mouth of the corpse was filled
with ground maize moistened with a drink called koyem.
After these preparations for the next world the body was
buried, and with it were placed some small stones, to serve
for money on the journey into eternity. The ancient Peruvians
also believed that the dead had need of maize. They kept a
feast every year, at about the time the Celts kept Hallowe'en,
and the Christians observe All Souls' Day, when they dropped
maize into the graves of their dead through openings left for
that purpose.

Among all peoples who get their living directly from the
fields, old customs have a way of lingering. Perhaps, then, it is
not surprising to find a modern ethnologist discovering in
the course of a year spent in a village of Yucatan many of the
same customs de Landa described nearly four hundred years
ago.

In the Mayan villages today the activity of every family
centers about the hearth, which is made of three stones on
which is set the pot, and the griddle for baking tortillas.
Beside the hearth stands a round wooden table on which the
tortillas are patted out. Close by is the metate-stone with its
"hand" — the stone roller with which the maize is ground
to meal. Many of the metates still in use are very old. Some
of them are carved to represent the dragon, symbol of
Mother Earth, or the frog which was one symbol of the rain-
god.

And still in these homes and in the villages, old ceremonies
connected with planting and harvesting, with the burning of

28 Singing Valleys

the brush in the milpas and the invocation of the rain-god's
blessing upon the crops are observed.

True, the Catholic Church has thrown a veil of Christian
symbolism around them, but the old gods of the earth and
the fields look through the veil. They are very little changed.
For example, the pagan Dinner of the Milpa which falls in the
month of Pop (July) continues to be the chief holiday of the
season, though in these later years it has been renamed "Fiesta
of Santa Cruz." At this time three bowls of ground corn are
set out in every house before the crucifix. At the same time
thirteen roasting ears are laid on the ground outdoors to feed
the Yuntizilob, protectors of the cornfields.

The priests in the parishes have learned what Bishop de
Landa could not learn, that is, the virtue of tolerance. When
they see, between the rows of sprouting ears, little clay images
of the fertility gods, omphallic and obscene and frequently
with rosaries twined about their squat bodies, they look the
other way. They know that the old gods never die. They take
new names, and new faces, that is all.

The greatness of the Maya covers more than one thousand
years. By the end of the first half of this period, when they
migrated to Yucatan, they had developed out of the earlier
communal life a society and a caste system made possible by
an abundance of food produced with small amount of labor.
Cheap food meant then, as now, cheap men. The tropical
climate made men, as well as the maize, prolific. So there
were thousands of hands to cut and carve the stones, to build
the cities with their temples and pyramids, their palaces and
sculptured walls. There was a serf caste to labor in the corn-
fields, a numerous priesthood and a leisure class to listen to
the tale tellers recount legends of the fabled past of Mayach.
Even the Plumed Serpent, Kukulkan, seemed not so far re-
moved from man now that man had progressed to a state that
approached the power and wisdom of the gods. With the com-

Mexican Maize Fields 29

placency that has moved many races to create God in the
image and likeness of man, the Maya appropriated Kukulkan
as an ancestor, the founder of the nation, who had promised
his children this magnificent destiny.

But through their pride ran an ever-present appreciation of
that which was the foundation of their wealth and greatness —
the corn. A beautifully carved, but broken, stela found at
Yaxchilan depicts a kneeling figure whose reverent face is
uplifted toward a pair of hands — universal symbol of the crea-
tive power. The hands hold out the sign @) KAN. This is
the sign for the first day of the Mayan month, and stands
for maize.

So clearly the wise men of Maya taught that: "In the begin-
ning was Corn; and from corn came enlightenment, learning,
civilization, power. . . ."

It is scarcely to be believed that a people as vigorous as
the Maya did not venture out on the sea to discover and trade
with other tribes. In later years, when the strength of the
nation was nearing exhaustion, they lived in dread of the can-
nibal blacks of the islands, and built massive sea-walls against
their raids. But earlier, the long canoes of the Maya must have
threaded the Gulf to the shores of Florida and Mississippi.
There is a legend that the Suwannee River gets its name from
"Water Beloved of the Sun-God" in the Maya tongue; and
that a colony from Yucatan was found in the great Okefenokee
Swamp in southeastern Georgia, where large earth mounds
have given up remnants of prehistoric civilization.

If up the Suwannee, then why not up the Mississippi? And
once they had penetrated this wide waterway, might they not
have entered the Ohio and the Missouri? Scattered through
the midwest are thousands of earth mounds, once the dwelling
places of men who planted maize and ate it, and left the
charred cobs with heaps of broken potsherds, arrow heads and
stone axes, to mark where once they lived. In Adams County,
Ohio, is a gigantic effigy mound of earth built up from the

30 Singing Valleys

surface of the ground and about fifteen hundred feet long, in
the form of a writhing serpent with an egg in its mouth. Can
this be Kukulkan?

There is not one of the ancient mounds or cliff dwellings,
whether in the southwest, south or midwest, that has not
given up to the archaeologists remnants of maize. There is a
wide difference in the size and type of the maize-cobs; many
of those from the caves and ruins of Nevada and Arizona are
almost dwarf, not more than an inch in diameter and about
four inches long, evidences of culture in desert country and
with no, or very primitive, system of irrigation. The cobs dis-
covered in Cherokee and Iroquois villages are twice that size.
There is little to choose between them and the corn grown by
American farmers of fifty years ago.

In the face of these facts, can we dismiss as pure myth the
Saga of Eric the Red, "writ by hand by Hank Erlendson"
somewhere between 1305 and 1338 telling of the discovery of
Vinland, and its "self-sown wheat fields"?

Hank Erlendson proclaimed himself a historian, not a teller
of fanciful tales spun out of his own imagination in the long
Icelandic winter nights. Doubtless he believed firmly in his
heroes Eric the Red, Thorfinn and Leif, "Eric's son/' and in
Lief s voyage westward in the year 986, in the course of which
he came to Vinland. The wonders of this new land, set down
by Hank, were not only the plentiful wild grapes, but the
fields of waving grain which seemed to the discoverers to have
sown themselves.

Leif s voyage into the setting sun could only have brought
him to the shore of Greenland, or to some point on the coast
of North America. Neither Greenland nor our Atlantic sea-
board knows any wild wheat, rye, oats or barley. These grains
were brought to the new world from Europe. Were the self-
sown wheat fields which amazed these Icelanders fields of
maize? Had the creation of the Maya traveled so far?

Accepting the theory that the fields were maize, which does
not flourish north of Nova Scotia, certain historians have lo-
cated Vinland as the country around Massachusetts Bay. The

Mexican Maize Fields 31

monument on the bank of the Charles River which credits
Leif Ericson with the discovery of America in the year 986
may be said to be founded on corn.

Somehow, the evidence of those "self-sown wheat fields"
makes it easier to believe in Leif s reaching these shores than
in the Irish monk Brendan who reputedly set sail from Kerry
in his corracle of brown bull's hide, and returned after years
to describe a magical isle which held all the wonders of the
Apocalypse; but no mention of maize. Or in the Welsh prince
Madoc, son of Owen Gwynned who is said to have sailed to
part of the new world and to have returned to Tintagel to
sing its glories, and enlist a company of settlers who set sail
into the west and were never heard of again.*

If Madoc or Brendan reached Maya-land, it is strange that
their chronicles make no mention of the chief food and source
of wealth of the natives.

But though these heroes may not have entered the gates
of Chichen Itza, there were others who did. From the time of
the Maya's coming to Yucatan, various Nahua tribes from the
north, even from as far north as British Columbia, were filter-
ing down into the Valley of Anahuac and touching the fringes
of Mayan civilization. They brought their own gods with
them. Chief of these was the horrible goddess of the stone
hunting knife, later called by the Aztecs Itzpapleotl, "the
Obsidian Butterfly"; a deity which demanded blood and more
blood in return for giving man his food.

Her devotees, who had been hunters in the north, found a
new food and with it a new faith when they entered the land
of the Maya. Even Itzpapleotl suffered a change. An old hymn
proclaims :

Oh, she has become a goddess of the melon-patch

Our mother Itzpapleotl, the Obsidian Butterfly.

Her food is on the Nine plains,

She was nurtured on the hearts of deer,

Our mother the earth-goddess.

* Noah Webster gave it as his belief that Madoc built the mounds in the
Ohio Valley.

32 Singing Valleys

Doubtless it was these Nahua tribesmen, joined with some
of the Maya, who became the Toltecs of Tollan, that half-
mythical capital close to the present City of Mexico. The
Toltecs were already on the decline when another wave of
northern invaders, this time the "Crane People," entered the
Valley of Anahuac. These were the Aztecs.

The legendary home of the Aztecs was Aztlan, "the Place
of Cranes," which their own historians, Tezogomac and Duran,
describe as "a country which we all know to be found to the
north and connected with Florida." They were fierce and
untiring. They poured down through Mexico absorbing what
they found of the older Mayan and Toltec cultures, and mak-
ing of these a civilization which became distinctly their own.

And in Mexico they found corn. They took to it with the
hunger of men who have braved deserts and crossed seas. Ac-
cording to Prescott:

The great staple of the continent was maize. It grew along the
valleys and up the steep sides of the Cordilleras to the high level
of the tablelands. The Aztecs were as curious in its preparation
and as well instructed in its manifold uses as the most experienced
New England housewife. From the stalks they derived a sweet
juice and a sugar little inferior to that from cane.

The Aztecs paid faithful court to the maize-god, whom
they named Cinteotl, and whom in time they grew to think
of as a goddess. Statues of Cinteotl, with a towering square
headdress, and holding ears of corn in her hands, have been
found in many places throughout Mexico. The face is rather
reminiscent of Tenniel's illustrations of Alice's Duchess.

But the greatest of all the gods of the Aztecs was Coatlicue,
the Earth Mother. Her they worshipped with a devotion ap-
proached only by that they paid to her son the god of war.
Of the twenty thousand human sacrifices that are computed
to have been offered annually in the temples of Mexico, it is
impossible to say how many were laid at the dragon feet of
Coatlicue in hopes that the stream of blood would increase

Mexican Maize Fields 33

her fertility, and that her worshippers might expect plenteous
harvests. They praised and worshipped the fecundity of the
earth even while they recognized its terribleness, and repre-
sented it with symbols of horror.

Mother Earth was given the form of a dragon, with claws
for hands and an animal mask. Her clothing was a skirt of
writhing serpents and a cloak of the skin of a sacrificed woman.
On her breast hung a necklace of human skulls. Well the
Aztecs knew that Nature is creator and destroyer; is beneficent
and cruel; and that her bounty is not without dangers for
man. Always they besought her for the gift of their daily
bread, but always, with strangely prophetic insight, they
shrank from what she had to give them with that bread.

The twelfth and the thirteenth centuries saw the rise of
two great empires in the two Americas, that of the Aztecs in
Mexico and that of the Incas in Peru. Both derived from the
Maya, though the link between Cuzco and Yucatan is more
difficult to trace than that between the Maya and the Crane
People.

Every historian commenting on Indian life has pointed out
that the cultural level of the natives of South, Central and
North America is marked by two signs, the use of adobe
blocks or stone in building, and the irrigation of the maize
fields. These two arts were the contribution of the Maya.

Before the first Incas, who were llama-herders living in the
mountains southwest of Cuzco, came down and took pos-
session of the pleasanter valleys, the valley tribes had maize.
The earliest native food in Peru was the potato. The most
primitive pottery found in the ruins is shaped in imitation of
the brown tubers and dotted with "eyes/' But at some unre-
corded time in their history the Peruvians became corn-
planters. In the National Museum in Lima is an antique vase
of painted clay with a realistic decoration of a stalk of tasseled
corn. At the time of the Conquest, the Spaniards saw four

34 Singing Valleys

cultivated varieties of maize growing in the irrigated fields,
and no wild varieties anywhere.

The Incas, with their extraordinary genius for government,
developed the agricultural life of the tribes as the basis of soci-
ety. Their worship of the sun they linked with the tribal
devotion to the earth goddess. The Inca chief announced to
the world that spring had come by turning the first furrow in
the maize fields with a golden plow. The epitaph which Inca
Pachu composed for himself has been translated:

I was born like the maize in the field.

Like the maize, I was cherished in my youth.

I came to maturity, I was spent,

Now I am withered, and I die.

Inca culture surpassed that in every part of the Americas be-
cause the Peruvians knew the use of bronze in weapons and
tools; they domesticated the llama which enabled them to
practise field agriculture, and they manured their lands with
guano. There was no need for them to move the milpas every
third or fourth year, as the Maya and the Aztecs who did not
fertilize their fields were forced to do. In four centuries they
spread an empire from northern Peru across Bolivia and into
northwestern Argentina. It was an empire in which justice and
mercy were set before cruelty. The Peruvians offered no human
sacrifices to their Lord the sun or to any of the lesser deities.
No human blood stained their altars. Nor can the charge of
cannibalism be laid against them, as it can be laid to the
Aztecs. Garcillasso comments with the awestruck wonder of
one who had seen the armies of Castile glut themselves at the
sack of Granada, that by Inca law it was a crime punishable by
death for a soldier to pillage. Moreover, he remarks, "the
penalty was exacted."

As among the Maya, the Inca system of land tenure was
communal. Each village held title to its fields which were
allotted, one tupa to every married man — not to own, but to
till. When a son was born, the father was granted one tupa

Mexican Maize Fields 35

additional. A daughter was rated at half a tupa. From time to
time the village lands were re-allotted, thus keeping the title
vested in the community, not in one family or in an indi-
vidual. The crop raised in the communal fields was divided
into three parts, of which one part belonged to the Inca, one
to the priesthood and one to the people. The people's third
was rationed among all who had taken part in the sowing
and cultivating. If a man was absent with the army, he was
given his allowance of maize out of the share set aside for the
Inca. If he had not taken part in the village sowing because he
was working on one of the church buildings, then his ration
was paid to him out of the priests' share of the crop. It was a
planned society in which no allowance was made for idlers or
for millionaires.

Perhaps it had been planned too well. Perhaps it made too
little difference to the tribes whether they gave the first third
of their crops to the Inca or to a Spanish governor, and
whether the second third went to the priests of the sun or to
the new order of priests who set up a cross and the statue of a
woman crowned with seven stars and standing on the crescent
moon, in the very temples where formerly hymns to the sun
had been chanted. After all, what was all-important was the
people's third. So long as that third part remained to the peo-
ple, and it was sufficient for their bodily needs, it mattered
little whether the rule was with the Incas or with Spain.

For at least three centuries before the coming of the
Spaniards, twilight had fallen on the Maya. Like Copan and
Palenque, Chichen Itza was deserted. Where did the Maya
go? No one really knows. The Seminoles of Florida have a
legend that the founders of their nation were seven hundred
Maya who came by boat up the Suwannee to the great Oke-
fenokee Swamp where they joined the Creeks. Some time
later the two tribes agreed to separate; the Seminoles — the
name is said to mean "Wanderers" — moved south into the
Everglades. But seven hundred "Wanderers" do not account

36 Singing Valleys

for the great nation that once held Yucatan. Probably many
of the Maya were assimilated by the Aztec confederacy. Doubt-
less many more died at the hands of the Caribs who were in
the habit of swooping down on the coast towns of the isthmus
burning and killing, carrying away women and a number of
young men who were not too sinewy to make a stew.

Too, for nearly two hundred years before Cortes, the Maya
were torn by civil war that raged between two rival families —
the Cocoms, whose totem was a pheasant, and the Kius, whose
emblem was a plant. The Mayan Wars of the Plants and the
Pheasants were worse than the British Wars of the Roses.
They exhausted the last strength of the first corn-planters. In
the course of the struggle, the milpas were deserted, the
granaries burned. There was little energy left in the Maya to
resist the white men who landed from enormous ships, and
who rode inland on great beasts, the like of which had never
been seen in the Americas before.

Cortes and his army passed through Maya-land meeting
with amazingly little opposition, and up into the mountains
toward the Valley of Anahuac. It was August; everywhere their
eyes rested on fields of golden corn.

The Aztecs and other tribes of the Nahua confederacy which
at this time controlled practically the whole of Mexico had
greatly improved their primitive husbandry. Though they did
not know the use of iron, they had tools of copper and tin,
and plows of hardwood. They irrigated their fields, and there
were strict laws to protect the forests which safeguarded the
rainfall. The Valley of Anahuac was magnificently wooded
until the Spaniards denuded it of its cypress and larch groves,
as they had previously deforested Moorish Andalusia.

Having a cereal — maize — which yields a harvest when it is
merely scratched into the earth and left to itself to mature,
and which, when planted in tilled land, gives, with very little
cultivation, twice as much food per acre as any other grain,
the Aztecs had attained to great land wealth. Taxes were paid
in maize which was gathered into the national granaries and

Mexican Maize Fields 37

became money. There seems little doubt that the Indians liv-
ing north of the Rio Grande, the pueblo-dwellers of Zufii,
Acoma, Taos, the cliff-dwellers of Pecos, and others, traded in
Tenochtitlan and carried back to their desert lands grains of
maize and ideas of irrigation.

Gradually, as the tribal wealth of the Aztecs increased, they
had evolved a system of slavery. Those who committed mis-
demeanors were deprived of membership in the tribe, and
were reduced to the lowest caste. A man who neglected
his garden for two years fell under this ban. He wore a wooden
collar about the neck; labored for a master and received for
his work not a share of the crop, as did the other "com-
munists," but what his owner thought was sufficient to keep
him in good working condition.

As among all the Indian tribes, the lands were held and
worked communally. The basis of the commune was the
family. Even in the cities every family lived to itself in a sepa-
rate pueblo which housed two or three hundred persons of
close relationship. Over the doors of these "Palaices, curiously
buylded with many pleasant diuises," as Richard Eden de-
scribes them, was carved the animal totem of the family, and
on the jambs, the writhing serpents of Quetzalcoatl, late
Kukulkan, who had now become the legendary father-founder
of the Aztec nation. From these pueblos the men of the family
went forth to work the lands for which that family was respon-
sible to the tribe.

As Cortes and his men rode higher into the hills, they came
to cities like Tlascala, well named "Place of Bread," a town
of thirty thousand set down in spreading cornlands; and where
the natives battled with them. And to Cholula where stood the
pyramid — the temple of Quetzalcoatl, larger than the Great
Pyramid by the Nile and covering forty-four acres. Then
again they took up the march, climbing the mountain wall
that rims the Valley of Anahuac, led by their Tlascan guide
through the pass between the two smoking volcanoes. At
the top of the divide they drew rein to feast their eyes on

38 Singing Valleys

the beauty that filled the vale. There lay the broad, forested
highland, with its linked lakes and the white towns built
on their islands. There were acres and acres of cultivated
maize fields running up the inner wall of the mountains, sepa-
rated by hedges of cactus and yellow-flowering aloes. There
were the floating gardens — rafts thirty to fifty feet long cov-
ered with rich loam in which grew beans, tomatoes, hot pep-
pers and the inevitable maize. These were moored in shallow
places in the lakes, and helped to supply the city dwellers with
food. There were the great palaces with their courts and outer
buildings, impregnable positions of defence, as the Spanish
warriors immediately noted. There were the flat house-roofs,
planted with flowers — cosmos and dahlias, marigolds, sun
flowers, petunias and sky-blue morning glories. And rising like
a sentinel, the royal Hill of Chapultepec, with its crown of
virgin cypress.

It was a fantastic, multi-colored civilization, set like a jewel
in the wilderness of the new world. Small wonder that the
chroniclers of the conquest compared Tenochtitlan with the
coffered palaces of Granada.

The Montezuma had sent a royal palanquin to bear the
emissary of Spain into the capital in triumph. The chair, car-
ried by warriors in feather cloaks, with necklaces and bracelets
of turquoise and silver, and helmets of painted wood adorned
with feathers, was hung with curtains of padded cotton to shut
out the sun. Above it floated the green plumes that were the
symbol of the Aztec chief, a symbol adopted in honor of the
maize-god.

So enthroned, Cortes was borne over the causeway and into
the city whose fall he plotted. Borne under the waving green
banners of the Corn. . . .

There was a prophecy in this, had any of the Aztec sooth-
sayers been able to read it.

The Montezuma spread a feast for the strangers. "They had
been long enough in the country to become reconciled to, if

Mexican Maize Fields 39

not to relish, the peculiar cooking of the Aztecs/'* It is not
to be supposed that the emperor gave his guests fewer dishes
or less carefully prepared ones than graced his own banquet
floor. Bernal Diaz has given us a few items of the royal menu.
The first cover was a fricassee of infants. This was followed by
game from the royal preserves and fish, caught only the day
before in the Gulf of Mexico two hundred miles away and
carried by relays of swift runners to the emperor's kitchen.
After these solid courses came sweetmeats and pastry made of
maize flour, eggs and the rich sugar of the aloe. "Two girls
were occupied at the further end of the emperor's dining hall
in preparing fine rolls and wafers which were set before him
from time to time. He took no other beverage than chocolate,
flavored with vanilla and other spices, and so prepared as to be
reduced to a froth of the consistency of honey, which gradu-
ally dissolved in the mouth. This was served in golden goblets
with spoons of the same metal, or of tortoise shell finely
wrought."

No less than fifty pitchers of this beverage were prepared
for the Montezuma's daily consumption!

In the market place of the capital, the Spaniards stood
amazed at the varieties of wares offered, and the traders from
all parts of the empire: "the goldsmiths of Azcapozalco, the
potters and jewelers of Cholula, the painters of Tezcuco, the
hunters of Xilotepec, the fishermen of Cuitlahuac, the fruit-
erers of the warm countries and the florists of Xochimilco."*
And everywhere the "unfailing maize." Everywhere were
booths where tortillas were baked and sold, where tamales,
hot with pepper and sweet from the corn husks in which they
were wrapped, were offered. From all quarters of the city, over
the painted drawbridges, came peasants with baskets and
sacks of maize.

And in and out of the temples dedicated to Coatlicue and
to Cinteotl, and to Chicomene Coatl, a harvest divinity called

* See The Conquest of Mexico, William H. Prescott.

40 Singing Valleys

variously ''Seven Snakes" or "Seven Maize Ears" (one of the
aspects of Coatlicue), the crowds poured. For it was harvest
time, when thanks were due Chicomene Coatl for her gifts,
and before she was supposed to leave her children for a visit
to the magic isle of Tlalocan in the west, where, according to
Aztec belief, the maize-god was born.
The crowds on the temple steps chanted the harvest hymn:

Goddess of the seven ears, arise, awake,
For, our mother, thou leavest us.
Thou returnest to Tlalocan.

Arise, awake,

Mother, thou leavest us now.
Thou goest to thy home in Tlalocan.

All day long, and through many days, the golden tide poured
into the city. The Spaniards watched and wondered. Here was
no poverty such as crept through the dark lanes of Toledo and
Seville; no hunger, no threat of famine. They saw the maize
mount in the Montezuma's treasury, and in the granaries of
the temples. They heard, as Sahagun tells, the songs of the
corn-bearers:

Oh, the yellow blossom has flowered,

She, our mother,

With the thigh-skin of the goddess

Painted upon her face. . . .

She has come out, come out from Tlalocan,

The white blossom has burst open. . . .

Yet this great empire with its magnificent cities, its exten-
sive agriculture, its stores of food, fell to a small band of
Spaniards who were thousands of miles away from their base
of supplies, aliens in a strange land.

It has been said that it was not the Spaniards but their
horses that conquered Mexico. Actually, the destroyer of the
Aztecs was neither of these. It was nothing that came in the
Spanish caravels. The peoples of Mexico were conquered by
the goddess whom they had served so long and so devotedly.

Mexican Maize Fields 41

Coatlicue, whose destroying fecundity they both worshipped
and feared, turned against them.

The history of all peoples, as Buckle so ably pointed out, is
the story of the effect upon them of four forces which lie out-
side themselves: climate, food, soil and the general aspect of
nature. To the last, with its power to stir man's imagination,
we owe religion, superstition, poetry and art. The other three
are closely linked, and react upon each other. Their immediate
result is evidenced in the accumulation of a people's wealth
which forms the basis of society.

In lands where a warm climate makes man prolific, and
where a rich soil gives an abundance of food which is also
cheap, it is inevitable that there shall be a wealthy leisure class
and a class of serfs. This had happened in Peru and in Mexico
long before Columbus opened the way to their shores. The
maize-fields of Mexico yielded from four hundred to eight
hundred fold. Coatlicue did well by her children. Too well.
Her gifts of increase enriched one class while it made millions
of peons. The Montezumas could afford dinner services of
gold and a menu of rare foods. What if the runners panted
their hearts out carrying fresh pompano from the Gulf fisher-
men's nets to the emperor's table? There were more runners.
And still more. In a land where corn was cheap, men were
cheap. Two hundred thousand laborers could be put to work
on a single palace in Tenochtitlan. Wages were next to noth-
ing, since maize was so plentiful. And what more did a slave
require than his daily ration of tortillas and chocolate; a blanket
to cover him, sandals woven of palmetto leaves and a palmetto
hat to keep off the rain and the sun? All of these Mother Earth
provided with lavish generosity.

In the long list of national debacles, it is the societies which
are divided internally that go down under external pressure.
Foreign conquerors win when they have allies within — the
allies of social decay and degeneracy.

Though the Mexicans did not know it, Coatlicue was already
in league with the invaders. She threw wide the gates. Surely

42 Singing Valleys

the Aztecs had a premonition of this, else they had not made
the earth goddess horrible.

The cities of Montezuma fell, and the smoke of their burn-
ing spread over the trampled cornfields. The Spaniards rode
north across the Rio Grande. Coronado marched over one
thousand miles of desert in search of the wealth of the Seven
Cities of Cibola. What he found were the pueblos of Zufii,
and the maize-fields spreading into Kansas.

Castaneda, who rode with him, counted no fewer than
eighty inhabited towns in that particular section of the Ameri-
can southwest. Their inhabitants were corn-planters, for in
front of the Spaniards the maize had already moved into the
north.

Cabeza de Vaca, who crossed from Florida to the Rio
Grande in 1527, commented on the maize-fields he saw.
Cartier saw great fields of it on the site of Montreal in 1604.
Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Hennepin reported it as the chief
food of the tribes in the Mississippi Valley.

Through the passes of the Rockies, across the plains of
Nebraska, to the forested headwaters of the Mississippi and
the Missouri, to the shores of the Great Lakes and the St.
Lawrence; over the Alleghenies to the Chesapeake and the
Potomac; through the valley of the Hudson and across the
Mohawk Trail to the Connecticut and the Merrimac, the corn
had traveled.

Those who carried it knew the value of the grains. They
kept the legend of its divine birth. The Senecas and the
Iroquois added new tales of their own devising. But each of
those who received it called it by a name which meant "She
Who Feeds Us."

Cinteotl still lived.

Ill
Corn Conquers Virginia

I TELL thee 'tis a goodlie country, not wanting in victuals.
On the banks of those rivers are divers fruits good to eat,
and game a-plenty. Beside, the natives in those parts have a
corne, which yields them bread; and this with little labor and
in abundance. Tis called in the Spanish tongue 'mahiz/
Spain . . ."

Walter Raleigh, recently breveted Captain, by the Queen's
graciousness, brought his fist down on the table-board with
such vehemence the ale in the pewter tankards leaped over
the rims. A murmur ran round the company gathered in The
Mermaid's common-room:

"Spain. . . ."

The name was spoken like a curse.

It was a way many Englishmen spoke it in those days when
the news was common property that King Philip was out-
fitting a fleet the like of which no power yet had ever launched
upon the seas, which he purposed to send against England.

Spain. . . . No longer was Spain a backward country pris-
oned between the Pyrenees and the Arabs, and too concerned
with her own feudal warfares to take part in European affairs.
Spain had leaped over the wall of the Pyrenees. The marriage
of poor, half-witted Infanta Juana to the Hapsburg princeling,
which had been paid for with the first booty brought from the
Americas, had produced a son who wore the title of Emperor,
and who had marched across France and Italy and the Low
Countries.

Now, with the tide of wealth pouring into Cadiz from the
New World, there was no stopping Spain. And this, so Eng-

43

44 Singing Valleys

lishmen felt, was a distinct slap in their faces. While they
had been undergoing the throes of the Reformation, Spain
had been stretching greedy hands into the west. True, for a
half century and more there had been merchants in the City
who had been thinking of the possibilities of trade with Span-
ish colonies in the Americas, and sent factors there in advance.
Hakluyt refers to a Thomas Tison, who several years before
1 526 lived in the West Indies and "seems to have been some
secret agent for Mr. Thorne and other English merchants."
Too, when Edward Fenton made his epochal voyage to China
in 1582, he found in Brazil "an Englishman named Richard
Carter, born in Limehouse, who had been out of England four
and twenty years; and near twelve years dwelling in the River
Plata at a town named Ascension, three hundred leagues up
the river."

But the Pope had declared the Americas to be the sole
property of Spain and Portugal; and this, despite the fact that
an English seaman, stout John Cabot, had sailed his own ship
to the New World while Columbus's caravels were still churn-
ing up the waters, and claimed for King Harry a part of the
continent Spain had never touched.

Was it not time England laid hold of Cabot's claim? Could
not England, as well as Spain, profit by additional wealth?
And would not colonies overseas answer the problems of over-
population, unemployment, high prices and low wages which
had been brought about largely by the turning of farms into
sheep-grazing lands, and the overdevelopment of the wool
trade at the expense of grain?

So argued Captain Walter Raleigh. He gave voice to his
belief everywhere he went; in the Queen's presence, in the
councils of the Navy where stout sea-dogs like Drake and
Frobisher heard him with respect, and in the ale houses of
London, whenever he and the company he loved to keep —
sailors, adventurers and poets — came together for a pint or two.

It was said, with a grin, there never was an Englishman so
mad to get himself and others out of England as was Raleigh.

Corn Conquers Virginia 45

Still, for all that, he knew whereof he spoke. He himself had
sailed to the New World. He had seen that amazing country
of the red savages with his own eyes. Recently, he had dis-
patched an expedition at his own expense to report on the
advisability of an English settlement there.

His captains, Amadas and Barlow, were returned with their
findings; they had found it truly a "goodlie land" with "the
highest and reddest cedars of the world, far bettering the cedars
of the Azores. The king sent us every day a brace or two of
fat bucks, conies, hares, fish . . . the best in the world. He
sent us divers kinds of fruits, melons, walnuts, cucumbers,
gourds, peas and divers roots and fruits, very excellent good;
and of their country corn, which is very white, fair, and well
tasted, and groweth three times in five months. In May they
sow, in July they reap; in June they sow, in August they reap;
in July they sow, in September they reap. Only they cast the
corn into the ground, breaking a little of the soft turf with a
wooden mattock or pickaxe. Ourselves proved the soil and
put some of our peas in the ground and in ten days they were
fourteen inches high."

The country so highly praised was that lying round Pimlico
Sound. With characteristic enthusiasm Raleigh had set about
forming a colony of planters.

It was no mean company that sailed under Ralph Lane in
the seven ships of Sir Richard Grenville's fleet. One of the
youngest of them was a nineteen-year-old lad from Suffolk,
Thomas Cavendish. Three years later he was to command three
ships and chase the Don from the Pacific with a thoroughness
equal to Drake's, and then come back to England having
circumnavigated the globe. Another was the mathematician
Thomas Hariot, several of whose theories Descartes was not
above appropriating. Still another was John White, destined
to become the grandfather of the ill-fated Virginia Dare.

They found the country as Raleigh's captains had reported
it. But what interested these Elizabethan adventurers was not

46 Singing Valleys

the "greene soils of the hills" but the river sands, from which,
remembering the treasure Spain had unearthed in Peru and
Mexico, they hoped to dig gold. Leaving their goods on the
shore, they waded barefoot into the streams scooping up the
gravel with their hands and panning it in the copper saucepans
they had brought. Meanwhile, over their heads, floated the
golden pollen of the Indian maize fields — a dust far richer
than any these sands could yield.

Grenville went on an exploring expedition along the south-
ern shore of the Sound. In the course of it he passed through
several Indian villages surrounded by "the goodliest come
fields that ever were scene in any country." The natives showed
themselves not unfriendly. In a village called Aquascogoa,
Grenville missed a silver cup from his mess-kit. He promptly
accused his hosts of theft, though there is nothing to prove that
the culprit was not one of his own crew. Maintaining the
British code of the time, which made theft even of articles of
little worth a crime to be punished severely, Grenville promptly
burned the granaries of Aquascogoa and sent his men into the
growing maize fields to spoil the crop, "all the natives having
fled." To the Indians, who made the destruction of corn a
crime punishable by death, the act must have been horrible
to the extreme.

Having made a demonstration of British law, order and
righteousness, Grenville returned to Roanoke and his ships,
and sailed for home. He left behind him the little colony to
pay the debt of his stupidity.

But thus far the colonists were all enthusiasm. Ralph Lane
wrote to Hakluyt:

We have discovered the main to be the goodliest isle under the
cope of heaven, so abounding with sweet trees that bring such
sundry rich and pleasant gums, grapes of such greatness yet wild,
as France, Spain nor Italy have no greater; so many sorts of
apothecary's drugs, such several kinds of flax, . . . And now within
these few days we have found here maize, or Guinea wheat, whose

Corn Conquers Virginia 47

ear yieldeth corn for bread, four hundred upon one ear; and the
cane maketh very good and perfect sugar . . ."
Your most assured friend,

Ralph Lane

From the new fort in Virginia,
the 3rd of September, 1585.

Had the others of the settlement followed Lane's example
and turned their attention to the produce of the land, instead
of to that avid search for gold, the winter's tale which the
gaunt survivors had to tell Sir Francis Drake when he put into
Pimlico Sound the next summer might have been different. It
was a tale of famine and death, of the enmity of the Indians
who had not forgotten the stench of scorched corn that floated
over Aquascogoa; of a heartbreaking lookout for relief ships
that never came over the horizon. How could the Virginians
know that England had commandeered all ships to send them
against the Armada? Or that Raleigh's Ark Royal which he was
building for the Virginia trade had been bought off the ways
by the Queen for £5,000 to be the Admiral's flagship.

Drake was hastening home with the loot of San Domingo,
eager to take part in the coming sea fight in home waters.
When he sailed, young Cavendish went with him. He had had
enough of planting; now he purposed to be a sailor, and as
close after the pattern of "El Draque" as possible. There sailed,
too, Thomas Hariot and John White. These took with them
the one harvest of that year in Virginia. It was a manuscript
entitled: A Brief e and True Report of the New Found Land
of Virginia. In its pages Hariot set down with the exactitude
of the mathematician a description of the land round Roanoke,
its plants and animals, minerals and natives, all of which John
White illustrated with drawings and sketches in water color.
Hariot gives much space to telling of the plants that were the
chief crops of the Virginia natives, especially tobacco and
"pagetour, the same in the West Indies is called maize. The
grains are the size of our peas, of divers colors and yield a very

48 Singing Valleys

white and sweet flour. . . . "It maketh a good bread/' He
describes the Indians' methods of planting and cultivation,
and estimates that one English acre "forty perches long and
four wide, yields 200 London bushels of maize and beans." In
England, he adds, a wheat yield of forty bushels per acre is
considered a plenteous harvest. It is to Thomas Hariot's ac-
curate eye and mind that we owe our knowledge that the
Indians of Virginia planted their corn, four grains to a hill,
"set not to touch," in the pattern of the Maya, and immor-
talized by them in their day-sign for planting.

An edition of Hariot's work was printed in Frankfort in
1590. This, and John White's earnest pleas that the settlement
in Virginia should not be abandoned, but encouraged and
aided, did much to stir England out of the lassitude which
came over her when the lively menace of the Armada had been
reduced to ashes. White had returned to Virginia with a new
company of settlers, among them his daughter Eleanor and
her husband, Ananias Dare. Even after tragedy had overtaken
the second colony, leaving only the charred ruins of houses, a
baby's shoe and the word CROATOAN cut on one of the
trees, White persisted in advocating a settlement in Virginia.
He pointed to Hariot's Briefe and True Report and to his
own illustrations to prove the richness of the land, and that it
would support planters, provided these dig in fields, not in the
river sand.

Gloriana was dead; Raleigh was in the Tower. Jamie the
Scotsman, with the reek of whiskey on his breath, had brought
a tradesman's point of view to Whitehall. Swashbuckling ad-
venture was regarded askance. But a merchant company, with
such estimable directors as Sir George Somers, Sir Thomas
Gates, Captain Edward Wingfield and the Reverend Richard
Haklyut, cousin and namesake of the famous author of Voyages
and Discoveries, and himself a writer whose Principal Voyages,
was influencing the minds of Englishmen; a company with
shares to sell, and dividends to reap, a company chartered to

Corn Conquers Virginia 49

exploit the New World and whatever it might yield, King
James could approve of that. After all, Virginia might accom-
plish for him what no Stuart could ever succeed in doing —
balance the budget.

The colonists who set sail on New Year's Day, 1607, in Cap-
tain Newport's ships carried with them explicit directions from
Rev. Richard Haklyut. It was sound counsel he laid down.
He recommended among other things,

You must have great care not to offend the naturals, if you can
eschew it; and employ some few of your company to trade with
them for corn and all other lasting victuals . . . And this you must
do before that they perceive you mean to plant among them. . . .

You must take especial care that you choose a seat for habitation
that shall not be overburthened with woods near your town, for
all the men you have shall not be able to cleanse twenty acres a
year. . . . Neither must you plant in a low or moist place because
it will prove unhealthful. . . .

Lastly and chiefly, the way to prosper and to achieve good suc-
cess is to make yourselves all of one mind for the good of your
country and your own, and to serve and fear God, the Giver of
all goodness, for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath
not planted shall be rooted out.

The expedition was well advertised. Newport's ships drew
sightseers who were curious about America and its natives. Cap-
tain Weymouth had brought back from his voyage to Maine
in 1605 five naked savages, with painted faces and long hair
adorned with feathers. An enterprising showman had touted
them about England with good monetary returns. Shake-
speare's complaint that men too miserly to tip a beggar would
'lay out ten doits to see a dead Indian," was not unfounded.
In market places, in village taprooms, in barracks from Pen-
zance to John O'Groats men were discussing Virginia and the
possibilities it offered for better living than they had in
England.

No meaner copywriter than Michael Drayton waved New-
port's fleet to sea with the exhortation:

50 Singing Valleys

Britons, you stay too long,
Quickly aboard bestow you,

And with a merry gale

Swell your stretched sail,
With vows as strong
As the winds that blow you.

And cheerfully at sea,
Success you still entice,

To get the pearl and gold,

And ours to hold
VIRGINIA,
Earth's only paradise.

Where nature hath in store,
Fowl, venison and fish;

And the fruitfull'st soil

Without your toil,
Three harvests more,
All greater than you wish.

There was one member of the expedition who, if those lines
happened to catch his eye, must have frowned and sworn
roundly.

"Without your toil ..." A pox on poets! 'Tis such wind-
bags as he that have enlisted these fine gentlemen with the
white soft hands, and no guts beneath their slashed doublets,
to be planters. Planters . . .

So, undoubtedly, thought Captain John Smith, veteran ad-
venturer and practical realist. The Directors of the Company
dubbed him dangerous and insubordinate. He reached Virginia
in irons. It was only several weeks later, and after Captain New-
port, who recognized the qualities of leadership in John Smith,
had prevailed with the other members of the Council, that
the irons were struck off and Smith was permitted to exercise
his authority as a Council member. There seems to have been
little doubt in the minds of the rank and file that the Captain
was the best man of the three whom the Company Directors

Corn Conquers Virginia 51

had entrusted with government of the colony. One of the
handful who survived the Starving Time in the winter after
Smith had left Virginia wrote of him that "He would rather
want than borrow; or starve than not pay. He loved action
more than words, and hated falsehood worse than death; whose
adventures were our lives, and whose loss our death. . . ."

That the planting made in the early spring of 1607 sur-
vived, and finally gave birth to a nation, is due to the sheer
capability of John Smith. He looms out of the records as one
of the truly great men in our national history.

Born with an insatiable curiosity about the world in which
he lived, and with a capacity for adventure at first hand, his
report of himself is that he had served in France under
Admiral Coligny, who discussed with him the advisability of
planting a colony of Huguenots in Florida; in the Low Coun-
tries against Spain, and in Transylvania, fighting the Turks as
one of Sigismund Bathory's captains. There he slew in single
combat three Ottomans and was awarded a coat-of-arms show-
ing three Turks' heads on a shield. Later, he was taken captive
and enslaved. He escaped only by killing his owner who had
set him to threshing wheat, seizing his horse and galloping
away into Russia. Then he journeyed by adventurous paths
across Poland, Bohemia, Germany, France, arriving in London
in time to hear the propaganda put out by the Virginia Com-
pany, and to decide on America as his next field of action.

And all this before his twenty-seventh year.

The recital of his adventures, told tersely in his own words,
would seem to place him among the rashlings. But John Smith
was no d'Artagnan. He had executive ability, as shrewd a sense
of values as any city merchant, and a comprehension of eco-
nomic factors in government rarely met with in his time and
in the class to which he belonged — that of the professional
soldier. This was proven during the two years of his stay in
Virginia. In the course of that time he saved the colonists
from starvation and massacre by his skill in handling the
Indians, buying corn from them and learning from them all

52 Singing Valleys

that he could about the country and what it had to offer. At
the same time his repeated injunction to the colonists was that
in order to succeed they must give up scanning the horizon
for supply ships from the mother country, and turn to the land
itself for their subsistence.

It was not an easy task to persuade the first Virginians
against those flowery promises of Drayton's that they must
become planters, not adventurers; and that their survival de-
pended on their driving roots into the soil. "He that does not
work shall not eat" was Smith's retort to those who would
have thrust their hands into the baskets of corn he brought
from the Powhatan. Work, he explained, meant tree-chop-
ping, grubbing up roots, breaking the soil with the tools they
had brought from England, and which the lazy ones were only
too willing to trade with the Indians for fresh-killed venison,
or corn. Of the members of this First Supply, thirty-five were
listed as "Gentlemen." Not a few of these were younger sons
of the nobility. George Percy, who governed the colony twice
— and badly — was a brother of the Duke of Northumberland.
Of the other settlers, many were footmen.

The Council's choice of a site was in direct disobedience to
Haklyut's admonitions. It was low and damp. The land was
uncleared, showing, had they been familiar with Indian ways,
that the natives considered it infertile, worthless for crops. It
is likely that had Smith not been a prisoner, he would have
saved them this initial mistake.

They felled logs to build a fort and when, at the end of a
fortnight, this was built, they broke up the ground of the
clearing they had made and sowed among the stumps the
seeds of English wheat. Five weeks later, when Newport sailed
on June fifteenth, the grain had grown to the height of an
average man. Newport took back to the Company tales of the
exceeding fertility of Virginia soil, not knowing that this very
richness would prove the destruction of the first wheat crop.

In all, the settlers cleared and planted in wheat and vege-
tables about four acres of ground. They had as well the stores

Corn Conquers Virginia 53

left by Newport which, it was estimated, would last fifteen
weeks, by careful rationing. Newport could not, even with
favorable winds, weather and prompt aid at home, be ex-
pected to return in less than five months. The colony was
faced with the necessity of adding to its store of provisions
enough to carry it through at least five weeks.

Considering the plenitude of the woods and fields, this did
not seem to present grave difficulties. The fringes of the pine
and cedar woods offered wild crab-apples, three varieties of
cherries, persimmons, a fruit of which Smith remarked, "If it
be not ripe it will drawe a man's mouth awrie with much
torment," as well as raspberries, whortleberries, four varieties
of grapes, and wild strawberries, that were four times as large
as any in England and so plentiful the men trampled them as
they went about the plantation.

There were also the sassafras trees, whose roots, with pine
wood for paneling, were the cargo the Susan Constant carried
home.

The woods, which were free of underbrush thanks to the
custom followed by the Indians of burning out the low growth
to aid them in deer stalking, yielded venison, squirrels, opos-
sums, raccoons, quail, wild turkeys. It might be thought im-
possible for one hundred able-bodied men to suffer want in
such a land. But as summer brought hot weather, malaria and
dysentery claimed its victims. The wheat, sprung from seed
which had been developed in a cooler, moister England, sick-
ened and failed. Sooner than any of them had expected, they
began to draw on the stores which were entrusted to Thomas
Studley. He has left his own account:

. . . Being thus left to our fortunes, it fortuned that within ten
days scarce ten of us could either go or well stand, such extreme
sickness and weakness oppressed us ... and the reason was this;
whilst the ships stayed our allowance was somewhat bettered by
daily proportion of biscuit which the sailors would pilfer to sell,
give or exchange with us for money, sassafras, furs or love. But
when they departed there remained ... no place of relief but the

54 Singing Valleys

common kettle . . . and that was half a pint of wheat and as much
barley boiled with water, for a man a day; and this having fried
some 26 weeks in the ship's hold contained as many worms as
grains, so that we might truly call it rather so much bran as corn
. . . those that escaped lived upon sturgeon and sea crabs. Fifty
in this time we buried. . . .

Smith, meanwhile, had led a party to explore the shores of
the Sound and to buy grain from the natives. They found many
Indian villages, each surrounded by green maize fields, from
twenty to one hundred acres in extent and cleanly cultivated
between the hills. Strachey says that at the time the English
arrived there were three thousand acres of cleared and planted
land within the boundaries of the present state of Virginia.
By the accounts, the palm went to the natives of Kecoughtan,
the peninsula whose sea tip the English named Point Com-
fort, and who were "better husbands than in any parte else
that we have observed."

Entries in John Smith's Journal record the corn purchases
made that summer:

At the mouth of the River 16 bushels

On the South side of the River 30 bushels

From Pashpahegh (that churlish nation) . .10-12 bushels

As Smith explored the bays and wide river mouths of Tide-
water Virginia in the pinnace which was an important part of
the colony's equipment, he became more and more impressed
by the cultivation of the corn lands. The rows were four feet
apart, and the soil between them was kept clear of weeds by
the women of the village who used their wooden hoes indus-
triously. This method of tillage was new to the English. In
Britain, at that time, most seeds were sown broadcast. Hariot
had commented on the good results of the Indians' method.
Squashes and "pompions" grew between the hills. The stalks,
according to Smith, usually bore two ears. Occasionally there
were three, rarely four, to a plant. The ears were well filled out

Corn Conquers Virginia 55

with from two to five hundred kernels. Also, the Captain
noted, the green stalks cut and sucked, yielded a sweet juice.

To ward off the herds of deer, the marauding squirrels,
crows, buzzards and woodchucks, four cedar trunks were set
up in the center of each field, with a platform atop them,
where a young lad was kept on sentinel duty. John White's
sketch of the Village of Secota in Hariot's Briefe and True
Report shows a neat street, with bark houses ranged along it,
fields of tobacco fenced with sunflowers and fields of corn in
various stages of growth. In the most advanced planting is one
of the watch towers. Every village, too, had its granary, set up
on four posts. Le Moyne pictured a round granary with a con-
ical roof in his description of sixteenth-century Florida.

The prestige of the tribal rulers was measured in their maize
fields. The Queen of Appomattox was mistress of one hundred
acres of beans, squashes, pumpkins and many corn lands.

Here, John Smith saw, was the readiest and most necessary
wealth Jamestown required — food. As the English wheat
drooped and parched under the July sun he contrasted it with
the vigorous growth of the Indians' maize. Why, he demanded
of the Council, cram the holds of the ships with seed from
England which was alien to Virginia soil, when right at hand
was a native grain which yielded plenteous harvest under even
primitive methods of cultivation? Let the settlers forget the
white loaves of Lincolnshire and eat the American yellow
bread, which apparently had power to nourish warriors and
keep them vigorous to an age when English graybeards were
tottering. The Powhatan himself was eighty years old. Yet
there was not a white man in Jamestown who would have
chosen to match his physical strength against the red king's.

By December the stores in Thomas Studley's warehouse
were exhausted. The colony had dwindled to one-half its origi-
nal number. These were living on wild game and matroum,
the seed of the wild barley growing on the river banks. Ahead
stretched four months of winter, and all around were the sav-
ages. Smith proposed to the Council that they allow him the

56 Singing Valleys

shallop and nine men. He would add to the party two Indians
who were disposed to be friendly, and go up the Chicka-
hominey where there were large villages with presumably well-
stocked granaries, and barter for corn to keep the settlers alive.

So began the well-known adventure of the bearded Captain
and the twelve-year-old daughter of the Powhatan. In being
captured and threatened with execution, Smith was only being
made to pay for the kidnapping of Indians by every ship's
captain who touched the Americas. When Verrazano landed
on the Carolina shore he stole away a child and tried to carry
off a young woman. Only her screams and the savage re-
sistance she put up made the Breton sailors desist. Again and
again Smith made the point in his arguments with the Council
that honest and cordial relations with the natives were neces-
sary if the English were to remain in Virginia. For as long as
hunger stalked them, they would have need of the corn of
the country. Englishmen could count on having bread to eat
only as long as they could count on the Indians' breaking
bread with them.

Wingfield, the first President, was deposed from office on
the charge of appropriating to himself too many of the stores.
He went back to England and there published a pamphlet in
his defense. It was another apologia, to follow de Landa's, and
to add another chapter to the history of the corn-planters.

Wingfield was no friend to John Smith; it was he who had
ordered the irons put about the Captain's wrists. But Wing-
field states frankly that the survival of the English cause in
Virginia was due to Smith's canniness in trading with the
Indians for corn, and to his shrewd recognition of the impor-
tance of the natives' grain as a crop for the settlers to grow for
themselves.

Again and again, in the two years before he was forced by
serious injuries which lay beyond the skill of the colony's
barber to cure, to return to England, John Smith went corn-
trading. In the course of those expeditions he spied out the
land and gathered the facts he put into his maps. He sailed up

Com Conquers Virginia 57

the James River to Powhatan's ''Birthright; whereon he sowes
his wheate, beanes, peaze, tobacco/' and now the site of Rich-
mond. He investigated the York and the Pamunkey Rivers. So
he sensed the greatness of the continent behind and beyond the
source of those rivers. Here was no narrow isthmus such as
the Spaniards had found in Yucatan, with China on the far
side of it; but a rich and varied firmament about which he was
insatiably curious. Everywhere he went he found corn. And
of every tribe whose language he learned to speak he inquired
concerning their discovery of the maize.

Still Jamestown had to buy its corn, giving for the basket-
fuls, knives, tools, blue beads, clothing, mirrors, as well as
occasional luxuries from the stores Newport and Captain Nel-
son brought. Only in the spring of 1609, when John Smith was
President, was he able to set the first cornfield in Jamestown.
Two Indians, Tassore and Kemps, captured the winter before,
"fettered prisoners and as evil a pair as would sell their king
for a piece of copper/' were told off to instruct the settlers
how to break the ground and set the seed. One is glad to
read that for this service they were given their freedom. Smith's
cornfield comprised forty acres. It flourished as had nothing
else the settlers had planted. When Newport arrived with the
third supply, the new colonists seized on seven acres of the
field and in three days had eaten every ear of the yield.

Jamestown had bread to eat. Jamestown had squirrel stew
and venison and roasted turkey, and compotes of raspberries
sweetened with sugar pressed from the green maize stalks.
Pocahontas was responsible for some of this. As Smith wrote
Queen Anne, commending to her the Princess in whose honor
scores of English inns hung out the sign, "The Belle Savage/'

Jamestown with her wild train, she as freely visited as her father's
habitation; and during the time of two or three years, she next
under God, was still the instrument to preserve this colony from
death, famine and utter confusion.

Such was the weakness of this poor Commonwealth. As had not
the savage fed us, we directly had starved. And this relief, most

58 Singing Valleys

gracious Queen, was commonly brought us by the Lady Poca-
hontas. . . .

Behind John Smith's stern insistence that the colonists plant
as well as buy corn, was his awareness that if once the Indians
came to realize that the whites were dependent on them for
food, more than half the value of the muskets and gunpowder
in Jamestown's fort would be lost. He had evidence that al-
ready the Powhatan suspected this. On one of Smith's corn-
trading expeditions, the King held out against giving him the
corn bargained for except at the price of a musket a basketful.
Only the cleverness of Smith, when the Indians surrounded the
house where he and his men were lodged, saved them from
massacre. Only his firmness with the Powhatan, refusing the
powder and firearms, even though this might mean that the
colony would have to tighten belts, made the wily savage sell
his corn for the price bargained for.

But in that summer of 1609, John Smith's eyes rested fre-
quently on the forty acres of standing corn within the palisade
of Jamestown. Carefully he counted the ears, calculated on
the grains. Here were bread and hominy. Here was hot por-
ridge to put heart into men who had the wilderness before
them. Here was security. Here was Virginia's future.

Within a few weeks the Captain was to meet with the acci-
dent which so crippled him that Newport insisted on taking
him back to a London surgeon. Without his practical advice,
the colonists did not save the corn in their granary from the
rats which had come in Newport's ship. Much of the harvest
of that first cornfield was eaten and spoiled. The news of this
leaked out to the Indians. Now there were threatening figures
in the woods about the settlement. The price of corn went up
and up. "If you are starving and need our corn, then pay us
in muskets and gun powder. Pay or starve."

Sixty out of five hundred settlers Smith left survived the
winter. These had neither strength of body nor heart to meet
the Spring when the Judas trees began to flower in the pine

Corn Conquers Virginia 59

woods and the whiteoak leaves were the size of a squirrel's ear;
infallible signs that corn-planting time had come. In the
pinnaces they were starting down the river, a sorry company,
having chosen all too probable death at sea to what lay
behind them in Jamestown, when the topsails of Lord Dela-
ware's fleet appeared on Hampton Roads.

Virginia was saved. Saved as much by the wisdom gathered
from that bitter experience as by the supplies Delaware
brought. The watching redskins soon presented themselves at
the palisade eager to hand over the palings baskets of seed
corn in return for trinkets, sugar and rum. Again the Vir-
ginians went into the forty-acre field in which last year's stub-
ble still marked the rows. They swung the mattocks; they
planted corn.

The colony was to suffer other setbacks from time to time
but never again was there thought of abandoning the under-
taking. Raleigh's dream had taken root in John Smith's corn-
fields.

IV

The Seeding of New England

THERE was no shaking John Smith's faith in America.
No sooner were the wounds caused by that explosion of
gunpowder at Powhatan's garden healed, than he was limping
about London, calling on the Directors of the Virginia Com-
pany to send to Jamestown no more remittance men from the
ranks of the landed gentry, but skilled workmen; millwrights,
joiners, blacksmiths, gardeners.

On his own, turning his back on the Company, he was fit-
ting out an expedition to explore the coasts of Northern Vir-
ginia, to which he was to give the name of "New England."

There had been a settlement on the Kennebec River at the
time Jamestown was founded. After a year, the survivors of
the colony had trailed forlornly home to England with tales
of blizzards, wolves, savages, poor soil and few natural re-
sources. "Northern Virginia" had a black eye.

John Smith pooh-poohed all this. What if the winters were
long and cold and the summers too short to grow pineapples,
indigo, nutmegs and coffee? (Later, settlers in Massachusetts
were to try all of these crops. ) What if the brief summer sea-
son presented a difficulty in raising sufficient food to supply a
settlement through a year? Were there not the fisheries off the
coast to supplement the crops? And were not these fisheries in
themselves worth developing as a source of revenue in England?

He pointed out to all who would hear that the Hollanders,
by fishing and selling their catch to the Germans, "are made
so mighty strong and rich as no state but Venice of twice
their magnitude, is so well furnished with so many fair cities,
goodly towns. . . . And never could the Spaniard with all

60

The Seeding of New England 61

his mines of gold and silver pay his debts, his friends and army
half as truly as the Hollanders still have done by this con-
temptible trade of fish. . . ."

Five years after his departure from Virginia, the indomitable
Captain is cruising along the coasts of Massachusetts, explor-
ing the bays and rivers; entering in his voluminous "Notes"
comments on the weather, tides, coast line, the drafts of
mackerel and cod, and the appearance and habits of the
natives.

In the ship's cabin, under the swinging lantern, John Smith
carefully drew with sextant and ruler his map of "New Eng-
land," which was to have so far-reaching an influence on
future events this side of the Atlantic. He gave names of his
own fancy to "Cape Cod" and "Cape Tragabigzonda" — the
last after a lady who had befriended him in Constantinople in
the days of his captivity, and for whom the Captain has been
supposed to have felt more tenderly than for Powhatan's
daughter. Three little islands near by he named the Turks
Heads.

John Smith's map was printed in London and widely cir-
culated. It was in a way a sensation. In an England that was
heavily in debt and floundering under Stuart rule, any sug-
gestions for increasing the revenue were taken under considera-
tion. "So Captain Smith believed, on the evidence of his own
eyes and nets, that the waters off Northern Virginia swarmed
with fish? And that these cod and herring and mackerel could
be salted down, and transported to London to give British
merchants a commodity with which to compete with the
Dutch?" Undoubtedly Captain Smith did so believe. "But,"
the dubious inquired, "how were the fishermen to be fed while
so far from home? The settlers on the Kennebec reported
Northern Virginia an unfriendly land and one that offered no
generous supply of food."

John Smith had an answer for that, too. "Let them eat
maize."

Maize, he reported, grew in New England as well as in

62 Singing Valleys

Virginia. True, the yield per acre was not so great. But as a
food supply for a fishing fleet and a few fishing villages, it
would be adequate. And maize, as he well knew from his ex-
perience on the James, gave its harvest with so little labor that
its cultivation would not interfere overmuch with the fisher-
men's chief occupations. It had, he continued, other proper-
ties which gave it advantage over wheat. No mill was needed
to grind it. It could be used in a variety of ways; as bread, as
porridge, as hominy, as samp; or stewed with beans into a
toothsome dish the Indians of Virginia called succoquatash.
In short, Indian corn was the answer to the problem of the
hour. The New England codfish and mackerel, plus the Indian
corn, would balance the British budget.

Meanwhile, another result of John Smith's voyage of 1614
was developing. One of his ships, under Thomas Hunt, had
coasted along the indented shores of Buzzards Bay. There
Hunt, though it was strictly against orders, kidnapped twenty
Patuxets. He knew better than to take them to England where
the Captain's eye might fall on them and on him. Accordingly,
he sailed for Spain where folks were not so squeamish about a
little slave trading on the side. In Malaga he offered his cap-
tives for sale. Some friars interfered, however, and had the
Indians released.

One of the twenty Patuxets, whose name has come down
to us as Squanto, was taken into the service of a British mer-
chant, the treasurer of the Newfoundland Company. He took
the Indian to London and taught him to speak English. A year
or two later, this same Squanto was sent to accompany Cap-
tain Thomas Dermer, "a brave, stout gentleman . . . em-
ployed by Sir Ferdinando Gorges for discovery" to Newfound-
land to report on the fisheries, talk of which had been stirred
up by Captain John Smith.

Leaving Newfoundland in the early Spring of 1620, at the
very time the Separatists of Reverend John Robinson's congre-
gation in Leyden were studying John Smith's map of New
England and writing to the Company in London relative to

The Seeding of New England 63

getting permission to settle there, Mr. Dermer left St. John's
and sailed down the coast, stopping here and there to gather
information for his report to Sir Ferdinando. He spent some
weeks in the country around Cape Cod, and while there, he
gave the much-traveled Squanto his freedom.

This was the Squanto whom the chief Samoset recom-
mended to Governor John Carver as one who spoke much
better English than himself. He came to Plymouth in the early
Spring of 1621 and "directed them how to set their corne,
where to take fish, and to procure other commodities and who
never left them till he died."

Surely, it is not unworthy of remark that of the three In-
dians who are recorded by name as having taught the whites
how to "set their corne," two remained steadfast friends of the
colonists for the rest of their lives.

The first landing of the Pilgrims on Cape Cod was made in
mid-November. The pin-oaks still fluttered russet leaves; but
the other trees were bare. In and out between the piled sand
dunes grew thickets of bay, set with waxy, gray berries. Be-
hind these stretched dark swamps, splashed with the crimson
of wild cranberries.

It was no land of plenty offering fresh food to travelers who
had tossed for seven long weeks at sea. Here were no waving
green maize fields such as had gladdened the eyes of Ralph
Lane's fellow colonists. Instead, the first reconnoitering party
of sixteen, sent out under Captain Miles Standish,

found a pond of clear fresh water and shortly after a good
quantitie of clear ground where the Indeans had formerly sett
corne, and some of their graves. And Proceeding furder they saw
new stubble wher corne had been sett the same year, also they
found wher lately a house had been, wher some planks and a great
kettle was remaining and heaps of sand newly padled with their
hands which they digging up found in them diverce faire Indean
baskets filled with corne, and some in them eares, faire and good

64 Singing Valleys

in diverce colleurs, which seemed to them a very goodly sight
(haveing never seen any shuch before).

So their time being expired they returned to the ship, and took
with them parte of the corne and buried up the rest, and so like
the men from Escholl carried with them of the fruits of the land,
and showed their brethren, of which, and their return, they were
marvelously glad.

Later, in summing up the value to the Pilgrims of this
chance discovery, Bradford spoke of it as "a spetiall provi-
dence of God, and a great mercie to this poor people that
here they got them seed to plant them corne the next year,
or els they must have starved, for they had none, nor any
liklyhood to get any till the season had been past."

Before they settled at Plymouth, three weeks later, the
ground was covered with snow, and had frozen. Under lower-
ing skies and sleety rains that froze their hands, they broke
the stiff earth and set the logs of the fort. They built the
palisade which was all that intervened between them and the
wintry wilderness. From the fringes of the woods dark faces
peered at them. Finally, however, curiosity and greed over-
came caution; the Indians approached the palisade. Trade
began; an offering of an iron pot for a jacket of beaver skins.
A basket of corn for a pewter spoon.

The Massachusetts Indians had no such supplies of corn as
John Smith had found in the granaries of the Virginia villages.
Their sandy fields, which the squaws cultivated with clamshell
hoes, yielded sufficient for their own needs, and little more.
They did not build granaries, but caches in the ground, such
as Standish's party had stumbled on. These were lined with
dry grass, the corn was put in baskets and covered over with
mats woven of sweet grass. Then earth was heaped over all.
Primitive root cellars, very little different from these, were
part of the equipment of many a New England farm until
half a century ago.

Squanto joined the despairing colony some time late in the
winter, when death was taking heavy toll of their number.

The Seeding *of New England 65

He came in time to help them carry the dead out to burial, and
to revive their fainting hopes with the promise of Spring.

One pictures the red man, whose travels and adventures
exceeded those of the Pilgrims, clad in skins and a proud
feather, summoning from memory his store of English words,
and putting to them questions about London: about Ludgate
Circus and the crowds around The Globe; about hawkers in
the streets, crying, "Fresh cockles!" and "Sweet lavender!"
and "Dutch eels, all alive-o!" Questions which the men of
Plymouth, who came, in the main, from small towns and
from the class of farmers and artisans, were ill fitted to answer.

They were eager to start planting. Squanto shook his head.
"Not yet. Wait. . . . Soon. . . ." The English could not be-
lieve that the warm spell in March when the pussywillows
burst along the withes and the skunk cabbage thrust up
through the muck of the brooks' edge was not the beginning
of clement weather. They had to learn the shyness of the
American spring. And the slowness. They had to learn, of the
red man, to stay their hands until after April's chilly rains had
ceased, and the earth had dried, and the shadbush burst into
misty bloom along the creeks.

Then Squanto beckoned them to follow him. He led them
not into the clearing where they were eager to break ground
and scatter seed, but along the estuary on which the town was
built. He pointed to the tide waters flowing in. ... They
were full of leaping silver. Herring, thousands of herring, run-
ning in from the sea, and up to fresh shallows to spawn.

Here was the wealth John Smith had promised. Here were
the fisheries coming right to their doors, to their feet; even,
as Squanto showed them how to kneel on the bank and form
a trap in the water with their loosely linked fingers, into their
hands. They filled basket after basket with the catch.

The waters had brought them fresh food, and something
more. The fish, Squanto made them understand, must be
buried in the ground with the new corn to make it grow. Only
by such fertilizing would the crop be assured to them. A fish

66 Singing Valleys

to a hill. A hole, four inches deep, four kernels of corn —
ancient homage to the planting gods of the Maya — and the
dry earth brought over them with a clamshell hoe. A month
later, and the ground between the charred stumps would be
a-flutter with new green leaves, and crying for the hoe again.
Two months more and there would be waving tassels, with
the orioles and redwings lighting on them to peck daintily.
Another month, and there would be new ears full of sweet
milk, to boil in the big iron pots, and to roast in the embers.
And when the moon came up, big and round and golden out
of the sea, there would be baskets heaped with ears as golden
as the moon, to carry home and hang from the house rafters
to dry.

Corn for the mortars that stood beside every hearth in
Plymouth; corn for bread and nokake and suppawn and suc-
coquatash.

They planted, that first spring, five acres of barley and peas,
and twenty acres of corn, dressed carefully with herring. How
did the Massachusetts Indians know that their crop of weachin
would yield its harvest only if they fed it with fish? There was
nothing in more ancient corn-lore to teach them this. The
tribes of Virginia, according to Hariot, "never fatten the
ground with muck, dung, or any other thing; neither plough
nor dig it."

Visitors from Virginia looked on the New England corn-
planting methods with disfavor. "There is not much in that
land/' one of them reported. "Except a herring be put into the
hole that you set the corne or maize in, it will not come up."
To which the men of Massachusetts retorted that the reason
why Virginians did not dress their fields with fish was not for
reason of the richness of their soil, but the poverty of their
waters.

New Englanders continued to set their corn, a herring to a
hill, for many years, and until the increase of domestic ani-
mals gave them manure. One writer tells of the wolves coming
down into the Cape Cod cornfields, drawn by the smell of the

The Seeding of New England 67

decaying fish. Later, when the herring were not so plentiful,
the farmers used seaweed. Today, after a big storm has churned
the Atlantic and piled the rich-colored kelp on the inset
beaches of Rhode Island and the South Shore, you may see a
long line of blue painted carts of the "Portygees" going down
to the sea for loads of fertilizer. This, spread odoriferously on
the cornfields, insures next year's crop for johnnycakes, and
the roasting ears for the Republican Party's clambakes.

Because they fertilized the soil, the New England tribes were
able to plant their maize year after year in the same hills with-
out rotating their fields, as the Indians living to the south
invariably did. The squaws kept the ground between the rows
clear and cleanly cultivated using their clamshell hoes, and
"not suffering a choaking weede to advance his audacious head
above their infant corne, or an undermining worme to spoil
his spumes." The same practice of clean cultivation obtained
among all the Indians of America. Strachey, writing of Vir-
ginia in 1610, comments that "the women sow their corne
well and cleane same as neat as we doe our garden bedds."

The Indians scorned the colonists for their shiftlessness in
letting weeds grow between their hills of corn. As soon as the
first blades appeared, the squaws were in their fields, hoeing
and planting three or four "Turkic beanes" in every hill with
the sprouting maize. The two plants, they believed, had an
affinity for each other even before they met in succoquatash.

If the Indian cornfields appeared like "garden bedds" to
English eyes this was because in England field crops were still
sown broadcast and there was no intertillage. The natives of
the Americas had kept weeded the space between their corn
rows and planted these with beans, squash, pumpkins — "cover
crops" — for generations before the English agriculturalist
Jethro Hull put forth his theory about "Horse-Hoeing Hus-
bandry."

The corn which Squanto showed the whites how to plant
prospered well. Every ear it yielded was doubled in value by
the fact that the wheat which they had brought with them

68 Singing Valleys

from England, failed, either by lateness of the season or weak-
ness of the seed after the long voyage and bad winter storage.
Still, as Bradford tells, when September came,

. . . and the wellcome time of harvest in which all had their
hungrie bellies filled . . . they had all things in good plenty, and
besides water foule there was a great store of wild Turkies, of which
they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had aboute a
peck of meale to a person, or now, since harvest, Indian corne to
that proportion which made many afterwards write so largely of
their plenty hear to their friends in England which were not faned,
but true reports. . . .

The Plymouth colonists had no chartered company in Lon-
don to send them relays of supplies. Their only friends in the
old country were congregations of Separatists who were neither
rich, powerful nor in political favor with the Stuarts. From the
outset, the colonists were dependent on the crops of their own
raising. In Virginia, not once, but half a dozen times, romantic
chance intervened to save the settlers from extinction. Help
came over the horizon from England, from Bermuda, or, as
had happened when Drake saved the Roanoke survivors, from
Peru and the Spanish Main. The men of New England had
no such inspiriting hope. They looked at their heap of golden
corn and knew that this was their mainstay.

Too, they entertained no ideas of America as a temporary
residence only; a stepping stone to a manor in Kent and a
baronetcy. They had come to stay. Accordingly they began in
their first year to adapt their ways of living to new patterns
imposed by the climate, the soil, the loneliness, the sea at
their backs and the savages surrounding them. They were ad-
vantaged in this by the fact that they had their women and
children with them from the start. They lived in families; not,
as the Jamestown settlers had lived for two years and more,
like "single men in barracks," a disorderly and disruptive form
of existence.

In that first summer the Plymouth colonists built separate
houses within the palisade. The center of each house was its

The Seeding of New England 69

hearth, where fires glowed, where ovens were heated and
whisked clean with brushes of corn husks; where loaves of
yellow bread were laid to bake until golden brown. Women
are naturally curious and given to trying things. Show a woman
a new flower, and in an hour she will have thought of a dozen
ways of using it to ornament herself, to provide herself with
a new perfume or a new condiment. It is not likely that the
women of Plymouth once in possession of their own hearths,
bake-ovens, mortars and mixing bowls could look at the ears
of corn hanging from the low rafters and not devise innumer-
able new ways of preparing the cereal. From Squanto, and
from other Patuxets who hung about the settlement and had
a smattering of English words learned from the traders who
had touched these coasts before the coming of the Pilgrims,
they learned to soak the grains in lye and make hominy.
They learned the secrets of suppawn, which was a kind of
porridge sweetened with the juice of the crushed green corn
stalks; and of succoquatash of corn and beans. Though they
drew the line at adding the chopped meat of a young dog,
without which, the Indians claimed, the dish lacked its rightful
flavor.

But they had weachin pones and griddle cakes, the last an
excellent food for journeys, since they could be carried in the
pocket or in the tall hat's crown. For how many generations
did New England children start for school on winter mornings,
glad of the three or four warm "journey cakes" which were to
be their lunch? They were buckwheat cakes, baked on a soap-
stone griddle over the open fire in a log cabin in Morris
County, New Jersey, when the writer's great grandmother and
her eight brothers and sisters made ready for school, four miles
away. The girls carried their cakes decorously in their hands,
using them for muffs as Bronson Alcott's daughters used their
apple turnovers. But long-legged Sam fitted his into the crown
of his coonskin cap, and then ran, with wildly waving arms,
jumping every stone wall between home and the schoolhouse.

The Virginia woods gave richly of raspberries, whortleber-

jo Singing Valleys

ries, strawberries, wild cherries and wild apples. In New Eng-
land, June meant "strawberry bread." August brought blue-
berry bread, and later cranberry bread, made after the same
recipe.

When winter came, and the family gathered about the
hearth on which the fire blazed for light and warmth, the
men and boys busied themselves with their knives fashioning
wooden spoons, bowls and trenchers for the household, the
girls wove baskets of reeds, some tight enough to store the
shelled corn, others loose for sieves. And while the woman
stepped back and forth beside her great carding wheel, watch-
ful of the faces of her own with the firelight on them, and re-
membering the sea journey and the terror of the First Winter,
the wilderness so close and the future so uncertain, it is not un-
likely that she would start singing a paraphrase of the loyth
Psalm:

Come now, give thanks unto the Lord,

His graciousness endures alway.
We wandered in the wilderness

Nor found a citie where to stay.
Then cried we to the Lord of Hosts

To save our souls from dark despair
He brought us forth by His right way

Into a land most wondrous fair.

The gates of brass He hath broke down,

The iron bars asunder torn,
To thirsty men He gives to drink,

The hungry He doth feed with corne.
The wilderness doth at his Word

Break forth in blossoms brave and gay,
Into the field the sower goes

To scatter seed without delay.

Whoso is wise will ponder well,
The loving kindness of our Lord.

The Seeding of New England 71

Come, let us now His glory tell,

The power of His mighty Word.
Come, let us praise His mercy true,

That He doth feed us in our need,
The wondrous works that He hath done,

And still our footsteps shall He lead.

That first corn harvest was only a respite before two terrible
famine years. These were ushered in by a drought, six weeks
long, which caused the new-sprung corn to wither and turn
yellow like dried hay. Fear gripped the settlers. What would
they do when winter came, without corn in the granaries?
The drought affected the Indians' crop even as their own had
been blasted. They could not hope to buy corn as they had
done during the first winter in New England. Too, the Indians,
wise in the way of droughts, were already leaving those parts
to hunt and fish in more favorable regions.

From the third week of May to mid-July the colonists
looked from their blasted fields to the brazen sky in which no
promising cloud appeared, and fought to keep their faith in a
God of mercy.

Would rain never come?

Separatists as the men of Plymouth were, many of them
had been born in, and all of them had lived within, the teach-
ing of an older faith; one which took account of signs and
symbols and seasons, and which paid deference to the super-
natural powers of those it accounted saints. It is not likely the
Governor could count off the days on his calendar and not
remember that July fifteenth had been celebrated in England
for centuries as St. Swithin's Day when, if it should rain, the
celestial intervention of the medieval Bishop of Winchester
would send showers every day for forty days to come. A most
useful saint, Swithin, to farmers and gardeners, no less than
to the British umbrella-makers.

Perhaps with some faint hope of this sanctified "rain-
maker" being within hearing of their invocations and lamenta-
tions, the Governor appointed July fifteenth a solemn day of

72 Singing Valleys

prayer and humiliation in which all were to confess their sins
and to beseech the Almighty to spare their corn.

.... For all the morning and the greatest part of the day it
was clear weather and very hotte, and not a cloud or any signe of
rain to be seen, yet toward evening it begane to overcast, and
shortly after to raine, wich shush sweete and gentle showers as
gave them cause of rejoyceing and blessing God. It came without
either wind or thunder or any violence, and by degrees in that
abundance as that the earth was thoroughly wete and soaked ther-
with. . . . Which did so apparently revive and quicken the de-
cayed corne and other fruits as was wonderful to see. . . .

For the rest of that summer the weather continued with
"Shush interchange of faire, warme weather and seasonable
showers" that the drooping corn revived miraculously, and
yielded a far better harvest than even the most sanguine among
the colonists had hoped for. It would have been sufficient to
see them safely through the winter, had not the arrival of the
Anne a fortnight after the rains began brought a new detach-
ment of settlers for whom the foodstuffs also carried in the
Anne were not adequate until another corn harvest twelve
months off.

So began those starving months in which five grains of
corn were a day's ration for a man. In comparison to the
Spaniards, extolled by Peter Martyr, who led a miserable life
for five days together with only parched maize to eat, "and
that not to saturitie," the Plymouth colonists, "when they had
corne, thought it as good as a feast and wanted, not only for
five days together, but sometimes two or three months to-
gether, and neither had bread nor any kind of corne." It may
have been then that Roger Clap bartered a puppy with an
Indian for a capful of maize, a trade which gave each party to
it a dinner to his liking. Certain it is that during those months
the men of Massachusetts became clam diggers, and the
women evolved chowders, fries and fritters made of the useful
quahaugs. Even this harvest of the sea was not without its

The Seeding of New England 73

tragedy, for one clammer, too weak from long starvation to
run before the advancing tide, was caught in the mud and
drowned before his comrades' horrified eyes.

Clams and corn saved Massachusetts, as oysters saved the
later colonists on Long Island on more than one occasion.
The Dutch had a saying, that "if oysters had legs, Long
Islanders would starve."

The Massachusetts settlers starved, but they survived. They
drew their wide leather belts tighter about their gaunt frames,
and spoke yet more grimly of the providence of God and His
benefits to the godly. And when the Anne, on which Mr.
Winthrop had sailed with beaver to sell in London, and with
orders to make arrangements for further supplies to be sent
the colony, did not come over the sea's rim, they took their
axes, and summoned what strength they had, to fell more
trees, to widen their clearings wherein to plant more and yet
more corn, "that they might not still thus languish in miserie."

What discontent with the communal principles on which
the colony was founded had arisen before this year is not
recorded. But as they realized that their existence in the new
land depended on their corn crop above all else, and as they
struggled to extend the cornfields, the men of Massachusetts
declared themselves unqualifiedly against the communal sys-
tem. A delegation waited on the Governor and Council with
request that the article of the charter which made all lands
communal and forbade private ownership of land be abolished
straightway.

Why should not every man seed and hoe and tend his own
cornfield? Why should not every man support himself and
his family by his own labors? Why should the strong in body
and spirit be broken down to carry the faint-hearted and care-
less? By following such a plan to its inevitable end, the repre-
sentatives argued before the Governor, there would be none
left to carry on.

The Governor did not yield without much debate and con-
sideration of the merits of communism versus individualism.

74 Singing Valleys

The holding of all property in common was a basic tenet of
the Separatists' faith and appeared as such in the Plymouth
charter. It was this, some felt, which gave them a spiritual ad-
vantage over the profit-taking members of the Church of Eng-
land and the Romanists. It placed them with the disciples
who followed Jesus of Nazareth, and with the early Christians.

But, argued the ardent advocates of individualism, neither
the disciples nor the early Christians were alone in a desperate
wilderness. They dwelt in cities, ringed round with cultivated
farmlands, and where men among them with trades like Paul
were able to ply their trades and draw their custom from the
unenlightened heathen to the benefit of the holy few. Given
such circumstances, communism might work, though it was
noticeable that even the early Christians had abandoned it.
But in a raw, new, lonely country it would not work.

Finally, the Governor and Council struck out that clause of
the constitution which decreed against private ownership of
land. A parcel of land was apportioned to each family, accord-
ing to the size of the family, not for inheritance, or for di-
vision, but only for their present use.

Bradford leaves us in no doubt as to the results of this step
toward individualism:

This had very good success, for it made all hands very indus-
trious, so as much more corne was planted than other waise
would have bene by any means the Governor or any other could
use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave farr better
contents.

The women now wente willingly into the field and tooke their
litle-ons with them to set corne, which before would aledge week-
ness, and inabilities; whom to have compelled would have bene
thought great tiranie and oppression. . . .

The experience that was had in this commone course and con-
dition tried sundrie years and that amongst godly and sober men,
may well evince the vanities of that conceit of Plato's and other
ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of
propertye and bringing in communitie into a comone wealth, would
make them happy and flourishing as if they were wiser than God.

The Seeding of New England 75

For this communitie (so fan as it was) was found to breed
much confusion and discontent and retard much imployment that
would have been to their benefite and comforte. For the yong-men
that were most able and fitte for labour and service did repine that
they should spend their time and strength to worke for other
men's wives and children, without any recompence.

The strong, or man of parts, had more in devision of victails and
cloaths than he that was weake and not able to doe a quarter the
other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men
to be ranked and equalized in labours and victails and cloaths etc.
with the meaner and yonger sorte thought it some indignitie and
disrespect unto them. And for men's wives to be commanded to
doe service for other men as dressing their meate, washing their
cloaths, etc. they deemed it a kin of slaverie, neither could many
husbands well brooke it.

Upon the poynte all being to have alike, and all to doe alike,
they thought themselves in the like condition; and one as good as
another, and so, if it did not cut of those relations that God hath
set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take of the
mutuall respects that should be preserved amongst them. And
would have bene worse if they had bene men of another condition.

Let none object that this is men's corruption, and nothing to
the course itselfe. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in
them God in his wisdome saw another course fiter for them. . . .

In abandoning the communal system in favor of private
ownership of land, Massachusetts was following the example
and experience of Virginia, ten years earlier.

But with this notable difference. In Massachusetts the de-
termination to throw it off sprang from the people. In Vir-
ginia it was by edict of the new Governor, Sir Thomas Dale,
who arrived in May, 1611, to find the settlers playing bowls
in the streets of Jamestown during the hours when they should
have been planting and hoeing their corn.

Without John Smith's firm direction and enforcement of
his rule that "only he who works shall eat/' things in James-
town had come to a pretty pass. The few who worked, ap-
proximately one-fifth of the company, were carrying a weighty

76 Singing Valleys

burden of shiftless and disorderly members. Moreover, these
had already antagonized the Indians who, under Smith's gov-
ernment were the colony's friends and feeders in times of
want. It is hard to condone the severity of some of Governor
Dale's punishments which included the breaking of offenders
on the wheel and nailing a man to a tree through his tongue,
but the statistics of the colony presented by such able observers
as Henry Spelman and Strachey reveal that prosperity followed
immediately on the Governor's establishment of strict law,
and his order that the communal system be abandoned. Each
man was allotted three acres of land, for which he was under
duty to pay a yearly tax of six bushels of corn into the public
treasury, which was also the public granary.

Ten years later taxes were being paid in tobacco. The plant
which John Rolfe was the first to cultivate in his three-acre
lot, and which, even against King James' expressed distaste,
had become a salable commodity in London, had already
started Virginia on the road to prosperity.

Virginia went tobacco mad. They grew it in the streets of
Jamestown and in the cornlands, until the Council took steps
to insure the food crop. Tobacco with its quick return in
money was worse than the gold fever. Men forgot that they
must eat. To remind them, the Council passed a law prohibit-
ing a man from raising more than one thousand tobacco
plants. In addition, he was constrained to "raise sufficient cornc
for his own needs, and a surplus for those not engaged in
agricultural labor." Rolfe estimated that an industrious man,
whose chief work was farming, could tend "four akers of
corne and 1000 plants of tobacco," and that such a planting
should yield grain sufficient for five persons; while the sale of
the tobacco would buy apparel for two.

Actually, by the records, Richard Brewster with three other
men raised in one year two thousand eight hundred pounds of
tobacco and one hundred bushels of corn. And three boys, who
seem to have organized the first "4H Club," reaped a harvest

The Seeding of New England 77

of three hundred pounds of tobacco and one hundred and
eleven bushels of corn.

The increase in the planting of tobacco naturally raised the
price of corn. The price per bushel in 1624 was the highest
known. And just as quickly as they had turned to tobacco, the
settlers began to extend their cornlands.

The country was growing by leaps and bounds. Growing,
more truly, by tons of tobacco and bushels of corn. Tobacco
made Virginia. It determined the type of life along the Tide-
water rivers and up to the base of the Blue Ridge. It precluded
towns in favor of the large plantations, each of which ulti-
mately became a town in itself. It made a prince of each
planter along the rivers. Their ships carried tons of fragrant
leaves to London, and brought back in return fine china from
Lowestoft, silverware and copper, silks, velvets, laces, mirrors,
wallpaper for the drawing rooms, and tuns of wine for the
cellars. The same ships brought muskets, gunpowder and slips
of fruit trees to plant in orchards, and books like that first
folio of Shakespeare which had just been published.

But the smoke trade, and all that it brought about, would
never have been without the fields of useful corn which waved
green leaves and tassels beside the acres of tobacco. Corn fed
the indentured servants whose labor made possible the to-
bacco crop, long before the "twenty negars" which the Dutch
brought to and sold in Jamestown in 1619 had increased to
form an important part of the population.

At the time that the Plymouth Pilgrims were holding their
Solemn Day of Humiliation for the benefit of their corn, the
whites in Virginia numbered less than two thousand. All were
foreign born, except the babies, the first fruits of those mar-
riages contracted in 1619 when the Company sent out ninety
young women and sold them as wives, at prices ranging from
one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of
tobacco, according to comeliness. But already the settlement
extended inland some seventy miles, up the James almost to

78 Singing Valleys

the site of Richmond, and along the York. Wooden block-
houses were set here and there between the corn and tobacco
fields to which the settlers could repair in case of attack by
Indians. They had need of such precautions. The Indians who
remained in the region were bitterly antagonistic to the whites'
advance. In 1623 young Henry Spelman, the author of one of
the most valuable records of the colony from 1609 onwards, a
friend and "blood brother" of the Powhatan, and who had
been for a while Pocahontas' companion, was on a corn-trad-
ing expedition, and had gone ashore leaving part of his crew
in the pinnace. Indians put out from the bank, but were
frightened off by the crew firing a small cannon. Spelman's
mates were congratulating themselves on their cleverness
when something came hurtling through the air from the river
bank, and landed on the deck in a smear of blood. It was
Spelman's head.

But even with the constant menace of Indian raids, the
plantations bordered the river on either side. The houses were
set close to the bank, with gardens running down to the con-
venient wharves. The houses were wood, of logs and clap-
boards; each with its generous outside chimney from which at
all seasons and all hours rose a lazy curl of sweet-smelling
hickory smoke. In the fireplace below hung the big iron or
brass pots, and it was seldom that the warm ashes did not hold
one or two "pones" wrapped up in husks, on the chance of a
traveler coming by. Those who came had no road but the river.
But they beached their canoes or skiffs, and walked con-
fidently over the grass to ask a meal or a night's hospitality.
It was corn hospitality; and none of it was overfine.

For planters' tables, you must know,

Are free for all that come and go.

While pone and milk, with mush well stear'd

In wooden dishes graced the board,

With hominie and cider-pap,

(Which scarce a hungry dog would lap),

Well stuffed with fat from bacon fry'd,

Or with molasses dulcify'd.

The Seeding of New England 79

Beyond the owner's house, a row of cabins for the inden-
tured servants runs like an English village street toward the
farm buildings. Still there are few blacks; only twenty-two in
the entire colony.

In the farmyards are pigs, cows, goats, chickens. Sheep graze
the lawns about the house. Oxen draw plows through the
fields. This in itself marks a great advance. In 1617 Ralph
Hamor sighed for "six or eight plows, now we have steers to
draw them." The first land in America to be broken by a share
was in Virginia in 1618. There are few horses; nor need of
them, for there are few roads. Travel and trade go by the
rivers. Away on both sides along the river stretch the tobacco
and cornfields. Tobacco is money for taxes and for export. But
corn is food. There is a little wheat grown, but not much of
that. The lands are still too fertile for wheat growing. And the
seed which Argall brought from Canada has proved disap-
pointing. Corn is easier to raise and more trustworthy. Corn
yields more per acre with less labor. Corn is ground at home
in a great stone mortar, without the difficulty of cartage to a
mill.

Besides, these planters who have survived the Starving Time,
the Indian raids, and the successive changes of governors and
their policies have grown used to the taste of the rough, sweet,
yellow bread. Their bodies demand the energy it gives. A man
needs energy if he is to push the frontier back and still farther
back, and to drive out the redskins. Too, corn yields more
than meal for bread and hominy and "spoon meat." There is
the sweet syrup in the green stalks. There are the dried husks
to stuff mattresses for master and servants too. There are the
cobs for lighting fires, and a few of these to be fashioned into
pipes for smoking the homegrown tobacco.

It is usual for the newly arrived servants, a rough lot some
of these, the scrapings of county jails and pothouses along the
Plymouth wharves, to grumble for fine white bread or at least
for moist rye loaves. But they learn soon enough that you
cannot feed servants on wheat bread, and make a profit on their
labor. In a month or two they are as active in the cornfields

8o Singing Valleys

and at husking and grinding as the vanishing Indians were.
In the fall they go eagerly into the woods to gather hickory
nuts. These, pounded shells and all, in a mortar with a little
water, make a milky liquid called "pohickory" which lends a
fine taste poured over fresh baked pones.

When the servants' time is up, a period of six or seven years,
and they have their freedom and rights, they are already corn-
planters. They in turn start plantations of corn and tobacco
on which other indentured servants labor for them. The oldest
planter's house still standing in Virginia is the steep-roofed,
dormered, brick home of Adam Thoroughgood overlooking
Lynnhaven Bay (the succulence of whose oysters was discov-
ered by George Percy within a month after Jamestown was
founded). Adam Thoroughgood, though the brother of two
knights, came to the colony an indentured servant. He worked
his way to freedom and the possession of this placid estate.
The house he built with two end chimneys, symbols of pros-
perity and prestige, survives. It is perhaps one of the most fit-
ting symbols of the American dream.

Virginia's elegant days cannot be said to begin before the
eighteenth century. Even as late as 1705 Berkeley comments:
"The bread in gentlemen's houses is generally of wheat, but
some rather choose the pone." Pompous Sir William Berkeley,
twice Governor, did much to further the luxury era. As early
as 1652, he retired to his estate "Greenspring" near Jamestown
where he planted an orchard of two thousand apple, pear,
peach, quince and apricot trees. There, too, he maintained a
stable of seventy-nine horses.

Reviewing the records, it is amazing how swiftly Virginia
moved out of pioneer conditions and into luxury. She could
not have done this so speedily but for corn. Corn made cheap
labor — white first, later black — in the tobacco fields possible.
Corn provided exports to New England and the West Indies.
Corn fattened and made prolific cattle, hogs and poultry.

It is no wonder that the private cook books which are part

The Seeding of New England 81

of the heritage of innumerable Southern families contain pages
of recipes for the making of corn breads, puddings, chowders,
fritters, batter-cakes, all of them evolved in colonial kitchens
whose windows looked out across tasseled fields to the lazy
river.

V

America Climbs the Cornstalk

SUCH plenteousness as sprang from Tidewater Virginia's
alluvial soil never rewarded the men and women of
Massachusetts who labored in their sandy fields with wooden
or clamshell hoes. A harvest there was, sprung from that
extraordinary union of herring and maize; but those who had
seen the golden yields of Virginia and of Calvert's Maryland
shook their heads and denied New England a future.

The New England character, as this developed through two
hundred years, is the harvest of the New England cornfields.
Where man could not raise bread without persistent labor,
work took on a dignity it never attains in lands that return
easy and bumper crops. Bronson Alcott hoeing his corn and
turnips, chopping firewood for his shivering family struck
William Ellery Channing as the most inspiring object in
Massachusetts. But the cast in Channing's eye was an inherit-
ance from a New England ancestry which had never had to
grapple with the problems that come from having more than
enough.

Where the fields yield only a frugal sufficiency, thrift
becomes a prized virtue. Just as the French, by sustaining a
large population on an ungracious soil, developed a genius for
proportion, utility and the mot juste — all of which were also
among the glories of an infertile, overcrowded, frequently
hungry Greece — the Massachusetts mind was self-trained to
clear, abstract thinking, and to express its thought in a lucent,
literary style in which is mirrored the sparse, coolly lovely New
England landscape.

The doctrine of low living and high thinking which pro-

82

America Climbs the Cornstalk 83

duced the Concord philosophers, divines and abolitionists who
crowned this country during the nineteenth century was the
direct fruitage of cornfields which never made possible the
lavish expenditure and waste that formed a picturesque back-
ground of southern plantation life.

By no stretch of eugenics could Emerson have come out of
Virginia, nor Lee from Connecticut.

It is interesting to speculate on the problematical divergence
of the New England character had the Pilgrims found there a
teemful soil. How long would the stern Separatist creed have
held its integrity against the insidious influences of great
natural plenty? There were Puritans who settled in Virginia.
Alexander Whitaker who preached in Jamestown's wooden
church was one. But the difference between the Low Church,
fox-hunting, toddy-drinking parsons of the Tidewater parishes
and the Higginsons, Mathers, and Edwards who preached Uni-
tarianism and Congregational freedom of conscience from the
pulpits of starched, white churches scattered through Massa-
chusetts and Connecticut bears a direct relation to the differ-
ence in yield per acre between southern and northern corn-
lands.

Out of the same meagerly filled harvest baskets came the
passionate individualism which illumined New England's re-
ligious and social thought. Where the corn shoots twenty feet
high into the sun, and every ear yields five hundredfold, the
stature of the planter is dwarfed. Man is made more than a lit-
tle lower than the grain he hoes. This had happened in the
Valley of Mexico; it was to happen in the valleys of Tidewater
Virginia. But beside the chary corn-hills in the fields north of
Point Judith man's stature reached to the stars.

New England never bowed the knee to Coatlicue, or paid
the toll exacted by her terrible fecundity. There were no
exuberant harvests to reduce man to vassalage. The New Eng-
land earth was a stepmother; a conscientious, Puritan foster-
parent who did her duty justly, but without sentimentality,

84 Singing Valleys

and who did no more than her duty. From her unresponsive
bosom men turned for love to that other mother, the sea.

The salt tang seasoned New England speech, as the salt
herring seasoned New England farmlands. The sea's loneliness
turned sea captain's sons to transcendentalism. Experiences of
coral islands and fantastic ports made comprehensible to the
New England mind the visionary flights of Ezekiel and the
Apostle John. Goethe says somewhere that no man walks with
impunity under palms. The men of Marblehead and Hingham
who had watched "the sun come up like thunder, out o'
China cross the bay," brought home to the big, square, quiet
houses with their many-paned, shining windows, and handed
on to their sons and daughters, something more than teak-
wood chests, carved ivory chessmen and rolls of pale-colored
Chinese silks. Who can say what heritage was bequeathed to
Hawthorne by his father's dying of yellow fever in Surinam
and not of God-fearing old age in the four-poster in the north
bedroom of the house on Salem's Herbert Street?

In Virginia, tobacco decreed a society of plantations and few
towns. As wealth and luxury increased, these remained on the
land. The country snubbed the streets. Too, the tobacco's
rapid exhaustion of the soil advanced the planters further and
further up the rivers away from the coasts. But in New Eng-
land, where prosperity could not be harvested from the soil,
men's thoughts turned to the sea. The building of ships and
the sailing of them created a society of small, coast villages;
of houses ranged along an elm-shaded street or fronting on a
common which provided pasturage for the cows. Behind each
house stretched straight backward a deep, narrow "farm-lot,"
in which the family worked to raise their own food, and no
more.

The village street ran down to quiet water. There catboats
and dories bobbed on the tide. On tall ways, proud ships took
form that would soon sail to Madagascar and Pernambuco.
All day the ship-carpenters' hammers rang in the village. All
day, and through months and even years there was talk of the

America Climbs the Cornstalk 85

Sarah Ann, and the Maid of Gloucester, and whether one had
yet made Capetown, and if the other had had luck a-whaling.

There were few men in those coast villages. The sea
claimed all but the very old, the crippled and the spiritually
unfit. Hardly was a boy big enough to handle a hoe than he
was throwing it down to run down to Derby Wharf to wel-
come home the Eastern Queen; to stand shyly on her weather-
stained deck; to sniff the pungent odors from the hold
crammed with bales of tea and spices, kegs of rum, licorice
barks and molasses; and to stare admiringly at his own bearded
uncles and cousins who had strutted the Bund of Hong Kong,
and knew what it was like to sail clear around the world.

Boys with that call in their ears couldn't stay in the corn-
fields. So it was the women and girls who spaded gardens in
April, after the herring had run up the brooks to spawn. The
women and girls dressed the fields with fish, and planted corn,
and hoed it through the summer while the bobolinks teased
them from the meadow grass. Women harvested the corn and
husked the ears. Not infrequently it was a long-legged girl
with Noah Webster's speller in her hand, who rode the bag
of corn to the miller.

In these ways the whites were following the pattern of the
corn-planters who had preceded them. Roger Williams ob-
served of the Narragansett Indians:

Their women set or plant, weede and hill and gather and barne
all the corne and fruites of the field. Their women constantly beat
all their come with hand . . . and take as much paines as any
people in the world. The women of the family will commonly raise
2 or 3 heaps of 12, 15, 20 bushells a heap.

Yet sometimes the man himselfe, either out of love to his wife,
or care for his children, or being an old man, will help the woman,
which by the custome of the country they are not bound to do.

Women's labor decreed corn rather than wheat as the
basic food crop. A woman could rival a man in the cornfield
where frequent and shallow cultivation is desirable. The corn
roots grow close to the surface and are injured by too deep and

86 Singing Valleys

too vigorous hoeing. Wheat had to be cut, cradled, threshed
and milled. But corn-harvest meant only passing up and down
between the rows, pulling the ripened ears into baskets. The
ears could be stored as they were and shelled at the house-
wife's convenience; a good task for little maids sitting round
the fire of evenings. And the woman who had no horse or
oxen to cart her corn to the miller could get out the wooden
mortar, or the samp mill which was one of Salem's first manu-
factures, and grind her meal in her own kitchen, as her grand-
mother had done in Plymouth.

So corn made possible the great male exodus to the sea.

It was a servantless society. True, in the later days of
Boston's and Portsmouth's magnificence, the merchants kept
slaves and sometimes Chinese or Hindu servants. But in the
seventeenth century, New England women did their own
housework without shame, and with a self-sufficiency that
must on occasions have driven husbands to up anchor. In a
society which honored work, the wife who combined the
offices of mother, nurse, physician, gardener, baker, brewer,
miller, cook, laundress, tailor and dairymaid wielded a power
far beyond that of any Southern "toast." Gallants might fight
duels or pen sonnets for love of the Evelyn Byrds and Mis-
tress Carters. But bronzed seamen humbly took orders from
the "Cap'n's wife" who represented her husband when he was
on a voyage. Supercargoes turned in their invoices to her, and
waited while she ran over their arithmetic. There were widows,
like Madam Martha Smith of St. George's Manor, Long
Island, who sent out their own whalers and did business in
sperm oil with chandlers all over the world. When these
energetic women died, the minister usually read aloud the
description of a virtuous woman prophesied by King Lemuel's
mother to her son, and the mourners nodded to each other,
"How true!"

These New England Penelopes whose Ulysseses had sailed
away into the sunrise believed in "gumption."

"There's precious little," one of them used to say to her

America Climbs the Cornstalk 87

granddaughter, "you can't set right with gumption, and a
few drops of oil."

And usually with more gumption than healing oil, they
proceeded to right innumerable conditions which they con-
sidered wrong. Ladies' societies dedicated to the improvement
of everything from the higher education of the members to
the morals of the Patagonians flourished in every New England
village and town. Most of the "movements" in America began
in some New England parlor, and were nourished through
infancy on chicken and clam-pie suppers, sales of bread, pie
and johnnycake. New England cornfields, tended by these mis-
sionary zealots, sent of their harvest to clothe the innocently
naked Hawaiians in nankeen drawers and calico Mother Hub-
bards, and to build tin chapels on the banks of the Ganges to
convert the Hindus to the tenets of Congregationalism.

It was surprising how the tide of New England corn, thriftily
administered by women, rolled around and fed the world.

Much of this might be read merely as a quaint chapter of
New England's social history were it not for the spread of
the New England gospel into the Western Reserve and the
states of the corn belt during the years of American expansion
following the Revolution.

The migrants carried with them across the Alleghenies the
ideal of strong-armed, strong-minded women. That ideal had
originated in a civilization in which women had labored with
hoes to make the corn to grow. The food of the western
frontier was also corn. The women of the frontier were ex-
pected to grow, as well as mix and bake, the family bread, while
the frontiersmen hewed logs, hunted, trapped, fished. It was
a repetition of the life lived in early colonial Massachusetts and
Connecticut. So the early New England woman never died;
she merely moved west. And she carried with her to her new
home, after the way of all women since the days of Rachel,
her familiar household gods — the "movements" and the bet-
terment societies, the reverence for education and the right of
individual conscience, and the ideal upheld by King Lemuel's

88 Singing Valleys

mother of a woman who "looketh well to the ways of her
household and eateth not the bread of idleness," and who
therefore had the right to demand to be given "of the fruit of
her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates."

One thing that kept New Englanders hustling was the per-
sistent necessity of making the colony pay dividends to the
shareholders in England. By 1624, for an investment of £25,-
ooo, English capitalists had acquired the whole of New Eng-
land. They made it clear that they were engaged in a strictly
business enterprise. The colony was expected to pay. And pay
it did — if sometimes through the long, Yankee nose.

Virginia paid her quit-rents in wheat first, later in tobacco.
New England paid hers in fish and furs. To get these she had
to have ships and corn, the last for bartej. She began building
ships before she built houses. In the first September, when the
harvest was barned, a party with the useful Squanto for
guide sailed in the shallop to trade with the Tarentine Indians
and brought back to Plymouth "a good return in furs/'

The following year they pushed their trading along the
Maine coast and into the Kennebec, from which river they
acquired seven hundred pounds of beaver. The trade was in-
variably in corn. In 1633, when this was rated at six shillings
the bushel, beaver sold at:

1 Ib. beaver 2 bu. corn

2 Ibs. beaver 3 " "

5 Ibs. beaver 9

The acumen with which the Yankees bargained and bartered
was that of men prodded by threats of destitution. The busi-
ness done by one enterprising colonist whose original capital
was 13 gallons of seed corn reads like a teaser in arithmetic.
He sowed his seed, tended the crop and harvested 364 bushels.
These he sold on credit to the Indians, receiving in their winter
catch of furs, pelts to the value of 18 shillings per bushel of

America Climbs the Cornstalk 89

corn. The beaver shipped to England sold for £327. Not a poor
profit to take from thirteen gallons of seed!

The fur-trading posts were the first extensions of the colony.
Later came the founding of Lynn and Salem, encouraged by
a promise given by the Plymouth settlers that they would sup-
ply the newcomers with corn for one year. Intercourse be-
tween the settlements was necessarily by boat. Only Indian
trails cut the forests. New England had practically no roads,
and no horses to travel them before 1650. Endicott, at Salem,
lamented that spring freshets and the state of his health made
fording streams impossible, preventing his coming posthaste
to Boston to argue a point with Governor Winthrop. Ships
were an immediate necessity if New England was to grow,
and pay its indebtedness.

The speed with which those first fleets were cut from the
forest and sent down the ways makes one gasp. They were
sizable vessels, too. The Desire launched in Marblehead in
1635 weighed 120 tons. Salem made a specialty of large decked
shallops, of from twenty to thirty tons. These traded with the
new settlements on the Connecticut River and along the
Sound and even with Lord Baltimore's Avalon in the New-
foundland. Some sailed to Bermuda with cargoes of pork, corn
and salt fish, and brought back potatoes, oranges and lemons
for the Salem folk to gawk at. On a single day in 1643, five
vessels cleared from Boston. Two were of three hundred tons
each, one of one hundred and sixty tons. All five had been
built in America.

Since there was little currency in the colonies, and that a
random collection of English, Dutch and Spanish silver
pieces, labor was paid in corn. In 1631, maize was made legal
tender for debts, taxes and fines, at a fixed rate of six shillings
the bushel. A law prohibited the feeding of this "country pay"
to swine, except when a plentiful harvest sent the value of
the grain below the six shillings rate. Still later, however, the
County Court passed a law that "no one within these liberties

go Singing Valleys

shall refuse to accept Indian corn at 2 s. 6 d. the bushel for
any contract, whether of labor or of cattle."

So, in a sense, corn built the ships of New England, as
corn filled their holds when they went fur-trading.

The Dutch had taken from ten to fifteen thousand pounds
of beaver annually from New England. Dutch ships traded
in and out of all the ports of the Atlantic, fetching and carry-
ing every sort of cargo. In the same year that Plymouth was
settled, the indomitable Reynier Pauw organized the Com-
pany of the West Indies to capture Spain's American posses-
sions, as the East India Company had already appropriated
Spanish and Portuguese power in the Orient. The great busi-
ness empire of the Netherlands was nearing its height. Of
Europe's entire fleet of twenty thousand sizable vessels, 16,000
sailed under Dutch command. John Smith had tried to drive
home to London merchants the fact that with no products of
their own to sell, the Dutch, by making themselves carriers
of the world's goods, had become the richest nation on the
continent. During the first part of the seventeenth century it
seemed as though you could not move anything, anywhere,
without a Dutchman's help.

Their settlements on the Hudson were primarily for the
purpose of cornering the American beaver trade as they had
already captured the Russian fur market. The first ship to sail
from New Amsterdam with a cargo carried more than seven
thousand beaver skins, and nearly as many otters. In 1656
Andrjes van der Donck, the patroon of Yonkers, estimated
that 80,000 beaver were taken that year from that quarter of
the present Westchester County.

It was not likely the mynheers would suffer the competition
of the New Englanders without resentment and increased
efforts of their own. The traders at Fort Orange and the scouts
who went into the St. Lawrence country and to the villages
along the Great Lakes held out tempting offers of rum and
gunpowder and muskets as against the corn prices paid by
the Yankees. After the poor harvest of 1630, when beaver went

America Climbs the Cornstalk 91

up to twenty shillings the pound, Massachusetts passed a law
forbidding the sale of breadstuff's to Indians. The redskins re-
plied, "No corn, no beaver," and turned west, over the Mo-
hawk Trail to sell their catch at Fort Orange.

Chiefly to extend opportunities for fur-trading, the English
colonists began to plant out frontier posts in western Massa-
chusetts and Connecticut. These formed in time a protective
cordon around the coast towns, permitting them to give full
attention to the sea. The frontier settlements served as forts
against the Indians and the Dutch. They took the brunt of
the French attacks, as when Deerfield was burned. They were
also depots where furs were collected to be picked up later by
the pole-boats. These sharp-pointed, flat-bottomed craft,
twenty to thirty feet long, and only three to five feet wide,
were poled up the shallow, white-water rivers of New Eng-
land. The skippers traded salt fish for beaver and otter skins.

Each of the western outposts belonged to a coast town. The
settlers could not remove without permission, under penalty
of loss of their lands or of imprisonment, if they were not
land-holders. Each was a self-sustaining community. It could
expect no supplies from the "mother town." The settlers must
hunt, trade, and grow their own food. This, naturally enough,
was corn.

So grew the river valley towns of western New England,
each one ringed by its cornfields. The plain wooden houses
clustered close together for protection. The women, left alone
in those villages, knew that in between the rows of corn in the
fields lurked fierce Mohawks, waiting for long-haired, blond
scalp-locks, or for captives who might be worth a ransom in
gunpowder and muskets. There were girls who went into the
fields to hoe, or to gather green roasting-ears, who vanished as
swiftly and as silently as did Kilmeny in the ballad. Some of
those girls were never heard of again. Of others, traders brought
tales of seeing a pale-faced squaw tending the fire in an
Iroquois camp who looked at them strangely, but shook her
head when they addressed her in English.

92 Singing Valleys

But persistently, indomitably, the colonists pushed their
frontier ever farther and farther west. Each ridge of hills was
a bastion only until a new supply of colonists arrived. These
were urged to climb the ridge and try the next valley. Com
grew in valleys. With corn and venison and partridge, and
trout from the amber brown pools, men and women could
live. They could raise families, build houses with dignified,
even elegant, doorways carved with the pineapples of plenty,
and chastely classic churches. They could form townships, and
counties and ultimately a commonwealth.

So corn provided infant America with a backbone while it
was developing the use of its legs.

America was growing, quite literally, up the cornstalk. Set-
tlers driving their cattle before them, with a sack of corn slung
over the cow's back, and their copper and brass pots and kettles
and bedding on their own, moved by Indian trails into the
unknown. Before them had gone the fur-traders, following the
Indians who retreated sullenly before the advancing tide of
white immigration. It was the fur-traders who spied out and
reported on the fat lands, and who brought back tales of
richer and still richer valleys beyond the blue western hills.
They told of the Genesee Valley, that garden of the Iroquois,
where the corn grew eighteen feet tall, and the corncobs were
eighteen inches long, where there were forty villages with
granaries that held sixty thousand bushels of corn. The power
of the Five Nations was in their corn wealth, as Sir William
Johnson well knew. When the granaries were full the redskins
were harder to manage, costlier to bribe. It was natural the
traders should know of the harvests and act, therefore, in the
capacity of spies. Shrewd business sense took them into the
wild with their blankets, beads, knives, mirrors, colored cloth
and ribbons in the fall of the year when the corn was harvested
and the bucks were in an expansive mood.

It would have been all right if these articles had been all
they took. But the ever greedier merchants demanded more
and more beaver skins to furnish hats for the gentry. And for

America Climbs the Cornstalk 93

their furs the beaver-killers demanded gunpowder and mus-
kets. Everyone knows how the long-barreled rifle grew longer
and longer to call for a higher and higher stack of beaver pelts
in "equal" trade.

Down the Hudson floated the long, sharp-prowed canoes
laden with pelts for Peter Stuyvesant's warehouses in New
Amsterdam. Up the lordly river sailed the sleeps, rounding
Anthony's Nose, tacking across difficult Martilaer's Reach,
bringing supplies from Europe, from the West Indies, from
Virginia to the docks of the patroons. The stout Van Cort-
lands, Verplancks, Beekmans, Van Rensselaers had attained
their titles by establishing a colony of fifty persons on their
grants within six years' time from the granting. They had come
to the New World as business men, traders. But the fatness
of the valley overcame them. With the hunger of those who
had known only the thin farms and cabbage fields of Europe's
lowlands, they seized on the acres, cleared them, planted
orchards, vineyards, corn and wheat fields. Each patroon en-
gaged in trade with the Indians, buying beaver sometimes for
cuttings from apple and peach trees as well as for gee-gaws
and corn. He built his own sloeps, and sailed them to far ports.
He grew his own food and cattle; and he sat on his stoep smok-
ing his long-stemmed pipe of Virginia tobacco in the summer
twilights, watching for the evening star over the Dunderberg,
well content that he was out of a warring, uncertain Europe.

The Hudson River settlers raised wheat for export and corn
for their own use. The mate of the Half Moon had reported of
the September harvest in those parts:

I saw there a house well constructed of oak bark, and a great
quantity of maize or Indian corn and beanes of last year's growth
there lay near the house for the purpose of drying, enough to load
3 ships; beside what was growing in the fields.

Not only were the Dutch jealous of the advance of the
New Englanders. They also saw their fur trade, which was
reported to be worth £10,000 a year, menaced by the Swedes

94 Singing Valleys

whom Peter Minuit planted on the Delaware. Minuit, lately
expelled from New Amsterdam, was wise in colonizing experi-
ence. He chose good crop land for New Sweden, and coun-
seled the settlers not to rely only on the two barrels of wheat
and two of rye and barley which they had brought with them
for seed.

"Plant Indian corn," he warned them. Only by so doing, he
added, could they be assured of sufficient food to carry them
through the first year.

But Minuit died on the return voyage to Sweden, and his
warning was promptly forgotten in the zeal to make quick,
easy profits by trade with the Lenni Lenape and Susquehan-
nocks. The Swedes undersold the Dutch until Governor Kieft
in New Amsterdam complained of a loss of 30,000 florins.
It took several hard years, when political troubles at home
prevented the supply ships from sailing, to make the colonists
realize the soundness of Minuit's policy. The cargo brought
to Fort Christina by the Farna in 1644 would seem to indicate
that the settlement had turned its attention to agriculture. It
included:

3 large saws for Saw Mill

8 grindstones

i pr. stones for Hand Hill

i pr. large stones for Grist Mill

5 anchors

250 copper kettles

300 prs. Shoes

200 prs. Stockings

200 barrels Flour

20 barrels Spanish salt

10 Hogsheads French wine

i Hogshead Brandy

10 gilded flag-pole tops.

Only the last items hint of pompous magnificence on Tini-
cum Island where Governor Johann Printz was building his
mansion surrounded by the finest gardens in the New World.

America Climbs the Cornstalk 95

It may have been from the Swedes that the Lenni Lenape got
their peach trees which amazed William Penn. A letter sent
to Sweden requesting a minister for the colony described the
Delaware colony:

Almost all of us are husbandmen. . . . This country is very rich
and fruitful. It produces, God be praised, all sorts of grain; all that
we plant and so gives us plentiful returns so that we are richly
supplied with meat and drink, and we send out yearly to our
neighbors on this continent and neighboring islands bread, grain,
flour. . . .

In the early days the flour was chiefly of buckwheat, though
Pennsylvania was to become a wheat-growing state and the city
of Baltimore the chief flour port in the East. But to the Eng-
lish who were moving into New Jersey from Long Island and
Connecticut the Swedes taught the uses of buckwheat flour,
and how to combine this with corn meal. What the johnny-
cake was to Rhode Island and the pone to the South, the
griddle cake, started with Indian meal, was to pioneer New
Jersey. A stack of these, very hot and smoking; dark and
slightly sour from the buckwheat, slightly gritty from the yel-
low meal with which the batter is properly started; so thin as
to be lacy on the edges; well buttered, and top-dressed with
strong, dark buckwheat honey is a meal to stay a man through
a long day felling timber in the pine barrens.

With an anxious eye on the Swedes and the Dutch already
in possession of two great rivers leading into the fur country
and close to the French on the St. Lawrence, King Charles
persuaded the first Lord Baltimore to abandon his plan for a
colony south of the Virginia Plantation in favor of one on the
Chesapeake. The Ark and the Dove, with the first contingent
of Catholic settlers, sailed up the Potomac into the wide bay
of St. Mary's River and dropped anchor at the base of a bluff
where stood an Indian village. Leonard Calvert bought the
land for some steel hatchets, hoes and pieces of colored cloth.
By his treaty with the Susquehannocks they were to hold half

96 Singing Valleys

the village and till the cornfields until harvest; then remove,
leaving the whites one-half of the crop. By this wise arrange-
ment the Marylanders had food and to spare. That first au-
tumn they sent a ship loaded with corn to Massachusetts to
trade for salt fish.

The Calverts were noblemen high in favor at the court of
the Stuarts, even despite William Claiborne's efforts to dis-
credit their intentions in America. Lord Baltimore's position
was that of a feudal baron; he paid to his sovereign during
Easter week in token of fealty, two Indian arrows a year. His
own rentals from settlers were collected in corn, capons, fat
pullets, occasionally a buck's forefoot. The society they
founded was simple. It drove its roots deep into the rich soil.
Father Andrew White's journal tells how the English women
learned gratefully from the squaws how to prepare the Indian
corn. And from another observer comes this comment of life
in Maryland: "The Son works as well as the Servant, so that
before they eat their bread they are commonly taught how to
earn it."

All this was quite another mode of life from that which
tobacco prosperity was causing to grow along the rivers of
Virginia. There, as the plantations spread, the work was done
first by indentured white servants. These were divided into
two classes. There were those who had sold themselves into
servitude to pay for their passage to Virginia; and there were
the felons, sent to work out the terms of their sentences and
the "kids," shanghaied by unscrupulous "spirits" about the
docks of London and Liverpool. These kidnappers did a good
business selling bond-servants, male and female, to the ships'
captains to be conveyed to the colonies. But toward the end
of the seventeenth century this trade fell off as the African
slave trade grew. The planters preferred slaves to servants who
would attain their freedom just when they had become most
valuable.

The blacks who survived the voyage and reached the tobacco
and cornfields, increased rapidly in numbers. Negroes were

America Climbs the Cornstalk 97

cheap to own. They lived in ramshackle cabins, wore scraps
of clothing and raised their own food. A peck of corn meal a
week, often ground by their own hands after the day's work
was done, was the usual allowance to a slave. It is probable
that under the utmost pressure a Negro could rarely be
brought to do as much work as an energetic white man. But
the hours of slave labor covered the whole period of daylight;
corn-husking and rice-beating were often done before daylight
and after dark. There were laws forbidding masters to exact
more than fourteen or fifteen hours work in winter, and more
than fifteen or sixteen in summer.

A white bond-servant, who had served his term and paid off
his bond, could take up land, raise a tobacco crop, use the
profits to buy a slave or two, and then capitalize on their
labor to increase his acreage and his profits. These freed
servants were settling the western counties closer and closer
to the strip of forest which separated the plantations from the
Blue Ridge. All these were corn-planters. Corn had been the
chief food of their bondage.

Those poor Christian servants in Virginia and Maryland and
other northerly plantations that have been forced to live wholely
on it, do manifestly prove that it is the most nourishing grain for
a man to subsist on, without any other victuals.*

By the same progress of wealth from corn to slaves to to-
bacco to money, the wooden plantation houses along the
Rappahannock, the York and the James were being supplanted
by brick mansions with curving wings, bedrooms for thirty
guests, ballrooms and lordly chimneys. The number of a man's
chimneys told his rank; two made a major, four a colonel.
There were box gardens and bowling greens, and libraries,
like that of Colonel Byrd of Westover which numbered "near
4000 Volumes in all Languages and Faculties." And in more
than one paneled hall hung the beauties and gallants of the
family painted by Lawrence, Lely, Kneller and Benjamin West.

* Lawson's History of Carolina.

98 Singing Valleys

Tobacco paid the taxes, the bills for presentations at court
and for educations at Oxford and Cambridge. But it was corn
which made tobacco possible. Even in their elegance the
southern planters did not forget this. They ate the hot corn-
breads which their black cooks learned to prepare, with frank
enjoyment of their flavor. The enjoyment was tinged with a
devout thankfulness similar to that of the earnest Hebrews in
eating their ceremonial, unleavened loaves. Both were truly
Passover breads.

By the time the colonies were a century old, a new spirit
was moving the men and women who turned their faces to
America. These were no longer adventurers, with the gold
fever in their veins. Nor were they traders, seeking quick and
exorbitant profits. They no longer talked of America as a
wilderness, but as a continent of amazingly fertile land, land
on which to grow crops. A land in which no man who was
willing to work need go hungry. The First Supply to James-
town had numbered thirty-five "Gentlemen," a great number
of "Gentlemen's gentlemen," six tailors and a perfumer. Surely
a strangely assorted company to combat the wilderness. Now
the ships were bringing a different breed of Englishmen,
wearied of long-drawn quarrels between kings and parliament;
Germans and Moravians seeking civil and religious liberty;
Irish wild geese whose cause and property had been lost on
the Boyne Water; and Scotch partisans of the Stuarts. For
twenty-four years the armies of Great Britain, France, Austria,
Spain and the Netherlands had been marching across Europe
from Dunkerque to Vienna, from Gibraltar to Berlin. Marl-
borough's soldiers had trampled the vineyards along the Rhine
and the potato fields of Belgium; Europe's granary along the
Danube was ravaged. Men who loved the land were sickened
by this turning of it into a dreary battle ground. Standing in
their wrecked farms they looked across the Atlantic at a con-
tinent that promised peace and bread without scarceness.

Young Philip Carteret, first Governor of New Jersey, walked
from the landing stage to the center of his "capital" city of

America Climbs the Cornstalk 99

Elizabethtown which then numbered four families, with a hoe
over his shoulder, in token that he, the King's representative,
was a farmer among farmers. Symbolically, the Seal of the
Twenty-four Proprietors of East Jersey bore the design of a
bundle of English wheat flanked by ears of American corn.
The day of the man with the hoe had come.

VI

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles

IN THE soft brightness of an early morning in the month of
August, 1716, a company of ten periwigged gentlemen
stood on the lawn before Governor Spotswood's country
house near Fredericksburg, Virginia, while twice as many
Negro servants brought up their mounts. Drawn up in the lane
were two companies of Virginia Rangers, lanky youths in buck-
skin breeches, with muskets. Proudly apart, beside a tall cedar,
four Indians, naked save for breech-clouts and wampum neck-
laces, watched the great show of preparations at the house
front with curiosity tinged with disdain.

From the steps Lady Spotswood and several other ladies
called and waved gay farewells as the gentlemen wheeled their
horses down the lane. The Rangers fell into line. After them
came a train of pack animals laden with equipment for a fort-
night's march. Guided by the four Indians, the party moved
out into the highroad. Most travelers leaving that house turned
to the east, taking the uneven country road winding between
worm-fences down to Williamsburg. These turned west. In a
few hours' march they would come to the end of that road.
Thereafter there would be only a trail running into the
primeval forest. Where that trail might take them no one ex-
actly knew. Perhaps, as they answered children who asked
that question, in a squirrel track up a sycamore tree.

To Virginians, Virginia ceased at the "Back Woods/' a
strip of forest fifty miles deep lying between the open Tide-
water valleys and the line of hills that smudged the western
horizon. The "Blue Ridge" Virginians called this, appro-
priately. What lay on the other side of those hills? Would one

TOO

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 101

who climbed them look down on the fabled Sea of Verrazano
which, early map-makers believed, made a deep indentation
into the American continent about the fortieth parallel?

John Smith had wondered about this and itched to know
the answer. He had taken the shallop up the James to the falls
in an effort to reach the river's fall line. But he had never
solved the mystery of the Back Woods, or what lay beyond the
mountains.

For more than a century Englishmen had held a strip of
the Atlantic coast running from the Penobscot to Savannah,
but nowhere more than one hundred and fifty miles wide. Fur
traders brought tales of great freshwater seas to the north, and
of rivers and valleys between ranges of hills in which the In-
dians grew corn of fabulous height and yield. The French,
going by canoe from the St. Lawrence, had discovered the
Ohio and the Mississippi. But how near, or how far, these
rivers were from Virginia, or what sort of land lay between it
and them, no one knew. As for what lay beyond the Missis-
sippi . . .

It might well be, averred several of those periwigged riders
in attendance on Sir Alexander Spotswood, that China was a
great deal closer to Virginia than some of them suspected.

The Governor's expedition up the mountain wall and
through Swift Run Gap, whence he looked down into the
Great Valley, is one of the turning points in American history.
By it this country emerged from infancy and entered upon its
adolescence. No more could Virginia be said to end at the
Back Woods. No more would Virginians be content with the
Tidewater. Eyes that had looked on the Great Valley drowsing
under the August sun, with the silvery Shenandoah threading
the woodlands and the Indians' cornfields, would never again
be satisfied with the known lands.

Beginning in the eastern edge of the Alleghenies in south-
eastern Pennsylvania, the Great Valley runs in a trough
through western Maryland then widens into a gracious vale
between sheltering mountain walls. This traverses the width

iO2 Singing Valleys

of Virginia and drops through a series of water gaps into the
Carolinas.

Americans were not slow to realize and seize on the wealth
of that fertile, limestone soil. The Tidewater planters appro-
priated large tracts on agreement to place settlers there. Gov-
ernor Spotswood carved out a generous slice for himself and
his heirs — one of them was to be the beloved second wife of
Patrick Henry. His first wife brought him three hundred acres
of pine slashes; by his second marriage he entered on miles of
rich valley land. Sir John Randolph took some 118,000 acres
and Lord Fairfax added 6,000,000 acres of the northern end of
the vale to his Virginia holdings.

Fulfilling their agreement, these gentlemen offered acreage
in tracts of various sizes up to one thousand acres. They did
not wait long for takers. There were many small planters in
Virginia, whose lands had been exhausted by the voracious
tobacco, who welcomed a chance to move onto new and richer
upland soil. So the parents of George Rogers Clark left the
Tidewater for the Piedmont. So came the Jeffersons. So came
younger sons and cousins and sons-in-law of the Byrds and
Carters and Lees and Randolphs.

New arrivals from Europe, learning of the Shenandoah,
bought claims, sight unseen, bought pack-horses and cattle in
Williamsburg and moved up the rivers to the hills. Even in
London, word went round that the Plantation in Virginia had
entered on a new era of prosperity. People went "new land
mad" as they called it, and the ships sailing westward were
jammed with emigrants.

Other settlers came from the north. It is said that the first
white man to overlook the Shenandoah after Lord Spots-
wood's Knights of the Golden Horseshoe returned to the
Tidewater, was the Dutch fur trader, John Van Meter. Com-
peting against Colonel Byrd's trade caravans to the Cherokees,
he had gone afoot into the Back Woods country and wandered
through a gap in the hills into the Shenandoah. Van Meter
returned to New York and called his sons together. He told

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 103

them that he had discovered "the best land I ever saw any-
where." He and they sold their stock in trade, bought corn
and cattle and turned south to claim 40,000 acres of the
Great Valley. As the rumor spread, it seemed as though a land
hunger seized on colonists up and down the coast. Men re-
sorted to all manner of ruses to get more and more valley
land. Jacob Stover hit on the plan of baptizing his cattle and
entering their names as prospective settlers in order to widen
his own holdings. And there was a bold young woman who
dressed in male attire and presented herself several times over
to fill applications for tracts in the Great Valley.

The great tide of migration began soon after 1730 and con-
tinued up to the revolutionary period. It seemed as though all
America was on the move. Lord Dunmore wrote home:

... the established authority of any government in America
and the policy of Government at home are both insufficient to
restrain the Americans. . . . They do and will remove as their
avidity and restlessness make them. . . . Wandering about seems
engrafted in their nature. They do not consider that Government
has any right to forbid their taking possession of a vast tract of
new country.

There were Massachusetts men, like the blacksmith Morde-
cai Lincoln who sold his forge and his grist mill near Hing-
ham, where his forbears had settled about 1640, to take up
land in the new colony of New Jersey. Forty years later his
son, "Virginia John/' sold his three hundred acres of Jersey
cornlands to take the trail down into the Great Valley. He
settled himself and his five sons on holdings in and around
Rockingham County. Fifteen years later his son Abraham
followed Daniel Boone over the Wilderness Trace that went
past his farm into Kentucky. There he blazed his name, the
date and an acreage on a tree establishing tomahawk rights
to some seventeen hundred acres. There, hoeing the corn that
would give him "corn title" to the land, he was killed by a
Cherokee's bullet. His sons who saw him fall took up his
musket, his axe and his hoe and held the land. One of those

104 Singing Valleys

sons, Tom Lincoln, taught his son Abraham to hoe corn on
those very lands that were truly a "dark and bloody ground/'
Of that farm on Knob Creek, Lincoln said long afterward:

I remember that old home very well. Our farm was composed
of three fields. It lay in the valley surrounded by high hills and
deep gorges. Sometimes when there came a big rain in the hills
the water would come down through the gorges and spread all
over the farm. The last thing that I remember of doing there was
one Saturday afternoon, the other boys planted the corn in what
we called the big field, it contained seven acres — and I dropped the
pumpkin seed. I dropped two seeds every other hill and every
other row. The next Sunday morning there came a big rain in
the hills; it did not rain a drop in the valley, but the water coming
down through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin seeds
and all clear off the ground.

In 1816 the Lincolns left Kentucky for Indiana. Folks were
moving into the Ohio Valley and into lands sloping to it, as
seventy years earlier they had pushed into the Great Valley.
Once again the words "new land" had gone forth. Once again
there was the promise of taller corn at the end of a westward
trail. Fifteen years the Lincolns stayed in the cabin on Little
Pigeon Creek while Abraham grew to a lanky manhood. All
that time other pioneers were passing their farm going farther
west, into Illinois and into the wilderness around the head-
waters of the Missouri.

"They say the land out there's the richest there is in this
country. . . . They say out there you can't keep the corn
from growing twenty feet high. . . . Here folks and cattle
have the milk-sick. But out there ..."

Torn Lincoln couldn't stand it any longer. Hadn't the
Lincolns always followed that call to new and richer cornlands?
So they bundled the household goods on a wagon, Abraham
climbed atop and took the reins. He pulled his wagon into
line with a caravan heading for Illinois. Where was Illinois?
None of them knew, exactly. It was on ahead, that was enough.
And it was new land, and rich for corn.

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 105

The pilgrimage which began in a little English village in
the first half of the seventeenth century, which went from
there to Massachusetts, to New Jersey, to Virginia, to Ken-
tucky, to Indiana, went on to the new country nearer to the
Mississippi. The place they chose to stop there was Sangamon,
meaning "the land where there is plenty to eat/'

The saga of the Lincolns was repeated by scores of other
families in that restless eighteenth century. All these took
advantage of the unwritten law of the frontier which per-
mitted a man to blaze his name, the date and a number of
acres on a tree in the wilderness establishing thereby a "toma-
hawk right" to the land. When he had cleared a piece and
sown a crop on it, he held "corn title." There was not a court
in the colonies that would have decided against the legality
of such a claim.

Not only were Americans of several generations on the
move, the colonies were drawing an increasing immigration
from Europe. Most of these came to Penn's Quaker Colony.
There were Germans and Moravians from the Palatinate, and
Presbyterians from the plantations of Scotch lowlanders whom
the Stuarts had encouraged to remove to northern Ireland.
These two racial streams poured into Philadelphia and took
the road west. A traveler of the time describes meeting them
on the trails in the early Spring, while the snow still lingered
on the eastern slopes.

A man driving a cow or two; perhaps leading a pig by a
"sugan" of twisted straw, as he had gone many times to the
fair in Antrim. . . . Three packhorses moving slowly under
unwieldy loads: on the first a woman nursing a baby under her
fawny shawl, and with her cooking pots tied to her saddle; on
the second a sack of corn and the farm tools; on the third,
wooden creels, one packed with bedding and clothing and in
the other, two small children, like pigeons in a crate . . .

For forty years and more the tide of Americans, Germans,

106 Singing Valleys

Moravians and Ulster folk who were to cut their mark deep
into the whole Back Woods region, flowed on, drawn by the
promise of new land. A thousand acres of fertile soil to a
family. The canny Scots knew that for a bargain.

So they took the trail from Pennsylvania into the Cumber-
land Valley. There some turned west over Pack-Horse Ford,
near Shepherds town. The first white settler in West Virginia
was Morgan Morgan who built his log house at Mill Creek in
the present Berkeley County. There he lived like a Gaelic
chief, taking his tribute in corn from the sacks later comers
brought to his mill to be ground, and settling his children and
grandchildren in the coves of the hills for miles around.
Scotch-Irish fur traders had crossed over Braddock's Road and
reached the Ohio years before the French and Indian wars.
They had paddled down the river bargaining with the red-
skins, and amazed at the country that unrolled richly before
them as they rounded each river bend. They had felt out the
valleys of the Youghiogheny and the Kanawha; they had
started a town of their own at the meeting of the waters of
the Allegheny and the Monongahela.

Maine and Massachusetts thought of the expansion of the
colonies in terms of ships, trade with Surinam and China. But
the men of the middle colonies knew that the country must
grow westward, away from the coast, away from Europe. This
was possible because every trader brought back word of a
plenitude of wild game and fish, and of Indian villages sur-
rounded by liberal cornfields. Where the corn flourished
Americans could live. Benjamin Franklin wrote enthusias-
tically of planting two new colonies between the Ohio and
Lake Erie. He lamented that the glory of founding settlements
in that rich country would, in all probability, not fall to him.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Ohio Company was formed and
purchased from the Crown two hundred million acres along
the river between the Monongahela and the Kaskaskia.

Not all the new settlers and restless ones turned to the

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 107

Ohio country. The majority kept on southward until they
entered the gracious vale of the Shenandoah. It was the first
time the movement of white settlers had been north and south,
not from east to west. So Joist Kite, with fifteen families,
chopped a way from York, Pennsylvania, to Winchester. So
Daniel Boone's father and his eighteen-year-old son went from
their farm on the Schuylkill down the Great Valley into back-
woods Virginia. So the Lincolns went. There, in the Valley,
they swung their axes and cut logs for cabins, roofing these
with bark or slabs of limestone. There they girdled trees and
burned underbrush to clear fields for their first crop of corn.
The wood ashes further enriched the soil. Dr. John Mitchell,
traveling in Virginia in 1767, commented, "the woodlands are
to a planter in North America what a dunghill is to a farmer
in Britain." And with the shoulder blade of a deer they hoed
their corn hills, as the Iroquois did.

These men entered the Valley arrogantly. When demanded
to tell by what right they squatted, they replied, "It was
against the laws of God and nature that so much good land
should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to work on
and to raise bread."

These Scotch-Irish pioneers left a deeper mark on the
Valley than did the noble lords Spotswood, Randolph and
Fairfax. Throughout a century they and their descendants
gradually overspread the whole Appalachian highlands. Not
content with the Virginia Back Woods, they ran down into
the Carolina Piedmont where Carolina offered land at cheaper
rates than any in Virginia. They pushed southwestward over
the Warriors Path, later to be known as the Wilderness Road,
into the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky.

Their faith was in the new land. Richard Henderson em-
ployed Boone to map Transylvania beyond the mountains.
He counted on Boone, who had the Indians' respect, to make
the bargain he knew he, himself, could not make. For twenty
million acres they paid the Cherokees £10,000 in blankets,

io8 Singing Valleys

gee-gaws and firearms. It was thought an exorbitantly generous
price at the time. And so it was, compared to what Calvert
gave for Maryland, or Peter Minuit paid for Manhattan
Island. But Henderson believed that land which would grow
corn and tobacco that could be floated down the Mississippi
to be sold in New Orleans was worth that price ten times over.
History proved he was right.

James Robertson and John Sevier who pushed the frontier
on to the Watauga River in Tennessee were mountain-bred
men. They, too, dreamed of an agricultural colony there and
cleared lands for corn on all sides of their blockhouse. All the
backwoodsmen were more interested in blazing new trails west-
ward to new farming lands than in riding the traveled roads
eastward to the sea. In the highlands they created a new type
of American, distinct from the New Englander and from the
Tidewater planter. This was the Backwoodsman; the tall, lank,
quiet man in buckskins and coonskin cap; the first American
to cut his ties with Europe completely; the first American to
look westward for tomorrow.

These men measured their boyish growth against a hoe
handle in their fathers' cornfields. They had put in hours at
the tin gritter, grating corn from the cobs. They were raised
on corn dodgers, with wheat cakes to mark Sundays on the
family calendar. They had made pones and baked them in the
ashes of campfires on lonely trails. They had hastened their
steps coming home at dusk, axe on shoulder, knowing there
would be Brunswick stew and hot cracklin' bread waiting for
them on the hearth. Most of them had made corn whiskey in
stills patterned after those stewing in every bog in Ireland.
The glass bottles molded like miniature log cabins in honor
of William Henry Harrison during the campaign of 1840
were filled with "corn" to remind Whig voters that their
candidate represented the men and the ideals of the Back
Woods. The log cabin was not American, but Swedish. The
first of these were built by Peter Minuit's Swedes on the Dela-
ware. But the vigor of the backwoodsmen who adopted this

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 109

form of house made it the universal symbol of early American
life.

Sturdy of body and tersely picturesque of speech, these
men poured into the American language a striking metaphor,
Gaelic in its penetration to essentials, but making use of
homely and roadside terms, as the frontiersman utilizes for his
need whatever lies close to hand. Lincoln's tongue was taught
them. The oratory of Clay and Calhoun sprang from the
same mountain source. From it, too, flowed the powerful
clarity of John Marshall's mind.

All these men felt the pulse of the country beating under
the ground they hoed. With corn, and with the strength and
energy it gave to them, they opened the west. Not only that,
but they forced the west on a reluctant east. New England
and Philadelphia could protest spending fifteen millions of
dollars for Louisiana; the backwoodsmen had delivered their
ultimatum: make the Mississippi an American road for Ameri-
can tobacco, corn, pork, lard and lumber to go to an American
market, or we will secede. "We will take on Spain with one
hand, and lick the eastern states with the other."

Once over the mountains these backwoodsmen spread along
the river valleys of the midwest. Strengthened by the fatness
of that land they influenced political affairs in this country for
several generations. Through the first half of the last century
one heard in Congress the language of the American Back
Woods. The Adams family might shrink from its colloquial-
ism; but what Yankee satirist has outdone Charles Sumner's
retort to his detractors: "These gentlemen criticize me for lack
of that in which the billy-goat is their equal, and the wild ass
their superior."

The spirit of the backwoodsmen was symbolized in our
time by Sergeant Alvin Yorke whose capture, single-handed,
of 132 German prisoners, was characterized by Marshal Foch
as "the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of
all the armies of Europe." Alvin Yorke was born in a cabin
made out of a corn crib. When his parents married, they

no Singing Valleys

chinked the holes in the crib with clay, put in a puncheon
floor, cut a window, added a chimney and set up housekeeping.

One great service to the colonies rendered by these back-
woodsmen cannot be overestimated. During the French and
Indian wars they formed a line of defense stretching from
Pittsburgh down the mountains to Kentucky. The Tidewater
planters, who had offered tracts of valley land at low rates,
were not unaware of the possibility of such a service being
needed.

France had been pushing down the Mississippi from the
Great Lakes while at the same time she extended her colonies
up the river from New Orleans. John Law's scheme for re-
plenishing France's national treasury had provided Europe
with its greatest bull market since the tulip craze. All sorts of
people, wig-makers and cooks, small-town notaries and army
captains, gambled in Louisiana shares on the basis of John
Law's advertisements that the Mississippi Valley offered a
wealth of food and gold to be made from foodstuffs. Rumors
of the prodigious yield of the Louisiana maize ran through
France. It was the old story of the Seven Cities of Cibola all
over again.

Le Page du Pratz, who came to Louisiana in 1710 before
the bubble burst, tells of a shipload of eight hundred eager
Frenchmen, drawn by the promise of fertile land, arriving in
New Orleans and staring in consternation at the tangled forests
of liveoaks, the alligator swamps and the painted Cherokees.
Meanwhile, slave ships brought cargoes of blacks from the
Congo to work in the rice fields and indigo plantations. The
Frenchmen soon found a value for the small, white "homony
corn," which ripened quickly and gave two crops a year. The
Negroes grinned at sight of it. Corn was the first familiar thing
the poor creatures found in the land of their bondage. Their
tribes had grown it in West Africa since the Portuguese first
took it there in the early sixteenth century. They pounded the
kernels in a mortar to a paste which they called "cooscoosh."

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 111

Many a disheartened Frenchman dined on cooscoosh moist-
ened with opossum broth and seasoned with salt and fines
herbes, and counted this the least of his troubles in Louisiana.

Later the French laid hold of the rich lands along the
Wabash and Kaskaskia, the American Bottom. In a strip
along the Mississippi three to seven miles wide, and about one
hundred miles long they planted orchards of fruit trees, wheat
and corn. They floated tons of flour, bacon, corned pork, hams
from bears and hogs, and myrtle wax down to New Orleans
on flat-boats, or in pirogues made of hollowed-out trees. The
trip down-river took a fortnight, what with keeping the boat
from running onto floating roots and shoals. From Indian
villages along the route the savages stared at the voyagers.
Often arrows, later musket balls, shot from a thicket on the
shore. Two weeks to float down to the Gulf; three months to
row the boat up-river, even with twenty men at the oars. No
wonder the French thought of the Illinois country as a granary
for Louisiana, but with no future possibilities of its own. The
English concurred in this. "The trade will go with the stream,"
General Gage reported to Lord Shelburne in 1767.

The country between the fall line and the Mississippi was a
battleground between settlers and Indians for a century. The
Shawnee chief Keigh-tugh-qua — the name means "Young
Blade of the Maize" — had taken toll of the advancing settle-
ments before the battle at Point Pleasant after which "Corn-
stalk" offered the colonists lasting peace. He and his Shawnees
retired to the plains of the Scioto. In 1777, true to his word,
Cornstalk appeared at the colonists' forts with warning that
the British were urging the Shawnees to attack the American
settlements. He gave himself and his son as hostages. He paid
for his honor with both their lives when the killing of a white
man by an Indian drove the settlers to revenge.

With first the French and later the British inciting the
Indians of the Mississippi Valley against the colonists, the
backwoodsmen in the mountains and along the river valleys
assumed an importance to the Tidewater planters. How many

112 Singing Valleys

families of them were wiped out in those years of stealthy,
bloody raids no one will ever know. Later comers into the
mountains often found tracts of second growth timber amid
the virgin forest growth, and in the center of these the charred
ruins of a cabin. Wild grape vines overhung the standing stone
chimney; a vixen and her cubs curled in the deserted oven.

But even in those blood-stained years, the movement west-
ward over the mountains went on. The road which ran down
through the Great Valley had, apparently, no ending. Men
slipped off clerks' stools, from behind counters and school-
masters' desks to take the road to the open. Americans wanted
land. They wanted the feel of it under their feet; and they
wanted that land to be their own. Their corn-titles gave them
the freedom of a self-sufficient individualism. That, they dimly
felt, was what it meant to be American.

This feeling which runs through the whole body of Ameri-
can thought derives directly from the American corn. Because
he had a grain which yielded so bountifully that a small,
transportable quantity would provide a crop for a man, his
family and his cattle, a grain which one man working single-
handed, or even a woman alone, could sow, dress, harvest and
mill, a grain which throve on new land in which the tree
stumps still stood, the men of the American frontier were free
of the bondage to the soil as wheat-, rye- and barley-growers
could never be. The corn-grower had no need of neighbors to
help him cradle and thresh. His crop did not compel him to
harvest it all at a particular moment, under threat of losing it.
He was not even dependent on millstones and miller. He
could go forth into the wilderness alone, with his sack of seed
corn, secure in the knowledge that he would not starve.

This sense of security and independence from others sepa-
rates the American from the European. Even though the
intense industrialization of this country during the last half-
century has undermined our sense of inner freedom while fill-
ing our hands with sewing machines, electric devices and auto-

Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 113

mobiles, all advertised to create freedom for us, the American
unconscious is less burdened with fear than is the unconscious
of any other nation of people. Americans of many generations
on the land carry with them and act from a deep if uncon-
scious conviction that no matter what goes on in Washington,
in Wall Street or in Hollywood, no matter what happens to
the banks, the railroad and the utilities, so long as the land
remains, they will manage to make out, in one way or another.
Though they do not put this in so many words, they are pin-
ning their faith to the cornstalk.

VII

The Mississippi Flows Through
Corn Land

IN MASSACHUSETTS, Samuel Adams' pen scratched on,
covering sheet after sheet of paper. Letters, letters, letters.
. . . "Support the Non-Importation Act. . . ." "Elect a Com-
mittee of Safety and Inspection. . . ."

On the wharves of Boston, Salem and Newport, shipowners
and captains gathered in knots and cursed the British revenue
officers. The rum, molasses and slave trade brought £40,000
annually into Newport. Yet Britain threatened this by duties
on sugar and molasses. In the West Indies the planters' needs
kept British workmen constantly employed. It was estimated
that for every Englishman in the sugar islands, four pairs of
hands in Great Britain labored, wove and spun. But the
islands depended on the American colonies for their food sup-
plies. Without American flour, pork, lard, dairy products and
oxen for the sugar plantations, the whites there would starve.
In the face of this, a British tax on island goods imported into
the American colonies, and a cordon of British revenue men
armed with writs to enter warehouses, stores and private cellars
in search of smuggled goods were affronts not lightly to be
borne.

On the steps of county courthouses and crossroads stores in
Virginia, tobacco growers gathered to grumble about prices
and the restrictions of the Navigation Act.

Taxes . . . taxes . . . taxes . . .

Was the Government in league with Big Business in the
form of the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Com-

114

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 115

pany, and against its own citizens, that it handed over the tea
trade to one, and for the benefit of the other decreed that
British colonists should not spread westward beyond the Back
Woods and the rivers' fall line? Did Parliament think to keep
the good land beyond the Alleghenies and running to the
French frontier on the Mississippi for a fur preserve, pro-
hibiting American farmers from settling on it? And what did
King George mean by granting to Quebec the territory from
Lake Erie to the Ohio River?

Meetings in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York; meetings
in Williamsburg and Richmond. Patrick Henry thumping his
clenched fist on the railing of the church pew, "If this be
treason . . ." Farmer George Washington riding over to
Gunston Hall to talk gravely with his friend and fellow
farmer, George Mason: "Think you, sir, it will come to war?"

Israel Putnam, plowing his Connecticut cornfield with a
musket slung from his shoulder, stopping in the furrow at
sound of a horse's galloping hooves on the hard road beyond
the stone wall: 'The British are marching on Boston. The
militia is called out. Follow as fast as you can."

Old Put, unharnessing the horse, leaving his plow there in
the field to follow that call to Bunker Hill and a major-
generalship.

And in Dedham, Massachusetts, Mary Draper heating the
deep ovens in her kitchen chimney; kneading dough in a great
wooden trough — two parts corn, one part wheat and rye flours
— shaping the loaves and laying them carefully on the hot
bricks. And while the sweet smell of their baking filled the
house, standing at the kitchen door, shading her eyes to look
down the road that wound to Concord and Lexington.

Soon there would be farmers coming back along that road,
farmers with blood-stained scythes and with muskets in place
of the hay-rakes they threw down when the call for the militia
came. And Mary Draper, standing at her gate, cutting off gen-
erous slices of fresh-baked bread:

"Here, eat this. You're hungry, ain't you? You can't fight the

n6 Singing Valleys

red-coats if you're hungry. There's cider in that jug. Drink it
down, man/' Running back to the kitchen to mix and knead
and bake more loaves. And still more.

Not that the Revolution was popular. It wasn't. Even the
Continental Congress found it impossible to be of one mind
about it. According to John Adams, "Every important step
was opposed, and carried by bare majorities." In the discussion
the delegates from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Delaware and South Carolina stood against revo-
lution. Finally, all but the New York representatives yielded,
and the resolution was passed.

The Yankee merchants and mechanics were for the war.
So were the Southern planters, and the mountain men who
knew that the valleys of the Yadkin, Ohio, Kentucky and
Wabash Rivers were good for corn. Was all that territory to
be kept a wilderness in order to supply King George and his
Whig ministers with beaver hats? But the ordinary run of
country people were slow to interest in the struggle. The tracts
of a Tory propagandist who signed himself A. W. Farmer were
widely circulated and widely commented on. Their obvious
intention was to make the farmers in the middle colonies, al-
ready disinclined to war, mistrust the policies of the Com-
mittee of Sixty. In Hall's New York Journal, under date of
Thursday, December 22, 1774, appears a letter:

To the City and Country Inhabitants of New York, Friends and
Fellow Mortals,

The division between Britain and her colonies is very alarming,
but what I think would be more alarming, is a division between
the inhabitants of the colonies, the effect of which we have from
holy writ, that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

I have seen a pamphlet published by Mr. Rivington entitled the
Country Farmer which seems to be calculated to throw all into
confusion, and to no other end; and artfully to gain his point as
a Farmer, he addresses himself to the Farmers and their wives; he
tells the latter they cannot treat a neighbor with a dish of tea;
and that will be a dreadful thing indeed. To the former he saith

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 117

their produce will rot on their hands and they cannot pay their
weaver, etc.

Being a Weaver myself, and tho they be generally poor, still
they are as useful a set of men as any in the world, and so will re-
main as long as from the King to the peasant all are born naked,
I therefore would beg leave to say a word in answer to our pre-
tended Farmer, and make no doubt but the lowness of stile I shall
speak in will be excused when it is considered that a man may be
a profound weaver, and no grammarian. . . .

My first answer to our Farmer is that we weavers, and I believe
I may say most of the other trades too, cannot live without meat,
bread and clothing, all of which I shall gladly take in exchange
for my labour. . . ."

Our "profound Weaver" was not the only tradesman who
found it no hardship to return to the "country pay" of earlier
colonial days. As the war dragged on, a reappraisal of values
took place in which the cities lost caste. Land which would
produce food became more desirable than a fine house on
Broadway or on Boston Common. There was an exodus from
New York into the country. All through the northern colonies
men who had begun to think of leaving the farms for work
in the new factories gave up the idea, and went back to their
plows. Food was food. Also it had value in barter, if money
was tight. And with the quartermasters of two armies buying
rations there was no need to worry about markets for corn,
potatoes or pork. The Pennsylvania farmers were selling pro-
duce at good prices to the British in Philadelphia while Wash-
ington and his men were starving at Valley Forge.

The continuous difficulty which Washington and his gen-
erals found themselves in, keeping a force of thirty to forty
thousand privates under arms, was not due to lack of courage
on the part of the soldiery. It had its roots in the intense
sectionalism which made men unable to see the conflict as
anything more than a series of local skirmishes. When the
zone of fighting moved from one colony to another, many in
the ranks saw no necessity for pursuing the enemy beyond

n8 Singing Valleys

their own territorial boundaries. They preferred to go home
and till their fields. "Summer soldiers/' Tom Paine called
them bitterly, as he poulticed his frostbitten feet with snow
at Valley Forge. One reason for this was that the colonists
enlisted men for short periods of service, with land bounties
for those terms. After Trenton, Washington offered his men
ten dollars apiece if they would stay with him a month longer.
The Congress advertised a bounty of fifty acres to every
deserter from the British Army. Privates in the continental
ranks who stayed under arms till the peace were to receive a
bonus of one hundred acres. Colonels were offered one thou-
sand acres. Fully one-seventh of the public land was so settled.
At the close of the Revolution New England was feeling
acutely the need for more, and more fertile, soil. A newspaper
article published in 1787 describes the plight of the New Eng-
land farmer who had

one miserable team, a paltry plow, three acres of Indian corn,
as many acres of half-starved English grain from a half-cultivated
soil. With a spot of potatoes, and a yard or two of turnips these
complete the round of his tillage.

In 1790 New York State had no settlements west of the
Hudson Valley. But the men of Massachusetts and New
Hampshire who had followed Sullivan on his raid on the Six
Nations brought home tales of miles of cornfields standing
eighteen feet high, and of tons of garnered grain to which
they had set the torch. One soldier returned to Plymouth with
a pocketful of corn of a variety strange to the white farmers.
The seed yielded roasting ears with larger, fuller and sweeter
grains than those of the immature cobs which heretofore had
satisfied Americans as a summer vegetable. This was the first
sweet corn. Not inappropriately, it entered our gardens by way
of the very fields which Squanto showed the Pilgrims how to
sow and dress.

New Englanders cut the first road over the Berkshires into
York State by which to move from their depleted farms onto

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 119

the rich, rockless land of the Mohawk and Genesee Valleys.

Even the terrible winter of 1788-89 when corn sold in
Albany at prices beyond what anyone had known, when two
hundred families living near James Fenimore Cooper's father
had no bread, when the poor tore the wild leeks from the fields
and ate them, did not discourage the land-seekers. York State
had another famine, in the Freezing Year, five years later.
Then two young men in Albany died of doing what many are
reported to have done, pulling the green, growing rye from
the fields to fill their empty bellies. Still people could not be-
lieve the Genesee Valley could return anything but plenty.

But when the Freezing Year of 1816, which brought a frost
every month, killed the harvest, the cry went up:

It's killed the potatoes, the wheat in milk,
Now it's frozen the corn in the silk.
Damn the Genesee Country/

Men packed up their tools and household goods, climbed
into wagons and moved farther west into the Ohio country
which Franklin had longed to see colonized.

It is significant that even the most disappointed did not turn
back to the humming little mill towns. They went on seeking
kinder climate and more and more generous soil. In his his-
toric letters to Arthur Young, Washington attributes his coun-
trymen's zest for land and the consequent rise in land values
to confidence in the American form of government, and to
faith in the country's future and permanent prosperity.

Land promoters were everywhere with scores of schemes.
Tench Coxe, of Philadelphia, who served as Assistant Secre-
tary of the Treasury in 1792, planned a settlement on the upper
waters of the Susquehanna, either in York State or Pennsyl-
vania. The company advertised rich farmland at fifteen dollars
an acre, lying along the river, which offered a route to the Balti-
more flour market.

Rufus Putnam, cousin to "Old Put," who had scandalized
the Bostonians by leading his troops through their city in shirt

12O Singing Valleys

sleeves, and a hat sunburned by long service in the cornfield,
and the Reverend Manesseh Cutler, like Moses and Aaron,
prepared to lead their brethren out of bondage to a stony soil
into a land of fruitful promise along the Ohio.

Interest in the Ohio Valley was stirring in the country for
twenty years before the outbreak of the Revolution. Washing-
ton came back from his campaign against the French forts to
report the amazing fertility of the lands beyond the moun-
tains. A company was organized to explore the river valleys
and start settlements. Christopher Gist, who had led Wash-
ington down the Ohio, was directed to locate a large tract of
fertile land. He paddled down the Ohio to the Kentucky blue-
grass country. Then, leaving his canoe, he struck eastward
through central Kentucky, over the mountains into Giles
County, Virginia, and down Lucky Creek. From farm to farm
he went, stopping in country stores and at courthouses, spread-
ing the news of his find. The seven years of warfare had only
held back for a brief space the inevitable movement westward.

The one hundred million acres of the Western Reserve
drew some of the most vigorous blood from New England's
veins. There is scarcely a colonial family that was not repre-
sented on the Ohio frontier. Many who had served in the
Revolution took land grants in lieu of pay. The Mound
Cemetery at Marietta, which was the first capital of Ohio,
holds the bodies of more Revolutionary officers than any other
acre of soil in the nation. On the headstones one reads the
New England names of Putnams, Danas, Cushings, Shaws,
Cutlers, Nyes, Buells.

All these crossed the Alleghenies to plant corn.

A generation earlier the young men of those families sought
their fortunes on the sea. In New England, farming meant
continuous hard work for a mere frugal existence. It meant
unequal chances against poor soil, drought, frost and blizzards.
There it had become the custom for the family numskull to
remain on the farm while his heartier brothers, who had more
of that prized New England quality of gumption, turned for

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 121

success to the sea. To New England youth the sea was the
frontier. It offered a man the hazards and the rewards of des-
perate adventure.

But in the quarter-century since Washington had floated
down the Ohio from Pittsburgh and had seen the finest corn-
growing land anywhere in the colonies, a new frontier had been
opened to the youth of New England; as Kentucky and Ten-
nessee held out adventure and fortune to the young men from
the southern counties.

Several hundred acres on the Muskingum River put into
corn and groves of sugar maples would make a man rich in a
few years. Corn and maple sugar could be rafted down to New
Orleans and sold for cash with which to buy more acres from
the Ohio Land Company. Farther west stretched a wilderness
where furs could be traded for and timber could be cut. And
always there was the mighty river running down to the Gulf
where the ships waited to buy cargoes to sell again all over
the world.

Out in that new country land meant wealth; as in Boston
and Newburyport ships meant wealth. And wealth, wherever
a man had it, was power.

So the young men of New England turned away from the
mother and lover who had called their fathers and grandsires,
to a new frontier in the west.

It would seem that there is something in the American
temperament which ever and again makes the youth of this
continent seek contact with the frontier. Always that contact
has had the effect of quickening the American spirit. The
movement away from the coasts into the Great Valley re-
lighted something in our national thought which was then in
danger of growing dim. The great revolutionary struggle for
the free expression of a national consciousness which lasted
from 1775 until the close of the second war with England
was the direct result of that contact with the frontier. Just so
the migration of great numbers of Americans into the Ohio

122 Singing Valleys

and Mississippi Valleys brought to birth the America which
took sides passionately for and against the principles of
Lincoln.

In this sense corn has fed all our great national movements,
as corn had always been the food of the frontier. Exactly
what is the urge which has drawn Americans, time and again,
from the comfortable homes achieved by a previous genera-
tion to rude living on the edge of the great plains or the
desert? Even in this day of oil-burning furnaces, glass-enclosed
automobiles and television sets, that urge stirs in the blood of
thousands of Americans making them ill at ease in our indus-
trialized cities. These are men whose bodies are too big and
too restless to sit behind office desks. Figures bewilder them;
they have not cash-register minds. They are not challenged
by competition with other men. If their neighbor makes a
million in Amalgamated Amalgam, this does not affect their
egos to the point of driving them to make two millions in
Incorporated Inks. These are frontiersmen, though they may
have degrees from Harvard, Princeton or Yale. They are
frontiersmen from whom the American frontier which was
first the sea, then the valleys of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and
later the Great Plains, has retreated beyond hope of their find-
ing it. They are the Sons of the Corn, though now alienated
from their Mother. True to the archetypal pattern of the son,
they rebel against the mother only to seek her again in another
guise.

So America which rushed to civilize its frontier has been
driven to replace it with the Country Club, the Dude Ranch,
the Salmon Camp and Duck Shooting Preserve. On these im-
provised frontiers the Sons of the Corn make fumbling efforts
to return to the Mother.

It seems apparent that much of the restlessness and inepti-
tude of present-day American life springs from this body of
Americans who are born to and feel the urge toward a frontier
which is now non-existent. They are in the sorry plight of the

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 123

frog which continues to kick spasmodically for some time after
its legs have been amputated.

The first United States census, taken in 1790, numbered a
population of approximately four millions. Two hundred thou-
sand of these were living west of the Alleghenies. Louisville
had fifty to sixty houses and three hundred whites. Ten years
previous, Virginia had encouraged settlers in Kentucky by
offering four hundred acres and an additional one thousand
acres by pre-emption to everyone who would plant corn. Set-
tlers were lured from New Jersey and Pennsylvania by reports
of the richness of Kentucky soil which would grow turnips so
sweet and juicy as to make a man forget the pears in the
orchards along the Delaware. Pittsburgh was a city of log
houses where money was scarce. Nails, lumber, axes, calico and
flat-boats were paid for in wheat flour, corn, pork and lard.
But it had a newspaper, the first to be published west of the
Alleghenies, and a bustling river-front where broad-horns and
flatboats were built and launched to carry passengers and
cargoes down the river. Philadelphia firms had as much as
$150,000 invested in river boats. They kept fleets of Cones toga
wagons busy carrying goods over the mountains to the com-
pany warehouses in Pittsburgh. One of these firms, Baynton,
Wharton and Morgan, employed as many as three hundred
and fifty boatmen. Many a young man — Stephen Girard was
one — got his start in life as a river-way peddler.

When navigation opened in the spring of 1786, Pittsburgh
was jammed with families waiting places on the boats to the
new corn-growing lands downstream. Within forty days after
the ice broke, more than one thousand persons with their
household goods, cattle and tools had started down the river.
Another seventeen thousand were to follow before ice blocked
the rivers again.

The flatboats were weighted down to the water line with as
motley a collection of moveables as any caravan ever carried.
There were pineapple-topped four-posters too precious to be

124 Singing Valleys

left behind in Litchfield. Two generations had been born,
wedded and had died in those beds. There were chests of
drawers of Santo Domingo mahogany or of New England
maple, carefully swathed in blue homespuns and patchwork
quilts. There were Spode and Wedgewood and Lowestoft tea
sets packed in rush baskets, and never left out of a woman's
hands. Great Grandfather Griswold of Old Lyme had brought
that tea set home in the May Queen to Great Grandmother.
Putting it into her hands he had had to tell her that her
youngest son Recompense had been washed overboard in a
gale off Tenerife. There was little that was new in those boat-
loads. Even the axes and the mold-board plows had done
service on Massachusetts and Connecticut and York State
farms. The oxen, the cows, the squealing pigs made the over-
land journey with the family. Usually it was one family alone,
but sometimes those who had been neighbors "back east''
pledged each other to stake out lands that adjoined. "Weath-
ersfield folks ought to stick together." So a group of families
from New Jersey settled Cincinnati.

Spring and summer, the tide flowed on, hopeful, deter-
mined. Men thrust their hands wrist deep into the sacks of
corn and shook the golden kernels in their palms, like dice.
"There's the land, ready and waiting. And here we are, and
here's the corn to plant our first crop."

By 1803, Ohio could count the sixty thousand settlers
needed to make her an independent state. Even at that, more
than one-third of her territory was a waiting wilderness.

In the Scioto Valley and along the Muskingum River, the
corn grew taller than anyone had ever seen it west of the
Alleghenies. Even the records of the Genesee country were
outdistanced. "My uncle, Rufus Dana, stood six feet three
and a half. He rode his horse down the alleys between the
corn rows and stood up in the stirrups and held his riding crop
as high as he could reach. But he couldn't touch the topmost
tassel."

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 125

The women who had made the first stage of the journey
west in the canvas-topped wagons, and the second in peri-
lously loaded flatboats, following the ice down the river,
stood at their doors and looked over the waves of rustling green
leaves, crackling in the bright sunshine. "Leastways, we won't
starve."

Starvation was the thought furthest from the minds of the
men who drove their plows across the rolling fields and felt
the deep wealth of that rockless soil. There was gold in those
furrows. Corn was wealth. Corn fattened cattle for the drovers
who were coming now out to this west country to buy beef,
as they had used to go down to the southern cow pens. Cities
like Philadelphia and New York had to have beef. Corn fat-
tened hogs. Corn made bacon, pork and lard. In the smoke-
houses, fires of hickory wood turned the fresh-killed meat to
sweet-smelling rosy hams. The cities in the East had to have .
these. So did the planters in the West Indies. All these were
salable in New Orleans.

Shrewdly, those transplanted Yankees knew that if they
made a good product for which there was a steady market, the
buyers would come for it. They were only a generation in
advance of Emerson's philosophy concerning the better mouse-
trap.

Those who did not come by road came by the river. Every
day the traders' boats went by; flat, broad arks, familiar sights
on the Susquehanna and the Delaware. Seventy-five to one
hundred feet long and from fifteen to twenty feet wide, these
were steered by sweeps which required the combined strength
of six men. They put in at the docks of the valley farms and
bartered for produce to carry to New Orleans. There were keel-
boats that drew two feet of water, and consequently made
fewer steps. There were store-boats that brought general mer-
chandise to sell to the farmers.

At sound of the warning conch shell blown from the deck,
the women would leave their chores to run down to the land-
ing to see if the flag floating from the oncoming prow was red

126 Singing Valleys

or yellow. Yellow meant calicoes and linsey-woolsey, lute-
strings and broadcloth. Red meant salt and molasses, tea,
spices. It meant Sandwich glass and Britannia-ware teapots
with the familiar stamp, "New Britain, Conn." on the under-
sides.

All these could be bought for corn, bacon, pork or lard, or
for Ohio maple sugar and syrup.

Many of the boats had stills aboard and sold Pennsylvania
rye whiskey at a quarter a quart.

"Say the word, farmer. If ye hain't got two bits, buy your
rye with corn. Corn'll sell in N'Orleans."

Everything, apparently, would sell in New Orleans. Spain
had signed an agreement granting Americans the right to clear
their produce through that port free. The Mississippi leading
from the farms to this market port was the most important
road in the country. Benjamin Franklin had foreseen this. Give
up our rights to the Mississippi and the entry to the Gulf?
"I would as soon think of selling my neighbor my front door."
Ships from New England waited in New Orleans for cargoes
of produce to take to the cities on the Atlantic seaboard and
to the West Indies. The largest part of the products, carried
by American ships about the world, was agricultural.

"What's it like, down to N'Orleans?" the women asked
curiously.

And the river boatmen told of Spanish fiestas and carnival
processions, of wide-galleried plantation houses, of Creole
beauties languishing on their balconies, of liveoaks trailing
gray Spanish moss and crepe myrtles, and orange and lemon
trees in flower.

'That's what N'Orleans is like, Ma'am."

To the farmers they spoke otherwise: "They say down-river
the French are dickerin' to take back N'Orleans. Things ain't
the same down there. You can't trust the Spanish varmints.
Look at how they tried to get their hands on Kaintuck. Re-
member what Gordoqui said? 'As long as Kaintuck's in the
Union, we won't give you free navigation on the river.' Well,

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 127

we got the freedom of the river, and we kept Kaintuck, but for
how long?"

"You think there's trouble coming?"

"Listen, farmer, there'll always be trouble as long as there's
some foreign country got a-holt of N'Orleans. Supposen the
Spaniards just tear up the treaty and close the port? Or sup-
posen they put a tax on your corn and pork? Or supposen
Boney does get it away from the dons? Do you think he'd let
your truck go through free of duty? And what if he did take
it, and England was to go to war with him, and we had the
British customs officers back on the river? I was just a little
codger when they put the tax on tea, but I kin remember,
like it was yesterday. . . ."

"So kin I remember. . . ."

The man leaning on a hoe beside the Ohio could look back
to a day in late April 1777, when the apple trees in the Housa-
tonic Valley were bursting into bloom, and there appeared
over them in the west a cloud of dark smoke. He could re-
member the peculiar, acrid, burning smell. He could see his
father stumbling into the dooryard from the field where he
was plowing. "The British — they've got to Danbury. They're
burning our stores. Damn 'em!"

"We'd ought to own N'Orleans."

"Own N'Orleans?"

"That's what I say. How are you farmers going to sell your
corn and your hogs if the Spaniards or the French or the
British kin dam up the river with a customs tax? You came
out to the Reserve to make your living, didn't you? Same as
me. You make yours on the land, and I make mine on the
water, carryin' what the land grows. It's the land that keeps
both of us goin'. But it's the river that lets us take our stuff
to market. Think it over, neighbor. You'll see I'm right. We'd
ought to own N'Orleans."

All up and down the rivers men were saying this. When an
Ohio man met a Kentucky man at the ferry, they talked of it.
Hadn't the first Continental Congress gone on record as say-

128 Singing Valleys

ing that "the free navigation of the River Mississippi is a clear
and essential right of the United States"? In the river valleys
men looked at the ripening corn and thought, "What's it
worth if they can close the port at N'Orleans? Where'll we be
then?"

"Where will we be" meant where will I and my wife and
our children be, with no market place in which to sell our
corn? What's the good of owning one hundred acres of bot-
tomless farmland if you have no place to sell the crops you
raise? What was the good of that trip westward, over the
Alleghenies ("We buried little Dan'l under a flat rock by a
creek back in Penn State") if European wars and European
politics could snatch your harvest away from you?

In Washington, in the unfinished White House, Thomas
Jefferson paced restlessly up and down the corridors still smell-
ing of damp plaster and whitewash. It had happened. Spain
had ordered the port of New Orleans closed to American
goods. There were tons of Yankee shipping tied up in the
harbor; and on the river, floating down, tons of farm produce
to be added to the jam at the river's mouth.

In all the river valleys of the midwest resentment flamed.
Thomas Jefferson had farmed in the Shenandoah. He did not
need to be told that men who had grown crops for sale, and
had these crops ready to harvest, would brook no interference
between them and their market.

"Make the Mississippi free," thundered the midwest.

But how to do this? It was less than twenty-five years since
the country had been at war with England. The Congress
would never approve another war. At least the delegates from
the eastern states would never agree to another war to benefit
farmers in the Back Woods.

"If you don't make the Mississippi free, then we will," the
midwest retorted. "We'll secede from the Union, if necessary.
We'll fight Spain. We'll fight France. We'll fight any dam'
foreigner who tries to stop our corn and hogs from going to
market."

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 129
Letters to Carmichael in Madrid . . .

Two hundred thousand of our citizens are settled on the rivers.
. . . These have no other outlet for their tobacco, rice, corn,
hemp, lumber. . . . The free navigation of the Mississippi is
necessary to us. ... More than one-half of the territory of the
United States is on that river. . . .

Spain was moribund. But north of the Pyrenees was a living
France, with a soldier-dictator at its head. It was scarcely to be
believed that Spain had made this move without advice from
Paris. What would France do next?

Then word that Spain had ceded New Orleans and the
Floridas to France.

"Frenchman or Spaniard," the river farmers shouted, "it
doesn't matter which of 'em holds New Orleans. They must
open the port. They must let our crops go through, free."

To Livingston, in Paris, Jefferson wrote:

The cession of Louisiana and the Floridas by Spain to France
works sorely in the United States. . . . There is on the globe one
single spot the possessor of which is our natural and habitual
enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-
eighths of our territory must pass to market.

In Paris, Livingston, the American buyer, was no match
against the French seller. Napoleon held out; the United
States must take the whole of Louisiana or none. When Liv-
ingston hesitated, the Emperor hinted that there was also a
time limit on the offer. Livingston agreed, and trembled over
what the President and his countrymen would say.

Entrenched New England raised a long wailing cry over
the purchase; forgetting their own brothers and cousins and
sons in the Ohio country; forgetting that New England's ships
carried midwestern foodstuffs. All they thought of, apparently,
were the fifteen millions of dollars added to the national debt.
How did that madman in the White House think the debt
was going to be paid? Did he expect to get so many votes
from the raccoons and polecats of the Back Woods that he

130 Singing Valleys

could afford to discredit himself with the country's sound
business interests? American business couldn't carry the burden
he put on it. ...

So stormed the Philadelphia merchants who traded down
the Delaware, and the Baltimore wheat-flour dealers. So pro-
tested the New York bankers, and the Bostonians who were
more interested in whale-oil than in lard, or in markets for
hogs and hominy. There was no use telling these grumblers
that the President's orders to his commissioners in Paris were
to offer thirty-four millions of francs for New Orleans alone,
or fifty millions for New Orleans and the two Floridas, but
Napoleon had forced the entire Mississippi watershed upon
them. Livingston had been left no alternative but to purchase
the corn belt.

The protestors summoned their forces to defeat the Presi-
dent, who was, himself, troubled in his Constitutional con-
science. How was he going to reconcile the Purchase with his
literal reading of the Constitution? Thomas Jefferson had no
bitterer enemy than John Marshall, the Chief Justice. Marshall
might have lent his power, prestige and decision to those who
opposed the Purchase. But the Chief Justice was born a back-
woodsman. He had stood on a ridge in the Alleghenies and
looked away to the west. He believed, apparently, that a coun-
try as big as this would have to stretch its hide once in a while.

When the United States flag was run up over New Orleans
just before Christmas, 1803, it waved simultaneously over some
828,000 square miles of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkan-
sas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota,
North Dakota and Wyoming that were now, for the first time,
American soil.

"How," the undergraduates at Williams College demanded
indignantly, "did the President think this country was going
to wag such a tail as that?"

Before the frost was out of the ground the following spring,
a tide of settlers was rolling into that vast new terrain as twenty

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 131

years earlier settlers had poured into the Ohio and Illinois
country. Men in the sugar camps along the Ohio looked up to
see pack-horses moving westward over the frozen trails.

"Howdy, strangers? Where you folks goin7"

"Coin' west. Coin' to Louisiany. Coin7 to farmin' where
they say a man's crop can't fail. How fur is it to Louisiany?"

The expedition of Lewis and Clark financed by Congress
for the opening up of the northwest territory was already turn-
ing men's minds to the new frontier.

With that continuous drain on the East it was a wonder
there were any people left in New England, New Jersey or in
York State. Within the first fifty years after the opening of
the Mississippi Valley the new territory gained in population
over the increase in all the thirteen original colonies in the
first century of the country's development.

Of the fourteen Presidents between the passing of John
Quincy Adams and the advent of Theodore Roosevelt, ten
were either born in the Mississippi Valley or had been residents
there.

The tail, which had seemed so outlandishly long to the
young men at Williams College, now threatened to wag the
dog.

The trail followed close to the river's edge on the Ohio shore
up to Marietta. West Virginia lay over the river. The deep-
folded hills forested in chestnut, beech and birch ran down
to the giant sycamores along the shore. The deer came down
through those forests to drink delicately at the running river,
and to nibble the sedge grasses and alder shoots. The deer did
not always stop at the river. They swam over, cunningly let-
ting the current sweep them in close to the lee of the Ohio
shore; then they scrambled out, and up into the tempting
cornfields.

When the Indians had lived along the river, the fields of
corn they planted had been smaller, the stalks were not so
tall or so strong, nor did they yield as many ears. But the

132 Singing Valleys

Indians used to burn the brush in a wide band around their
plantings, which allowed the deer no covert. And usually
there were several sharp-eyed small boys, armed with bows
and arrows and sling shots, on guard against the marauders
from the woods.

The white men who had taken the country from the
Indians planted their fields more lavishly and were more care-
less in guarding them. But the white men had guns. They did
not wait for the deer to swim the river and fatten and grow
sleek on their corn. They hunted the deer in their own forests,
up and down the mountain slopes. And though they were
clumsier and noisier in their tracking than the red men were,
their guns were as usable in the woods as in the open — which
the Indians' bow and arrows had not been.

The white men built houses in their cornfields. The first
house was usually of logs with the stones gathered from the
cornfield made into an end chimney.

Sometimes they did not go to the trouble of putting up a
cabin. There was one family lived for a year or more in a hollow
sycamore tree by the river. The man and the woman and their
children were as cosy inside its bark wall as the gray squirrels
were in their holes in the upper branches.

But after a year or two, the white men usually set to build-
ing a taller, wider house of brick or stone beside the cabin,
which became the kitchen of the new dwelling. Gradually,
out beyond this, a cluster of other buildings grew up, following
the farmhouse patterns of Massachusetts and Vermont. The
new house had a dooryard with lilac bushes and snowballs, and
a flowery almond grown from a slip a woman had brought in
a pickle jar all the way from Connecticut. But beyond the
house on all three sides, the cornfields ran away to touch the
horizon. From the time the first green shoots appeared out
of the damp earth the fields were alive. Even the lightest
breeze fluttered the long leaf ribbons. Rain at night tinkled on
them. Under the midday sun they crackled as they grew.

The men who lived in the houses set in the cornfields knew

The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 133

the full sweet taste of independence. They courted no man's
favor, felt no man's scorn, feared no man's competition. They
held their own lives in their own hands. While the fields
yielded they had bread and ham and pork and bacon and
chickens and eggs and milk. And while the river ran by their
gates they had a convenient market where a surplus of produce
could be bartered for other goods, or sold for cash.

The man standing beside a little mound of luggage on the
flatboat that rounded a bend in the river on a summer morn-
ing in 1805 looked at those farmsteads and thought these
things. The sight of them seemed to lift a great load of weari-
ness from his soul.

He was a little man, and elegant, even in his traveling
clothes. A man, one would say, more at home in a lady's draw-
ing room, or bowing in a minuet than on a battlefield or a
wilderness trail. Yet he had a reputation on these, too.

"What a country!" he whispered. "What a chance for
wealth, for power, for a new life."

His eye was quick to catch an otter crouching on the bank
to watch the boat before resuming its fishing, and quicker still
to see a white horse and its rider on the Marietta Trail.

The rider was a woman — young, for even at that distance
it was evident that the horse was spirited and that she matched
its spirit with her own. And — the man felt sure — beautiful.
Only a young woman serenely confident of her charms would
have worn that long, full-skirted habit of crimson velvet that
flowed along the horse's flank, and that broad-brimmed crim-
son velvet hat with the floating white plume. So attired, she
might have ridden straight out of the Bayeux tapestry onto
this American trail winding between the river and the ripen-
ing cornfields. So Romance, in the figure of Margaret Blenner-
hasset, and Tragedy, in the figure of "the man who shot Hamil-
ton," met and passed, and were destined to meet again in the
cornlands by the river.

VIII

Millions in Tassel

WHATEVER else the trial of Aaron Burr accomplished,
it had the effect of putting the corn belt on the map.

Those who had grumbled over the purchase of Louisiana as
an unwarranted expense awoke to the fact that the lands added
to the country's boundaries had a value estimable in dollars.
The eastern states, proud of their humming little mills, their
inventions, their Yankee notions and gadgets, proud of their
steamboat chug-chugging up the Hudson, suddenly became
aware that the fertile bottom lands of the midwest put farm-
ing on a basis with banking, with cotton-spinning and manu-
facturing.

Up to that time the majority of Americans thought of a
farm as land which gave those who worked it — provided they
were industrious and lucky — shelter, food and some homespun
clothing. But the idea of a farm which paid its owner cash
dividends was brand new. It was also, to the New England
mind, slightly shocking.

Didn't the Bible say, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou
eat bread"? It didn't say anything about getting rich raising
a thousand times more food than a man needed for himself
and his family, and selling this to city dwellers a thousand
miles away.

The second war with England which was urged on the
country by the southern planters and midwestern corn farm-
ers made the eastern industrialists even more conscious of an
up and coming agrarian population living west of the Alle-
ghenies.

During the struggle, and after it, the agrarian interests held

134

Millions in Tassel 135

the center of the stage in Washington. Henry Clay, "the mill-
boy of the Slashes/' who had cleared land for a corn-title in
Kentucky, was the eloquent spokesman of the corn-growers in
the river valleys. More clearly than any man of his time he en-
visioned the future of the corn belt.

"Create an American System. . . . Encourage the farmers
in the midwest. Encourage settlers to take up land out there.
Let them know that the land will make them rich. Let our
land create our national wealth and create a body of customers
for the manufacturers. What better security can you have for
goods on credit than the fertility of the American soil?"

Congress opened land offices in the new territory which
immediately did a "land-office business" selling lots of eighty
acres at $1.25 per acre. The old Ohio Land Office in Marietta
still stands. The total business transacted within it probably ran
into many billions of dollars.

People had faith in the American soil. That faith amazed
some of the Europeans who visited the country. Harriet
Martineau marveled at the Americans' appetite for land. "It
is the aim of all action, the cure for every social evil," she
wrote.

The value of that land was created by the corn it would
grow. Eighty acres meant so many bushels; and so many
bushels of corn stood for so many dollars. Land which was no
good for corn was no good at all, according to the business
man's point of view. Was it not the great corn wealth of Ken-
tucky which made Spain cast greedy eyes on that territory
and plot with Wilkinson to keep it out of the Federal union?

Henry Bradshaw Fearon, an Englishman who spent nine
months in the Mississippi Valley during 1817 selecting sites
for the settlement of English immigrants, divided the pioneers
into four classes. First, the squatters, hunters and trappers who
held tenaciously to their tomahawk rights. Second, the small
farmers who worked from eighty to one hundred and sixty
acres. Then the "strong-handed farmers" with acreage from
five hundred to one thousand. Lastly "squires" whose tracts

136 Singing Valleys

were too vast for surveying. Many of the pioneers, he re-
ported, had not owned twenty dollars in cash when they came
west. Still there was little money in circulation. Purchase was
by barter and "swaps."

These men enjoyed a freedom that struck strange to a
European. True, each man was perforce his own farmer,
butcher, miller, blacksmith and shoemaker. But on his land he
was a complete social unit. When a new settler came to him to
buy seed corn he could set his own price. His wealth was all
under his own control.

There was no denying the power of Clay's arguments while
the waters of the Mississippi continued to float tons of produce
to the Gulf. New Orleans, so fed, grew phenomenally. In
1831, the year when Lincoln made his trip down-river and
wandered along the busy levees, the imports and exports
amounted to twenty-six millions of dollars. Five years later
they were double that sum.

The steamboats had a lot to do with it, making two-way
travel on the rivers possible. Nicholas Roosevelt's New Orleans
puffed and chortled along the reaches of the Ohio from Pitts-
burgh, belching wood smoke and cinders over the cornfields
on the banks. A lot of people regarded this new invention
with suspicion and fear. When Charles Dickens made his
American tour he was counseled while traveling on the Missis-
sippi to stay aft as much as possible, for "steamboats usually
blew up in front."

With the steamers on the river, besides all the other craft,
a man could cut logs for a raft, load this with farm produce
and float down to New Orleans to sell crops and lumber in a
ready market. Then, if trade was good and he had a taste for
luxury, he could buy a return passage on one of the steamboats.
Aboard, if he had luck, he could win his passage money at
poker or rolling dice.

It was not likely that the eastern cities would watch the
mounting prosperity of New Orleans without wanting to tap
some of that rich stream for themselves. How to divert the

Millions in Tassel 137

current of corn wealth? There were four natural gateways
through which it might be brought to the seaboard. These
were the four main routes through which settlers had moved
into the Great Valley. There was the Warriors Path, or
Wilderness Road, through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.
There was the route across the Great Kanawha to Boones-
boro; there were the road to Pittsburgh on the Ohio, and the
road through the Mohawk and Genesee Valleys to Buffalo
and the lakes. The last, through level country, offered fewer
obstacles in development as a canal route. Let the wheat, corn
and pork come that way to enrich the New York merchants,
instead of being sent to the Gulf, and then reshipped from
New Orleans.

The Erie Canal was opened in 1825. Albany declared a
holiday on the day in October when the Seneca Chief made
the first trip from the Great Lakes to the Hudson. There was
a procession of decorated carts loaded with produce brought
from western farms.

The canal boats which brought the wealth of the west to
the east passed, at the locks, other barges moving slowly west-
ward with kegs of nails, plows and farm tools, furniture, clocks
and yard goods. Henry Clay's American system was working.
The east manufactured for sale to the west, and was repaid
in food. In New York State the subsistence farm was a thing
of the past.

Still the tide of migration moved on. Every country in
Europe added to it. The news of fertile and cheap cornland
had spread around the globe, kindling the imagination of
poets and startling peasants out of their apathy. Why, in that
country, it was reported, a man could plow a furrow forty
miles long. When you broke the prairie sod and planted the
American corn you were sure of a harvest. Corn couldn't fail.
Later, when the corn had ravished land of its superabundant
strength, you could sow wheat. There was no possibility of
hunger in America.

Every packet to Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Balti-

138 Singing Valleys

more brought immigrants: Irish, Germans, Danes, Swedes,
Norwegians. The Irish kept close to the cities; they were of
different breed from the Ulster folk who had helped settle the
Back Woods. The others turned west. They were strong-
armed men, eager to work on the land and to own the land on
which they worked. They sat on the decks of the barges that
were towed up the Hudson behind steamers like Captain
Harvey Temple's Connecticut. Cap'n Temple made nothing
of a string of sixty to eighty barges. When Cap'n Corneel van
der Bilt threatened his supremacy on the river, Cap'n Temple
hitched up one hundred and eight barges, ordered all hands
to stoke the boilers, and steamed up the Hudson with a broom
lashed tauntingly to his smokestack.

Through the Mohawk Valley the canal threaded towns, and
farm lands where grain ripened. The immigrants got off and
walked along the towpath, feeling the good earth under their
feet, drawing in deep breaths of the rich, warm smell of August.

Beyond Buffalo the lakes spread like great inland seas.
White-sailed brigs rode the waves, laden with grain and lum-
ber. There were steamboats on the lakes, too. The first of these,
named Walk-on-the- Water for the Wyandot chief, was built
in 1818 on the very spot where La Salle built his sailing ship
Griffin in 1679.

In Cleveland, in Chicago, in Detroit, the foreigners found
work. Any work did, so long as it allowed them to save toward
the purchase of land. So the cities of the midwest grew on the
labor of men whose hearts were set on being corn farmers.

As soon as they had a yoke of oxen, a home-made wagon,
tools, a plow, sacks of corn, they left the towns and started out
across the prairie. The matted grass was hard to break; but a
swing of an axe, and there would be a deep gash into which
to drop four kernels of corn. Why four? The Norskies, the
Hunkies, the Germans, the Danes didn't know — only that that
was the American way. They tamped the earth down over the
seed with their heavy boots, and moved on two steps to swing
the axe again. And again.

Millions in Tassel 139

The roots of the corn did what their tools would not do.
They broke the tenacious prairie sod. Next year it was pos-
sible to put a plowshare into the ground and to drive a long
straight furrow. The earth that rippled away from the blade
was dark and rich and sweet to smell.

Soon there were a sod hut and a cornfield where there had
been only prairie grass. Some day there would be a cluster of
farm buildings, a silo, a mill. Then a village with a school and
a church. Years later there was a railroad station and a post
office. And after that, many houses, gas-filling stations, a movie
theatre, Coca-Cola signs in Neon lights, beauty shoppes — a
city.

"It is not to our interest," cautious Thomas Jefferson had
said, "to cross the Mississippi for ages." Not even the Missis-
sippi could hold back the pressure of thousands of eager land
seekers. The Pembina caravans made the five-hundred-mile
trip up into the Missouri country for furs. The traders brought
back word of rich lands beyond Pig-Eye's — the hut-saloon of a
one-eyed Irishman where Minneapolis now stands — and the
corn-growers began to dream of a new domain.

One day a man loaded oxen and a plow on a raft and
crossed the Mississippi close to where Davenport now stands.
On the western shore he harnessed his beasts to the plow and
shouted to them. He felt the plow pull at his armpits. Behind
him a furrow darkly streaked the sod. The man bent, took up
a handful of earth, and smelled of it. He smiled. Still smiling,
he urged the oxen on toward the horizon. They did not stop
until they came to the bank of the Missouri.

So the first corn grew in Iowa.

The land which the Indians gave up so sullenly was not won
without labor. In September 1832, a young man, lacking one
month of being twenty-one, journeyed by canal from Albany
to Buffalo. Thence he went by steamboat to Detroit, and
from Detroit to the fort at Chicago. Young Conant "located"
in Indiana, twenty miles outside of Chicago. He was a me-

140 Singing Valleys

thodical young man and he kept a diary of his activities
through four years. A brief excerpt — and the brevities are his
own — reveals what life on a prairie farm was like a century ago.

1836. Jan. i. Attended to the survey of my claim.

2. Drew rails.

3. Sunday. Wrote poetry.

4. Made shelves and split rails.

5. Went to Chicago with a load of potatoes.

6. Sold my potatoes for .75 a bushel.

7. Cut apples, worked at my house, husked corn.

8. Attended a meeting of settlers for securing to each
man his present claim.

9. Cut rail and timber.

10. Sunday, went to Chicago.

11. Commenced thrashing.

12. Still thrashing.

May 10. Mrs. Hoar and Betsy Kelsey arrived.

11. Planted corn and prepared for the wedding.

12. Married Betsy Kelsey.

June 3. Made a table and borrowed 6 bu. of potatoes to

be paid back with interest in the fall.
4. Wife 18 today. Made a few articles of furniture.
Made a churn.

Sept. Heard big wolves howling. Hunted deer, worked
at shoemaking. Made a coffin for H. Dougherty.
Plastered my house. Dressed pig and calves torn
by wolves. Dug a well. Killed a badger. Killed a
wolf. Corn half destroyed by blackbirds. Set out
small trees. Took up a bee- tree to hive for honey.
Hunted deer.

It is quite understandable that the diarist should have con-
densed his records, with so much on his hands to be done
each day.

The years 1835 to 1836 marked the heyday of speculation
in government lands, even though ten years later Wisconsin
was offering 500,000 acres at $1.25 per acre on thirty years'

Millions in Tassel 141

credit. The interest of seven percent was collectable annually
in advance. A man with one hundred dollars in cash who went
into that country moved like a prince. Speculators were quick
to take advantage of the bargain and bought vast tracts which
they held, and then resold at double the government's price.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, in Kansas City, in Minneapolis, the
corn from the farms was sold either in its natural state as grain,
or as hogs and lard. Not only the men who raised these but
men who traded in them in the cities grew rich.

The purchase of Louisiana had been effected in 1803. In
1845 Texas was annexed. And in the same year, Oregon. In
1848 California was added to the union. Five years later the
Gadsden Purchase completed the boundaries of a country
which stretched from Atlantic to Pacific, from the Rio Grande
to the Great Lakes. None of the eastern financiers objected to
this expansion. Instead, they were quick to invest in western
properties and western futures. Above all, they were interested
in the railroads for which engineers were already drawing up
plans and possible routes.

But even the most imaginative among them were unpre-
pared for the rapid expansion of the country. Horace Greeley,
whose editorial advice to young men to go west was taken up
by promoters of western lands, confessed himself dumb-
founded by the numbers who took the trail to Oregon.

The country lying between the Missouri River and the
Rockies was marked on maps "The Great American Desert."
It was an arid plain, overgrown with sagebrush and bunch
grass, good for nothing but prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. A few
cattle grazed on ranges, but even these would not make that
country pay unless it could also produce corn to fatten the
young steers for market. Around Denver there were the mines,
a source of speculation. But the rest of the territory appeared
to most of those who had ridden across it as waste land.

The first counter evidence to this was brought by the Mor-
mons. The followers of Joseph Smith took miles of the Great

142 Singing Valleys

American Desert and by irrigation turned these into crop lands.
There might be black magic in what the Latter Day Saints
were able to do with sagebrush country but, if so, it was a
trick worth acquiring.

The railroads, with millions of acres in the sections along
their rights of way which Congress had voted them, and which
they proposed selling to farmers whose farm produce would
make the railroads pay, prompted colonies to turn the Great
American Desert into another Great Valley. The Central Ken-
tucky Emigration Society, The Wyandotte-Kansas Colony,
The German Colonizing Company of Chicago, the Chicago-
Colorado Colony under the Unitarian minister Robert Collyer,
advertised the future values in crops of the lands they had to
sell. They had an enthusiastic agent in the editor of the Star
of Empire Magazine, published in Denver, whose columns
rhapsodized the futures of Colorado, Nebraska and the
Dakotas.

Not less enthusiastic was Nathan Cook Meeker who held,
after the Civil War, the post of agricultural editor of the New
York Tribune. Meeker was by nature an idealist. He had been
deeply influenced by the ideas of the French socialist, Fran-
£ois Fourier, and had gone to Ohio with his young wife to
pioneer. There, he said, "I learned what could be done through
co-operation." There was not the co-operation in Warren that
Meeker needed to make a success of his venture. Followed a
period of store-keeping in Hiram, Ohio, and then another
farming venture in Illinois. It was then that Meeker heard
about the success of the Mormons' venture in Utah. It fired
him with new enthusiasm for the dry lands and with plans
for irrigation projects there. But the Civil War came, and
Meeker went as a correspondent with Grant's army. His
despatches to the New York Tribune made news.

After the war was over the paper kept him on, with the
title of agricultural editor. Writing from his farm on the
Kansas frontier, Meeker began to inspire youth in the eastern

Millions in Tassel 143

cities with dreams of irrigation farming in the dry west.
Greeley, always the editor, sent for him to come on to New
York to discuss the paper's policy. In the plush sanctity of
Delmonico's, the plan for the Tribune's promotion of an agri-
cultural colony on the Cache la Poudre, midway between
Denver and Cheyenne, was formulated.

The first article on this project was published on February
14, 1869. Immediately the paper was showered with letters.
More than three thousand eager readers demanded to know
how to join the colony. The offices in Cooper Union were
besieged. Ultimately seventy thousand acres were bought and
subscriptions at $155 were sold to members. Each subscriber
could also select a town lot for $25 or $50, and could take up
eighty acres of government land for $75. The town of Greeley
was laid out with streets, sites for churches, schools and a ten-
acre park.

In April 1870, four hundred colonists set out for Colorado.
They came from Massachusetts and New York, from Ohio and
Indiana where Meeker' s name was known. He was the Moses,
who was to lead these eager farmers westward, as Rufus
Putnam had led the colonists to the Ohio country.

Greeley was a town of "several stern-wheel shanties and a
few one-horse tents," "a prairie-dog village, bounded by prickly
pears." The first wheat crop "withered like a forlorn hope/'
The irrigation ditches which had been dug with great labor
and expense were too shallow to carry sufficient water to
alleviate the arid soil. Then came the grasshoppers. They came
over the horizon in a dark cloud. They settled on the gardens
and spindly orchards and ate every green leaf and shoot.
Greeley was a shambles. A place of death inhabited by mad-
men. You couldn't shoot grasshoppers. Frantically, the town
merchant offered a new suit of clothes for one million grass-
hoppers. A man brought in a sackful and dumped them, dead,
on the floor of the store and demanded the suit.

"Not dead grasshoppers; live ones," the merchant insisted.

144 Singing Valleys

Next morning the man was back again. With two sacks. He
shook the insects out into the store, very much alive.
"Count 'em/' he commanded.

Despairing of a future in farming in such a country, the
colonists called a meeting and discussed plans for using what
money remained in the fund for a woolen mill and turning
the barren crop lands into sheep ranches. Meeker protested.
The battle waged long and bitterly. "Dig deeper ditches," he
urged. "Dig more ditches. The water is there in the river. We
have only to bring it to the land to make the country bloom."

Ultimately Meeker and his ditches won over the woolen
mill. The ditches were dug, the river came to the land, and the
land began to yield. The wheat crop broke a record. The corn
filled the granaries and the town's elevator. The clover was a
better stand than any yet grown in that country. The potatoes
brought high prices in the Denver market.

And Meeker proved his point. The dry country, when irri-
gated, was rich. It would grow food for men and to fatten
cattle on the ranges. The colony had but one more enemy, the
Indians. There was trouble with the Sioux, especially since
the lands from which they had been driven were proved to be
valuable. Finally there was guerrilla warfare. After one of the
attacks Meeker wrote:

This stopping plows by bullets is by no means a new thing in
America, for, so to speak, the plow has plowed its way from the
Atlantic to the heart of the Rocky Mountains, through showers
of bullets, and the American plow is yet to turn furrows across
China and the steppes of Tartary, and even invert the soil around
sacred Jerusalem. SPEED THE PLOW.

It was Nathan Meeker's last editorial. A few days later,
while on business # the White River Agency, he was killed
by an Indian.

Today, in Weld County, Colorado, more than three hun-
dred and seventy thousand acres are under irrigation. One-

Millions in Tassel 145

seventh of all the beet sugar produced in the country is grown
there, and the annual wheat crop averages three million
bushels. And in the University at Greeley young men are
educated to be farmers on the Great American Desert.

The story of Greeley, Colorado, was repeated with varia-
tions in a score of other localities. Towns which began as colo-
nies used co-operative measures in raising and marketing crops.
With the coming of the railroads, grain elevators were built
for the shipment of wheat and corn to the markets in Chicago
and elsewhere. Many of these elevators are farmers' co-
operatives.

More than three-quarters of the nation's annual corn crop
never leaves the farms, or the localities where it is grown
(except on the hoof). It is fed to hogs, to cattle, horses and
poultry. More than one hundred million bushels go to the
millers to be turned into corn meal and flour, to the distillers
to become alcohol, and to the makers of breakfast foods.

The balance, close to eighty million bushels yearly, becomes
the source of our supply of starch, corn syrup, glucose, dextrose,
cooking oil. It appears before us in candy, in ice cream, in
rayon textiles, in soap, in paper, in chewing tobacco, in bath
powders, in fireworks and explosives, in yeast and in gluten
feeds for cattle.

No other grain known to man has so many uses which are
convertible into dollars. No other crop grown in American
soil supports so many industries, gives employment to so
many men and women, accomplishes such far-flung ends.

It is truly the totem of the American people.

There is an affinity between it and the American people
whose life it has made, and whose destiny it has shaped and
shared. These are the secrets it whispers when the leaves rustle
in the summer wind — tales of Tussore and Kemps working out
their freedom by sowing the grain to feed their captors; tales
of Cornstalk of the Shawnees and his brother Silver Heels, and
the whistle of bullets in the Back Woods; tales of Negro slaves

146 Singing Valleys

hoeing com, baking hoecakes in the embers, remembering
Africa and freedom; tales of Deerfield and the Genesee coun-
try, of the Wilderness Road to Boonesboro and of the little
company of axemen who cut that road and who sat by their
fire at nights, eating hot pones and listening to their leader
read aloud Gullivers' Travels; tales of the Great Valley and the
Father of Waters; tales of the Montezuma and the Maya who
preceded him; tales of the Plumed Serpent and of Coatlicue
the Earth Mother.
The corn has its own poets. Not the least of them sings:

Always, I never knew it any other way,
The wind and the corn talk things over together
And the rain and the corn, and the sun and the corn
Talk things over together.

Some of the things they tell each other are in this book.

IX

Hogs and Hominy

Q. What makes more noise than a pig under a fence?
A. Two pigs.

Q. What makes more noise than forty-five million pigs going
to market?
A. Thirty-seven million pigs.

OF COURSE it doesn't make sense. But then that was the
charge the packers and a large proportion of the break-
fast-bacon-eating public brought against the Agricultural Ad-
justment Act — that it didn't make sense — when it put this
riddle to the nation.

In 1937, the squeals of eight million pigs which did not go
to market were heard from the Red River of the North to
the Pecos. Newspaper headlines screamed, the packers repre-
senting America's three-billion-dollar meat industry went to
law, and hundreds of housewives in Los Angeles, Detroit,
Chicago, Cleveland and New York stormed the butchers' shops
and demanded cheaper pork and more of it.

Hogs and hominy are now a chapter in American history.
Those eight million pigs wriggled under the fence and into the
United States Senate and the Supreme Court. They broke the
A.A.A. They made it plain to the whole world that we had a
hog situation.

The hog situation and the farm situation are inseparable in
a country where more than 60 percent of the farmers raise corn
and hogs. More than 40 percent of this country's corn crop
goes into pork and lard. Hogs and hominy work together like
the blades of a pair of scissors. There have been periods when
they cut coupons for the farmer. Recently they have cut
him in two.

148 Singing Valleys

When Ponce de Leon landed in Florida he brought with
him thirteen sows. The dons were pork eaters. Estremadura,
the province which sent out the greatest number of conquis-
tadores, has a pig-raising industry. Pizarro was a swineherd of
Trujillo. The hams of the province have been famous among
epicures since Saint-Simon praised their delicate, sweet flavor —
due, he believed, to the vipers on which they fed.

Doubtless the "thirteen sowes," which obligingly increased
to a herd of three hundred within one year, were of this
Estremaduran breed. When de Soto started on his march he
drove some of these swine before him; possibly to eat up the
rattlesnakes. Runaways from de Soto's advance guard were
the progenitors of the wild razorbacks in the south.

When John Smith left Jamestown, his mind was easy about
the colonists' food supply. There was corn a-plenty, and there
were "60 odd pigges and 500 chickings." The "pigges" were
the natural increase of three sows imported a year and a half
before.

In Florida, in Virginia, and later in New England, swine
throve on the native maize. The settlements along the Con-
necticut raised hogs and sent ships from Essex loaded with pork
and lard to sell in the sugar islands. Indeed the swine, by
their numbers, became a problem. There was an ordinance —
how Connecticut enjoyed making a law about something! —
that roving swine must be ringed; and that a man could claim
for his own and kill or sell any mavericks he caught in his corn-
field.

When the great westward movement began, the pig moved
west with the settler. Tamworths, of Wiltshire origin, made
the trip down into the Shenandoah Valley. Their descendants,
already more American than British, took the Wilderness Road
into Kentucky and on to Missouri. Black Mule Foots wrig-
gled inside canvas sacks in the Conestoga wagons that took
the Palatines and Moravians from Pennsylvania to the Ohio
country. There was at least one pig on every flatboat that
floated down to Marietta and to Cincinnati. Let out of the

Hogs and Hominy 149

sack, and unhobbled, the squealing porker quickly found his
way to the corncrib.

During the first half of the last century the center of hog-
raising in this country was the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
Eastern cities were already looking to the west for their supply
of bacon and lard. The hogs raised on eastern farms were used
by the farmer and his family, and sold to neighbors or a local
butcher. When I was a girl, in Putnam County, New York,
most families in the village had a barrel of salt pork put down
in the fall. Usually the barrel was kept in the cellar. Once, I
remember, when I was spending the day with a small playmate,
we played hide and seek. I went up into the unused and un-
heated third story to hide, opened a door into a "summer bed-
room" and shrieked at sight of a large dead hog laid out on
the bedstead.

But Henry Clay's American System encouraged the cen-
tralization of industries. The East manufactured what the
Midwest needed to raise food for the East to eat. Nails, duffel
cloths, plows, hats, shoes, tools, spices, calicoes and Bibles
were returned to the eastern settlements in corn, wheat, pork,
lard, beeswax, beef. The Mississippi River trade was largely in
hogs and lard. Farmers soon found a profit in turning their
com into pork and shipping this to New Orleans.

Commerce on the Great Lakes, bringing western farm
produce to the Erie Canal, boomed the city of Buffalo which
had not a single white settler when the Federal Constitution
was adopted in 1787. Sixty years later, in 1847, 98 steamers,
4 barques, 82 brigs, 495 schooners, 23 sloops and scows un-
loaded cargoes to be forwarded by canal. There were nearly
two million barrels of flour in those cargoes, and half a million
barrels of pork. The Buffalo elevators received six million
bushels of wheat, and half that amount in corn. The balance
in favor of wheat was leveled by three and a half million
pounds of lard.

The diarist Philip Hone, who was Mayor of New York, has

150 Singing Valleys

left a memorable picture of what he calls "one of the triumphs
of this great American staple production."

I witnessed on Thursday (Jan. 28) a procession of 20 or 30 carts,
the forward one being drawn by 6 white horses and decorated
with flags, up Broadway to the grunting of martial music, each
cart loaded with 4 or 5 enormous dead hogs. The whole number
was 106 hogs, weighing 40,262 Ibs., an average of 380 Ibs.

These overgrown animals were raised by 5 farmers of Burlington
County, N.J. and sold to a pork butcher here. They were nearly
uniform in size, with short, duck legs, like Grant Thorburn's; little
twinkling eyes peeping out between two mountains of fat, like
pins upon a pin-cushion; and hams as round as a full moon and
luscious as a turtle's calipash.

There was Indian corn written in legible characters upon their
jolly features, and shining out of their swelling sides; dead though
they were. They had, out of benevolence to mankind, laid down
their characters as swine to assume that of pork. Every spare-rib
and every link of sausage, as well as the more important parts of
these children of Ham, will sing the praises of Indian Corn.

We have seen how the lure of new and ever richer cornlands
drew farmers into Illinois, Indiana, across Kentucky to Mis-
souri, and up into Iowa. Where they planted corn, they raised
hogs. And where the corn flourished, hogs were healthy, fat
and prolific.

The British might deride American bacon and the corn
which made it fat. Americans retorted that they liked it that
way. They wanted their rashers crisp, not flabby. And they
wanted lard for their frying pans and for the crust that covered
their pies. Americans wanted pie; lots of pie, and often. The
corn and hog belt supplied them with the wherewithal.

And where the corn grew and hogs grew fat, the railroads
came. As a matter of record corn was, and still is, the largest
crop in every state of the Union. Most of it was, still is, fed to
livestock on the farms where our corn is grown. But the live-
stock had to be carried to the packers. Rail kings, smoking long
Havanas in their offices in New York, spoke reverently of

Hogs and Hominy 151

freight rates and the business that could be done. So many
hundreds of thousands of hogs carried to the packers in
Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, or Chicago to be butchered
and processed, and so many million pounds of ham, bacon,
sausage and lard carried to the hungry and rapidly spreading
cities in the East, meant dividends.

The coal carried by the Beech Creek Railroad bought a
Duke of Marlborough for Commodore Vanderbilt's great
granddaughter. The New York, Chicago and St. Louis Rail-
roads which Calvin Brice sold to W. H. Vanderbilt at a price
so exorbitant that people said the rails must be made of nickel
plate, was a farmers' road. It carried hogs and steers and tanks
of grain. So did the Illinois Central, which paid for the flam-
boyant society career of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, and set up the
Harrimans in Newport.

The dividends paid by midwestern roads bought private cars
for the officers of the roads, yachts, race horses, political careers,
collections of old masters. Not inappropriately William H.
Vanderbilt had a marked preference for the paintings of Rosa
Bonheur. They paid for presentations at Court, titles and
coronets.

Beneath and supporting much of the panoply of the Gilt
and Plush Era was the American pig.

On their way to market those pigs made money for the
midwest. They built towns where none had been, and they
raised towns to the status of cities. They put up barns and
houses. They bridged rivers, paved town and county roads,
endowed universities and churches. They gave farmers' sons
and daughters college educations.

The magazine Fortune gives the story of one farmer in the
corn belt which is typical of many more in that area. Fortune's
farmer is Benjamin Ray Summy, of Lansing, Minnesota. Mr.
Summy came to Lansing in 1889, when he was eighteen years
old.

He bought his first eighty acres with a $100 down payment,

152 Singing Valleys

earned enough on corn and hogs to buy another eighty, and
another. His land today is worth $110 to $125 an acre. He owes
not a penny and made money every year except 1926 when he
was hailed out. Of his four children, two grown sons help work
the farm. This fall [1938], he has no hogs which should fetch
him about $4,000; sixteen head of cattle worth $2,000, and sixteen
lambs worth about $150. He also milks a string of dairy cows. . . .

Here is a career built on corn and hogs.

Let us take a look at these creators of national prosperity.
Whether the race of the pig is Berkshire, Duroc, Poland China
or Mule Foot is a matter of individual taste. All these breeds
have their champions. The word is true in both senses. The
first three breeds are the aristocracy of pigdom. The Mule
Foot is the native hog of Africa. It was the variety generally
kept in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maryland one hundred years
ago, and the strain has not been lost. The sows are reputedly
quiet mothers who give large litters. The Mule Foot is a good
forager and puts on the first two hundred pounds of weight at
less cost than do the pedigreed breeds.

A pig should weigh two hundred pounds at ten months.
And those first two hundred pounds should not be made on
corn. Pigs can't grow bones and muscles on an all-corn diet,
and a pig of small frame can't carry as much fat as a big pig
can. Therefore a mixed diet — preferably alfalfa pasture and
corn — is recommended, with proportionately more corn as the
pig matures, in order to fatten it.

All sorts of other pig feeds are used, among them fish-meal,
peanut meal; millet and shrunk wheat; cotton seed, whole and
pressed; pressed potatoes; cow peas; cow beans; middlings. In
the South, when the acorns fall, the pigs are turned out to feed
on the mast. Mast-fed pork has something no other kind can
have. At least, so the Southerners say. Hams from mast-fed
hogs, smoked over hickory for six hours daily for six days, with
occasionally a handful of juniper berries thrown on the hickory
to spice the smoke, are an American delicacy to place beside
the cheeses of Brie and the wines of Champagne.

Hogs and Hominy 153

The curing of hams is still done on many farms and by
recipes in use for generations. Naturally these home-cured
hams have an entirely different texture and flavor from the
rapidly and chemically processed hams the packers sell. But
you could not expect a commercial packer to go through the
following ritual:

How TO CURE HAMS

Rub the hams all over, and well, with plenty of fine salt, working
the salt into the skin and around the hock. Pack the hams, skin
side down, in a box and leave them for several days. Then rub
them thoroughly with a mixture of

* Ib. brown sugar
Z teaspoon black pepper
£ teaspoon saltpeter
teaspoon red pepper.

Work this mixture well into the meat, especially around the hock,
where fly is apt to breed. Repack the hams in the box with salt
around and between them and allow them to stand for six weeks.
After this they should be smoked over hickory wood, for six hours
a day for one week. Air the smoke house daily to prevent the hams
becoming warm. Sew each ham in a bag and dip this in very thin
whitewash. Hang from the rafters for four or five months — If you
can wait so long.

When the time comes to cook one of these home-cured
hams it should be soaked overnight in cold water to which
a few bay leaves have been added. In the morning cover the
ham with fresh, cold water and bring to a boil. Boil gently in a
covered vessel on the back of the stove allowing twenty min-
utes to the pound. Allow the ham to cool in the water in
which it was boiled. Then remove the skin, spread a mixture
of equal parts of brown sugar and vinegar, with a little mus-
tard and red pepper over the fat side, stick it with whole cloves,
and return to the oven. Bake for half an hour in a hot oven,
basting the ham every five minutes with cider and a very little
of the liquor in which it was cooked.

154 Singing Valleys

To the glory of the pig, there is nothing of him that cannot
be eaten, except the grunt. Of all the foreign peoples who are
woven into the texture we call "American," none were more
frugal than the German Palatines who settled in Pennsylvania,
and are known erroneously as "Pennsylvania Dutch." In Bo-
hemia, and in the Rhinelands, these people had been taught
by necessity ways of making a hare go further than one would
think possible after it was dead. They had learned to take the
portions usually considered inedible and boil these into a broth
which they thickened with rye or oaten meal. When cold this
could be sliced like a meat.

In Pennsylvania these wanderers found plenty they had
never known before. But that did not make them less frugal.
After butchering, the women made the sausage, and the blood
puddings. Then they took the hog's head and made it into
"ponhaws" — doubtless a corruption of the two German words,
pfanne and hase (literally, panned hare). Today this is usually
called "scrapple." On the farms it is made in this way:

Halve the head and clean thoroughly, removing the eyes and
brains. Put the head into a large kettle and cover it with cold
water. Simmer this gently until the meat separates from the bones
— several hours.

When cool, skim off the grease, take out the bones, chop the
meat and put this back in the broth, season with salt, pepper
and sage. Stir in enough coarse corn meal to make a mush and
boil slowly for one hour. Take care that it does not scorch.

When cool, pour the ponhaws into greased pans and place in a
cool place. To serve, cut it in thin slices and fry crisp and brown.

In Somerset County, Pennsylvania, the Dutch women are
even more economical. At butchering they cook all the odd
pieces of pig which can't be used in any other way into a
pudding — a hard mass of chopped gristle and pork which only
a Dutch stomach can digest. It looks like a poor quality of
rubber. But the broth from the cooking of these left-overs is
thickened with corn meal and buckwheat flour, and this is
"ponhaws."

Hogs and Hominy 155

A breakfast of ponhaws and buckwheat cakes, with real
maple syrup, is something to remember.

Pork is America's national meat. No other meat appears so
frequently on so many tables of rich and poor, and in so many
forms. Besides eating it ourselves, we built up a sizable export
trade in pork and lard. In 1900, 14 percent of all the pork we
raised, and 38 percent of the lard we refined was sold in for-
eign markets.

With ready markets at home and abroad farmers extended
their cornfields, built more sties, and went in for hog and
hominy farming. This was especially true in the corn belt where
nearly three quarters of all the hogs in the country were raised.
A further incentive to this expansion was the number of small
packers who started business in the towns in the northern
midwest, close to the source of the hog supply. These were
usually family businesses, run by one man and his sons. They
bought the hogs from the farmers near by, processed them,
and resold the meat and lard to the big packers in Chicago, or
to retailers in nearer cities and towns. They offered the farmer
quick cash for his hogs and a nearby market. They encouraged
him to feed his corn to his hogs and let it go to market on its
own four feet.

Gradually, under these influences, the northern midwest
changed from a grain to a corn-and-hog-raising area.

The small packers — though some of them, like George
Hormel, now have businesses valued at many millions of dol-
lars— working with agents of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry,
improved the hogs and the conditions under which they were
kept and fed. The state fairs and cattle shows helped in this
too. Ultimately the little packers and the big ones — like Swift,
Armour, etc. — formed an organization called the Institute of
American Meat Packers, with a membership of three hundred,
and an annual business of three billions of dollars.

Draw an equilateral triangle, and you have a picture of the
factors which were represented in the farm and hog situation

156 Singing Valleys

of a few years ago. One side of the triangle represents the
farmers who raise the hogs and the corn which fattens them;
one stands for the packers who process the meat and deliver
it to the retail markets; the third is you and me — the public.
No side can stand alone. Weaken one, and the other two are
insecure.

When the towns are in the throes of a depression, and men
are out of work, women try to make a nickel do the work
of a dime. They buy less meat, and of the cheaper cuts; or none
at all. Immediately the retailers' orders to the packers fall off,
and the packers pay the farmers less for the livestock then
being driven into the stockyards.

Drought which scorches the standing corn, floods which
wash away sprouting fields, winter dust storms which carry off
the topsoil which nourishes the surface roots of the corn, all
these are immediately reflected in the supply and price of pork
at every corner grocery.

The farm situation did not come in with the Democrats.
Or with the Republicans. It had begun before Woodrow Wil-
son declared that a state of war existed between this country
and Germany. Since the turn of the century American farmers
have been facing the results of their own earlier extraordinary
success. The fact that farming in America was profitable drew
thousands of immigrants to our farm lands. It encouraged
them and the earlier settlers there to plow up more and more
acres of prairie sod and to turn grazing lands into corn and
wheat fields.

Meanwhile the farmer in the Mississippi River basin was
being brought to pay the price of the pulp mills in the north.

These monsters, by gluttonously eating away the forests,
were able to spew out the ten million and more sentimental
home magazines which jammed the R.F.D. carriers' sacks each
month. Actually, American farms have been washed or blown
away from under the rocking chairs of readers intent on the
love lives of Temple Bailey and Kathleen Norris heroines,

Hogs and Hominy 157

printed on paper which, left in its natural state, would have
saved their farms.

None of these events was planned; they just happened.
They might have been foreseen; and a few men did foresee
them and prophesied. But their prophecies were received about
as Jeremiah's were. People just wouldn't, or couldn't, believe
that the American soil could be exhausted. Or that overcrop-
ping without manuring would invite famine. They treated
such warnings with scorn and righteous indignation, as though
to foretell these things threatened the great American tradition
of inexhaustible wealth and plenty. As though the warners im-
plied that Americans were subject to the same laws that gov-
erned other peoples.

So nobody listened to the voices crying of a future wilder-
ness. The people in the towns shrugged and asked what the
farmers mattered to them; they bought their food at the A & P.
The packers did not see any cause to worry while hogs were
plentiful, and there was a market for pork. The farmers replied
that there were always good years and bad ones. And the good
ones, when they came, made up for the drought and the frost
and the floods and the dust storms and the grasshoppers. You
had to expect such things when you went to farming.

In 1910, the farmers received $7.24 per live hundredweight
of hog, which, actually, was 59 cents less than the value of the
corn which had gone into the making of those hundred pounds
of pig. The next year the loss was $1 per hundred pounds.
Alarm began to sweep over the corn belt. The packers pushed
the export trade in pork and lard — Germany was buying heav-
ily of the latter. The next two years showed profits, and a great
sigh went up from Iowa. Farmers in that state, in Nebraska
and in the two Dakotas began to add to their corn acreage.

Then came two years of loss.

The corn crisis was already on one horizon when the Great
War broke on the other. World markets for produce acted on
the farmers of the corn belt like an injection of vitamin B

158 Singing Valleys

into the veins of a man staggering and shaken from alcoholic
poisoning. They rode out into their cornlands and plowed
more and more acres. Responding to the Food Administra-
tion's plea, they bred more and more pigs. In 1918, hogs sold
at $11.73 Per nve hundredweight, which represented a profit
on corn of only one cent less than four dollars. There never
had been anything like it in America before.

The next year the profit on hogs was 87 cents less; but no-
body thought of complaining. The numbers raised were greater
than in any previous year, and exports of pork ran to nearly
two million pounds. Germany had stopped buying lard, but
the United Kingdom of Great Britain was taking more of this
by-product than ever before. Hog-raising looked like the high
road to prosperity. Farmers painted their barns and put elec-
tricity into them and into their houses. Towns in the corn belt
built million-dollar high schools. Farmers' wives turned the
pages of mail order catalogs and ordered linoleum, furniture
and clothes. They patronized the local beauty shoppes for per-
manent waves. They got new upper teeth.

Meanwhile the manufacturers in the East took a long look
at the corn belt and the prosperity which shone over it, and
got an idea. They called in their salesmen for a pep talk. Then
they sent them out with orders to sell motor plows, tractors,
corn drillers, corn huskers and threshers to the hog raisers.

The glib young men who drove up to the farmers' doors in
bright new cars that made the farmers' daughters dream
dreams, seemed bent on making the plow horse as extinct as
the little eohippus. They showed their motor farm machinery
in booths at the state and county fairs.

"Look at the way the world is. All shot to pieces. The farms
in Europe can't grow anything for years and years. The world
has got to eat, though; and the way I look at it is, you farmers
are going to have your hands full feeding it for years and years.
Yes, sir, the whole world is looking to the American farmer
for help.

"And you've got to have help. Real help. You can't go on

Hogs and Hominy 159

breaking your backs pulling a plow that has a stubborn mule
hitched to the other end of it. The world can't wait for mules
and horses any more. They're too slow. Speed's the thing,
today. Speed's cheaper, too. Your time's worth dollars, isn't
it? Modern farm machinery lets you get your work done in half
the time. And you've got some time to live in. Time to spend
with your family enjoying yourselves. Life oughtn't to be all
work; it ought to have some play in it.

"Listen, farmers, the farm has got to have motor power. You
ought to have tractors like that fellow Thomas Campbell uses
out in Hardin, Montana, where he's growing wheat the way
the United States Steel Corporation makes steel. . . ."

With the money from their hogs they bought tractors. And
corn drillers and corn huskers. They bought large motor trucks,
useful to carry hogs to the stockyards, and corn to the eleva-
tors. They did not foresee that their sons would soon find it
easier to use the truck to haul fodder to mules in pasture than
to harness up those mules and make them haul their own feed.

In 1921, the price of hogs collapsed. The market was glutted.
And, incredible as it seemed, it went on falling. There was a
loss of 83 cents on every live hundredweight in 1920. In 1933
the loss was $4.28.

Twelve years in the red. Twelve years when it cost more to
raise corn than pigs were worth. Twelve years while motor
power reduced the number of horses and mules which had
eaten part of the corn raised. Twelve years meeting install-
ments on plows and tractors; paying for gasoline to run these;
paying for commercial fertilizers. Farms that had never had a
mortgage on them were put up at the banks to pay for aids to
prosperity which had failed to bring prosperity.

Between 1920 and 1933 one farm in four in this country was
sold for debt or taxes. Tenancies increased by more than two
hundred thousand. The value of farm property declined by
$20,000,000 in the first ten years after the War. In the next
three years it was to drop lower, until the value in 1933 was
57 percent of the pre-war worth.

160 Singing Valleys

Nobody knew what to do about it. The export trade in pork
had fallen off badly, due to Denmark's raising hogs for the
British market and the efforts of all the European countries to
re-establish their farmers. Germany returned as a customer for
lard and boomed this market for us in 1923. But there, too,
the effort was being made to raise lard at home. A few years
later the tariff on foreign lard was raised from $1 per hundred
pounds to $17. This cut off the market in Germany. Mexico,
another good customer for lard, began to talk tariffs.

Where was American corn going to go, if not into hogs?
And if into hogs, then who was going to buy them? The entire
agrarian scheme of the country was broken down. It was as
stalled as the power cultivator standing in Farmer Walt Jay-
cox's shed. He kicked the front wheel disgustedly.

"Look at the durn thing. It's as bad as Lonny Brewer — won't
work lessen you fill it plumb full of firewater. Only Lonny'll
drink corn likker. This contraption has got to have gasoline.
And it hasn't given me a spadeful of manure since I got it."

The farm situation was waiting for Calvin Coolidge when
he walked into the White House after Harding's death. But
the ex-Governor of Massachusetts, who said "the man who
builds a factory builds a temple," frankly considered the manu-
facturers of the country of greater value to its development
than the farmers. It was the old story all over again; industrial-
ized New England against the agrarian midwest.

Once again the fight was on between the white milled loaves
and the strong yellow bread of the frontier.

Congressmen from the corn belt stormed Congress for relief
for their constituents. The result was the McNary-Haugen Bill
which the House passed, and the President vetoed. A second
time the House passed it, and again the man from Massachu-
setts used his power to say "No." Farm relief was shelved for
the time being. And farm prices sank lower.

As though to force the farm crisis on the country, the weather
now took a hand. There were three years of drought and con-

Hogs and Hominy 161

sequent dust storms, following springs in which the snows in
the north melted too suddenly for the rivers to carry them off.
Corn withered in the dry summers, and stock, without pasture
or water, died. Millions of dollars' worth of topsoil was washed
down the Mississippi as once the produce raised on that soil
had been floated. In Oklahoma, starving sharecroppers looked
at the stunted cotton and blasted corn and knew they were
licked. Farmers in the northern midwest besieged the banks
for loans and were turned down. Cornlands weren't worth
lending money on.

There were men, like Farmer Summy, who came through
those years. They came through chiefly because they had kept
their heads in the years of rapid farm expansion. They had
steadfastly refused to farm against the future. But most of
them grew gray holding their own and seeing their neighbors
go to the wall.

The Secretary of Agriculture had figured largely in the fram-
ing of the McNary-Haugen Bill which was planned to allow
the Government to set prices for farm produce and to control
production. When, during the first Roosevelt administration,
Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, this con-
ferred on the Secretary of Agriculture extraordinary power to
bring about farm relief. The lines taken by Secretary Wallace
were those suggested in the bill which Coolidge had defeated.

The relief measures — briefly, paying farmers not to plant a
certain acreage of certain crops, or to raise more than a certain
number of cattle, hogs and poultry — startled the country.

The idea of cutting down the nation's food supply at a
time when the bread-lines in every city were lengthening filled
people with horror. Where was the economy in that? What
had happened to the machinery of production that it could
not move the surplus from the farms to the hungry towns?
And what became of the consumer's dollar that so little of it
reached the men who raised the commodities for which the
dollar was paid?

162 Singing Valleys

But one million farmers signed the contracts which the
A.A.A. offered them. They would have signed anything that
offered even hope of relief. The contracts covered seven basic
commodities: wheat, tobacco, cotton, milk and milk products,
cattle and poultry, corn, hogs. The contracts covering the last
two of these called for a reduction of 20 percent in the acre-
age of corn grown, and 325 percent reduction of hogs.

It was estimated that the 45,000,000 hogs — the average num-
ber slaughtered annually under Federal inspection during the
previous ten-year period — would be reduced to 38,000,000 in
1937. Actually, the farmers bettered their contracts by one
million hogs.

These were the eight million pigs which squealed in the
Senate and the Supreme Court. Eight million pigs which did
not exist. Meanwhile, pork prices were the highest they had
been in years. Bacon and ham went off the nation's breakfast
tables. Lard substitutes — made of vegetable oils — were bought
in place of high-priced lard. Pork, which had always been the
working man's food, was beyond his wages or relief check.

One interesting consequence of the pork shortage, accord-
ing to William Whitfield Woods, President of the Institute
of American Meat Packers, was that Americans began to eat
fish. Chain stores installed fish and vegetable counters. In one
district where no fish had ever been sold before, a chain of
stores advertised skinned whiting at ten cents the pound, and
sold one hundred thousand pounds in a week.

It was the meat packers who brought to court the case
against the A.A.A. They were being squeezed between the
upper and the nether millstones. They could not get the pork
and lard to fill their orders from abroad, and their business
was severely menaced by the importation into this country of
foreign hog products to meet the sudden shortage here. To
show how these importations followed the A.A.A/s restriction
of American corn- and hog-raising, one has only to examine the
figures for 1933 and 1935.

Hogs and Hominy 163

IMPORTATIONS INTO THE U.SA

1933

o Hogs 100,000

o Corn (Ibs.) 1,200,000,000

50,000 Cattle 250,000

o Tallow (Ibs.) 200,000,000

Foreign corn- and hog-raisers and foreign processers were
getting rich on the American market, while American packers
were paying process taxes to the government to be used to pay
farmers not to raise crops.

The Supreme Court's decision that the extraordinary powers
granted to the Secretary of Agriculture under the A.A.A. were
illegal, and that this government could not legally prohibit
the production of food, was the triumph of those eight mil-
lion hogs which never went to market.

We are still too close to the crisis to judge of the effective-
ness of the A.A.A/s program of farm relief. Nobody knows
what it has done for the corn belt.

Farmers are going back to raising corn and hogs, or not
raising them, according to their own judgment of the markets
for these. From October 1939 to June 1940 the hogs slaugh-
tered under Federal inspection numbered 34,332,746. Many
farmers are making use of the opportunity the government
offers them to put their corn in bond. But all of them are
wary of extending their corn acreage. Many are letting fields
go back to grass for grazing.

One result has been the increase in subsistence farms in the
eastern states. By applying scientific methods to the cultiva-
tion of outworn New England fields, the yield of corn per
acre in Connecticut during 1939 was ahead of that of Ohio,
and nearly equal to the average yield of an acre of Illinois or
Iowa cornland. Too, farmers in the South have gone in for
hog-raising. Whereas formerly, 73 percent of the hogs in the

164 Singing Valleys

country were in the corn belt, now the numbers in those states
represent only 60 percent of our national pork supply.

The horse and the mule are coming back to the farms.
Events have proved that these are not so outmoded as the
enthusiastic young salesmen for General Motors once said they
were. Horses and mules will work on corn. There's a lot of
work on a farm that is done more cheaply by animal power
than by gasoline.

The squeals of those eight million pigs woke up the entire
nation to the necessity for forest and soil conservation; and
for drought and flood control measures in the Great Valley
which is America's market basket. Even the unthinking ones
who "always bought their food from the A & P" were made
aware of the source of supply behind the counters and shelves
in the corner groceries. They know now that that source must
be protected if Americans are going to have enough to eat.

Not least of all, those eight million pigs set a lot of us to
thinking. They made it fairly apparent that Nature's economics
take no account of man's. You can't contract against drought
or flood or frost. The laws of natural increase and supply don't
respond to factory methods of production, or the theories of
the technocrats. From now on, it is safe to say, we are going
to be wary of throwing a political monkey wrench into Nature's
machinery.

And if, by the generous laws of Nature, our corn and our
swine increase, we'll let 'em. We'll lean on the fence rails and
rejoice in the fatness of the land. Some we'll take to market;
and the rest we'll eat, thankful for a good dinner table. And
if we have enough over to give to the man who has none, the
national economy will not be upset.

Who knows, the time may come when America won't have
a single hungry person in it!

X

The Mills Grind Slowly

THE Maya who planted the first corn used a metate-stone
on which to roll the kernels, which were first soaked in
warm lye water. The stone was as important to every family as
its hearth. Its place was outside the house door. The time spent
on one's knees at this humble altar was not without compen-
sation in the way of a knowledge of how all the other villagers
were conducting their affairs. In every Mexican village today
the metate is in evidence. Stuart Chase tells the story of a lady
living in the capital, who took her Indian cook to see the relics
of ancient Toltec civilization which have been excavated from
the lava flow at San Angel. The Indian woman was quite un-
moved until her eye fell on a prehistoric metate stone. "She
was enchanted with its shape, and implored the mistress to
secure it for her kitchen. 'The metate I've been looking for.
Ah, if I only had it! Such beautiful little tortillas as I could
make you/ That stone was used by some pre-Aztec woman,
overwhelmed by a volcanic eruption two thousand or more
years ago. The maize tradition does not die."

Where or how the saddle-stone was evolved is unknown. It
was the household mill of the Egyptians, and is pictured in
papyri and wall paintings. Among the score and more objects
buried with the mummy of the Prince-Chancellor Meket-Ra,
steward to one of the Pharaohs of the eleventh dynasty, and
excavated from the royal cemetery at Thebes, are models in
wood, realistically carved and painted, of many of the prince's
earthly possessions.* These include a granary, a bakery and
a brewery, besides stables, gardens, boats, palaces. Within the

* In the Egyptian Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

165

166 Singing Valleys

granary a clerk keeps record of the sacks of grain which slaves
carry on their backs up a flight of steps to dump into the bins.
In the brewery, male slaves pound the mash, or tramp it with
their feet. In the bakery, other male slaves under the direction
of an overseer mix and knead the loaves preparatory to placing
them in the waiting ovens. The only female figures in these
models, which preserve a faithful record of activities some four
thousand years ago, are two women kneeling at saddle-stones
within the bakery. They are grinding the flour for the use of
the men bakers.

The saddle-stones used in Prince Meket-Ra's bakery are
identical with many seen in Mexican villages today, or in the
Indian pueblos of our southwest. Like all that have been found
in countries east of the Atlantic, they are simply fashioned
and without ornamentation of any kind. But every important
collection of Mayan and Aztec objects has a number of metates
sculptured in the form of dragons or frogs — symbols connected
with rain-making ceremonies for the fertility of the fields.
Others carry the snakes of Coatlicue, the Earth Mother. Not
infrequently the snakes have seven rattles to commemorate
one aspect of the goddess, "Woman of the Seven Snakes."
These present us, too, with an American version of the rain-
rattles that were shaken before Ishtar, Isis, Cybele and all other
earth and grain deities.

With the American tribes the metate and the mortar, either
of stone or of wood, remained the only form of mill until the
Europeans brought the idea of using water or wind to turn
grinding stones. The metate seems not to have crossed the
Great Plains and the Mississippi to the Atlantic littoral.
Squanto taught the men of Plymouth how to make beech and
oaken mortars in which the first corn harvest was pounded into
meal. The rhythmic thump-thump of the heavy pestles on the
wood resounded throughout Plymouth until, in 1623, the
Council authorized "a water-work to beat corn, not to inter-
fere with the intending gris ting-mill." The toll, fixed by the
Council, was "one pottle per bushel."

The Mills Grind Slowly 167

Primitive America never had the quern, the bridge between
the saddle-stone and the rotary grist mill. The quern was truly
a mill. It was composed of two stones; the lower was station-
ary, and the upper turned around on it by means of a stick
thrust into a hole near the edge. The grain was poured by
hand into a hole in the center of the upper stone. The prin-
ciple was exactly that of the later grist mills. In fact, the
Romans called a quern mola, from which the word mill is
derived.

In the most primitive querns, which date from some time in
the second century B.C., the lower stone, or bedder, was a rock
selected for its conical shape which allowed the ground meal to
run down the sides. Only the tedder (upper stone) was quar-
ried. Later, quarried and dressed stones were used for bedders
and tedders.

The quern was essentially a part of the kitchen equipment.
The milling was done by the "lady" of the house, or by a
female slave. In poor villages there might be one quern for
the use of several families; but not a man of the village would
have demeaned his manhood by setting hand to the wooden
handle of the tedder.

These hand mills were used by all the peoples of the Medi-
terranean littoral. Besides these, and the more ancient saddle-
stones, the Egyptians had had paddle mills. These were boats,
moored in mid-stream, in which a large quern was set up. The
current turned the paddles, which turned a shaft connected
with the upper stone. Perhaps from these the Romans got
their idea of a water mill. Pliny mentions one — and as though
it were a rarity in his time. The Romans took their invention
to the Rhineland, where they had discovered a quarry from
which to cut excellent millstones; to the Rhone, to the Seine,
and to the Thames. They took corn-grinding out of the home
and out of the hands of women. They turned it into a busi-
ness— a business for men.

For a long time the women of that loosely jointed empire
rebelled against this intrusion on their ancient rights and

168 Singing Valleys

duties. They roundly resented such totalitarian ideas, and re-
fused to take their grain to the mill where the miller — a gov-
ernment man, and therefore no more popular than an excise-
man in the Kentucky mountains — exacted a heavy toll of the
meal ground. No doubt their husbands tried hard to explain
the political and social advantages of this new economy. The
women simply would not, or could not, see things that way.
Why, they asked, should they pay the state to do for them
what they were able and willing to do for themselves?

'Think of the legions," their husbands replied. "Think of
the magnificent new buildings they are putting up in Rome.
All that takes money. Think of the wars. It costs money to
make a war."

"But why have any wars?" the answer came back.

Ultimately, of course, the state and the men had their way.
At least to the extent that the Emperor Constantine issued an
edict forbidding the use of querns in localities where there was
a water mill. The state had to be supported, and progress had
to go on, whether women understood the one or wished the
other. Men knew that so long as you left an industry in the
hands of women and in the home you couldn't exploit it or
tax it or monopolize it. Perhaps they argued that you had to
raise it to the level of a business and put men in charge of it,
to turn it into a problem. Then it became important.

So the mills were built on the streams all over England. A
number of them, including one run by tidewater, are men-
tioned in Domesday Book. Meanwhile, however, women con-
tinued to use their mothers' and grandmothers' querns, and
to cheat the government. There's a stretch of lonely, rocky
moorland in Lancashire still known as "Quern Moor."

But the dignity had been taken from the task of corn-grind-
ing. The Code of Ethelbert, written about the middle of the
sixth century, decrees: "If anyone molest a maid servant of
the king he shall pay 50 shillings amends. Of if she be the
maid who grinds at the mill, he shall pay 25 shillings."

The Norman barons, bishops and abbots were inheritors of

The Mills Grind Slowly 169

the Roman point of view. They believed in organization. As
Big Business men, they quickly set up more mills and com-
manded their vassals and tenants to bring their grain there to
be ground. One abbot, to insure the use of his mill by the
farmers, sent soldiery to carry away the household querns. He
used them to pave his parlor. Some years later, when his rever-
ence put up the price of corn-grinding, the people marched
on the monastery armed with pick-axes and hoicked the quern
stones up from under the quaking abbot's feet.

The miller was a baron's man. Or a bishop's, which was
slightly worse. The farmer knew he couldn't trust him; a surly,
crafty fellow who held his job on a pledge to his master to
weigh short.

This character of the miller persists through so many old
tales and ballads that it has become one of our literary tradi-
tions. Just as all carpenters are proverbially simple-minded and
good, and tinkers a bad lot. Chaucer's miller is drawn after
this pattern. The design is inescapable now. Let a story-teller
introduce as a character an honest, generous, warm-hearted
miller: his audience will have none of him.

But who has ever read or heard sung of a miller's daughter
who was not young and beautiful and trustingly frail? She
allows the young stranger to woo her by the purling mill-
stream while her father is safely inside, grinding the lover's
corn. At the close of the third stanza the lover rides away,
never to return. The miller's daughter lingers through another
verse or two, only to die of a broken heart and leave her parent
surlier and more crotchety than before, at the end of the song.

The old water wheels were usually fitted with overshot
wheels. The stream was dammed above the mill, and a head
of water was carried from the pond through a stone or wooden
head-race to a sluice set directly above the wheel. When the
sluice was opened, the water fell into the pockets which formed
the wheel's rim. The wheel was forced down and around by
the weight of water it carried. The pockets emptied at the
bottom and, lightened, came up to be refilled at the sluice and

i jo Singing Valleys

so forced down again. The wheel's turning turned a shaft
which entered the side of the mill and joined the tedder which
it caused to revolve. An undershot wheel is planned to be
turned by the current of the stream in which it rests. Naturally
its usefulness is affected by seasons of high or low water. Nor
can an undershot wheel be used in streams where the current
runs at a distance from the shore.

The principle of the windmill is that of the screw-driven
ship. The sails, made of light wooden lattice, are fitted with
canvas louvres. These permit of being opened so that the wind
may blow through, leaving the mill at rest. When closed, they
offer resistance to the wind which forces them around. The
veering sails revolve a shaft which turns the upper millstone
inside the windmill.

The problem of how to keep the sails in the constantly
changing wind was solved by building the early mills on stout
wooden posts. The post was fixed securely to the ground, but
a wooden bearing atop this permitted the heavy superstructure
which was the mill-house, to be swung round, thus bringing
the sails into the prevailing wind. Later on, engineers devised
a way of building towers with the mills high up in them. A
wooden cap on the tower revolved on a large bearing. The
sails were fastened to the cap. Many of the windmills still turn-
ing in the Netherlands are of this design. In England, where
the wooden facing of the towers was frequently painted white,
they were called "smock mills."

Recently a man digging on the site of an old mill pond near
Orangeburg, South Carolina, discovered a set of mill gears
made of southern oak which, according to Professor B. W.
Dedrick of State College, Pennsylvania, an authority on old
American mills, "may be the oldest pieces of machinery in
America."

Do these gears which are apparently parts of three separate
mill wheels (the largest nineteen feet in circumference) solve
the mystery of the "lost colony" which left Roanoke Island

The Mills Grind Slowly 171

and wandered south to Croatoan? There are no records or
legends of a mill in that locality. Experts have given their opin-
ion that the gears had been buried at least two hundred years.
One has a bullet embedded in it. There is the possibility that
the Roanoke settlers set up the mill there and that shortly
afterward most of them, or all, were killed by savages.

The first mill of which there are records is the windmill
which Sir George Yeardley put up about 1620 on his patent
Flower de Hundred on the James. A spit of land reaching into
the river is still called Windmill Point. The spot has another
historical significance, for it was here that Grant's army crossed
the river, one hundred and thirty thousand strong.

Mills, driven by wind or water, soon became common in
the Tidewater. Every large estate had its own mill to grind
the corn harvest. The mill at Stratford, the historic home of
the Lees, has been reconstructed in recent years.

The first grist mill in Massachusetts was built at Watertown
and was owned in part by William Cradock. His half interest
was valued at £200. Occasionally this is spoken of as a tide-
water mill, but one writer says it was found necessary, in 1632,
to move the mill to Boston because at Watertown it was
impossible to grind corn except when the wind was westerly.
Which seems to indicate that this too was a windmill.

A well-watered land, Massachusetts soon had a mill turning
in every settlement. The noble Sir Richard Saltonstall was
miller at Ipswich and charged a toll of one-sixteenth of the
grain brought him to be ground. Frequently, mills were built
at common expense. The Plymouth records give a court order,
dated 1634, providing "that Stephen Deane have a sufficient
water wheele set up at the charge of the colony, consisting of
one foot more depth than he now useth; the said Stephen
Deane finding the iron worke thereunto belonging." At Stam-
ford, Connecticut, a dam was built by the townsmen; the
frame and body were put up by a carpenter for £51, and the
town sold the mill for £75. Many of the early mills in New
England are still standing, like that of Governor John Win-

172 Singing Valleys

throp at New London. Some are still used as corn mills, others
have been incorporated in the small factories which make the
rivers of New England the busiest waters in the world.

Isolated settlers devised a sweep-mortar, made of a hol-
lowed tree-stump and a convenient sapling to whose top the
wooden pestle was affixed. Jerks on a rope worked the pestle
and sent loud thumps reverberating through the woods. These
sweep-mortars were so common on Long Island that sailors,
lost in a fog on the Sound, listened for the sound of them
as a warning.

The Dutch patroons on their Hudson River patents built
mills on all the little kills. It was a sawmill — "de Zaagaertje" —
which gave its name, onomatopoetically, to Saugerties.

One pair, at least, of the three sets of gristing-stones which
the Fauna brought to the Fort on The Rocks in 1644, went
into the mill which the Swedes built on the creek they called
"SkoldpaddekiH" (Turtle Creek) which flows into the Brandy-
wine at its confluence with the Delaware. This is now within
the limits of the city of Wilmington. That mill continued
in operation for more than two centuries. No doubt Dutch
Molly, the hominy-seller of Wilmington and who probably
was Swedish, got her supplies there. She was a famous figure
in the town; a hawker who might have stepped from a Hogarth
print, fat and blowsy, with a wink for a likely looking lad,
and a bawdy jest on the tip of her tongue. Decorous Wilming-
ton housewives spoke of her as "that dreadful woman," and
shuddered when her hoarse cry, "Hot corn! Hot corn! 'Ere's
yer lily-white hot corn!" sounded under their windows. But
they sent the servant out with a bowl and a coin for Molly's
wares, nevertheless.

Millstones were part of the cargo of every ship coming to
the colonies. Most of these were quarried in France, from
buhrstone, a silicious quartz found in the Eocene formation of
the Paris basin. The Romans had gone to Andernach on the
Rhine for their millstones, and in England the stone-cutting
works of Notts and Sussex were listed among the country's

The Mills Grind Slowly 173

assets by the compilers of Domesday Book. Anglesea, too, sup-
plied medieval mills with grist-stones. But for many centuries
European mills had been supplied from Houlbec, near Evreux,
and from the still larger and more famous quarries of La
Ferte-sous-Jouarre, which lie close to Chateau-Thierry. Trains
carrying American troops to that sector in July and August
1918, were run up on the tracks of the quarry from which
came most of the stones that ground American corn meal.

Stones for the mealing trade were cut from three to seven
feet in diameter, and twelve inches in thickness. Many of the
smaller stones were quarried in one solid piece, but the larger
ones, and the majority of those brought to America, were cut
in four to nine segments. These were mortised together and
bound with an iron rim. The bedder was finished smooth. The
tedder's inner surface was cut in a design which hastened the
grinding process and helped to work the meal out to the edge
to fall into the bin. Stones used for grinding wheat or rye
required less cutting than stones used for grinding American
corn. Here and there, in Europe, are still to be seen ancient
gristing-stones carved with religious symbols and names. But
usually the design was a simple arrangement of grooves, like
the spokes of a wheel. An old buhrstone is sunk in the soft
grass in front of the little red mill at Ludingtonville, Putnam
County, New York. The stone is nearly snow white. The de-
sign, like the fronds of ferns, swirls away from a central
opening which is shaped like a Celtic cross.

This mill was the property of Colonel Henry Ludington,
who headed the Dutchess County militia. From it, his daugh-
ter Sibyl rode on horseback on the night of April 27, 1777, to
summon the members of her father's company from the cabins
in the Big Woods and the valley farms, to meet the British at
Danbury.

Hundreds of old millstones have gone to make doorsteps and
to pave terraces and garden walks. There is such a walk on
St. Helena's Island, near Beaufort, South Carolina, and an-

174 Singing Valleys

other in a garden close to Albany, New York. John Taylor
Arms is a collector of millstones in his Connecticut garden.

South Carolina, so its sons boast, is the best-watered state
on the Atlantic seaboard. It is also a state of old mills. Many,
like the one in Middleton Gardens, ground rice, but all of
them ground corn which was and still is the state's chief cereal
food. The old Bluff, or Cornwallis Road, running west to the
mountains and over them, passes a score of old mills, many of
which are still in operation. One, in the city of Columbia, was
built prior to 1740. General Sherman set fire to it on his march
to Georgia. The present owner rebuilt the ruin, dug the old
French buhrstones out of the brook, and set up a wheel again
for the grinding of corn.

In all the mills it was usual to use stones of American granite
to grind corn for cattle and poultry feed. Granite was sup-
posed to make a smooth meal, and buhrstone a meal with
round particles. Most old mills were furnished with both types
of stone. A very large one, of Vermont granite, which served
in the Yellow Mill at Bridgeport, Connecticut, is now part
of the equipment of Rose Mill at Milford, near by. Very early
in colonial days the German Palatines who settled near New
Paltz, New York, began quarrying in the Shawangunk Moun-
tains. They did quite a trade in millstones from the granite
along Esopus Creek.

When the stones were in constant use — most country mills
ran steadily from November to April — it was necessary to lift
the tedder every two or three weeks and spend a day or two
dressing the surface. Moving the stone was no easy task in
itself, and cutting it called for skill and proper tools, which in
most instances the miller had to make for himself. No ordi-
nary chisel would carve the excessively hard buhrstone.

At Jennerstown, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, a sum-
mer theater has been made out of an old grist mill. It was
built, early in the last century, of heavy chestnut logs and
chinked with plaster. Originally the mill stood at Roxbury,
some miles from its present site. At the time of building an

The Mills Grind Slowly 175

order was sent to France for a set of grinding stones. These
were cut and shipped to Baltimore, and then reshipped by
canal to Cumberland, Maryland. There they waited for winter
to come and cover the mountain roads with snow. Then
Miller Reitz yoked eight oxen to a sledge and went over the
ridge and down to Cumberland to fetch the stones to his
mill. On the return trip, while high in the mountains, the
sledge-runner struck a buried rock. Over went the sledge and
over went the millstones, crashing down the mountainside.
For twelve months more the mill and the farmers waited until
another set could be quarried and sent from La Ferte to
Cumberland and brought — safely, this time — across the moun-
tains. These now hang on the walls of the theater, after
nearly one hundred years' service to Somerset County farmers.

In selecting a site for a settlement it was necessary to look
for a body of water which could be made to turn a wheel. The
difficulty of carrying corn to a distant village to be ground was
insurmountable with few draught animals and fewer — and
these bad — roads. The early records of Eastchester, one of the
first villages in Westchester County, New York, give the agree-
ment made by the thirteen original settlers in 1665. Article
Twenty-one provides "that one day every spring be improved
for the destroieng of rattellsnacks."

That there were plenty of these creatures seems apparent
from the name "Rattellsnack Creek" on which the first mill
was built by John Jackson. Perhaps the rattlers drove John out,
for a few years later we read of the settlers making overtures to
John Taylor of Woodbridge to come and be their miller. This
John, too, may have had a healthy dislike for the wriggling
symbols of Coatlicue. He had to be urged!

Ultimately an agreement was drawn up between him and
the council which the Town Clerk — whose spelling suggests
that it was he who produced those ominous "rattellsnacks" —
called "A covenant consernin keepin the mill and grinding our
come." By its terms the town set apart three acres of upland
and two of meadow for

176 Singing Valleys

. . . this smith who agrees to grind the corn which comes first
to the mill, and in scarciety of water to grind ondly for the inhabit-
ants of East Chester, for the sixteenth part towell of wheat, and
the twelfth parte Indian corne; and to pay £28 at or before the
25th. day of December next.

Covenants of this sort were not at all uncommon in the
northern colonies where a simple democracy prevailed. The
close interdependence of farmers and millers was too clearly
recognized to be lightly treated. In a very real sense the miller
was a public servant. He ranked below the schoolmaster, but
was not to be classed with the blacksmith, house builder or
wheelwright. The rate charged for grinding corn was fixed by
the Town Council. The miller could show no preference in the
way of grinding one man's grain before another's. The miller
served the community impersonally, not for cash, but for a toll.
This gave his service an unquestioned dignity.

The road to the mill was the most traveled one in the town-
ship. It was the first to be broken after a heavy snowfall; the
first to be improved when the Selectmen called on the men to
give a day's labor on the highways. The mill itself was the
general gathering place for the men of the community; older
than the church, freer, more democratic, infinitely more com-
fortable. A man could rest himself on a sack of corn and speak
his mind about the government. He could spit satisfyingly
into the mill-race while he argued with a farmer from the
other side of the ridge the probable results of the coming
elections and the advisability of bringing the need of a new
bridge over the Housatonic before the Selectmen's Meeting.

News came to the mills, and went from them to the farthest
hillside cabin. . . . Ben Holmes had heard it said in Boston
by a ship's captain newly come from Malaga, that the English
were landing soldiers in Spain. . . . Queen Anne was poorly.
. . . Would her successor be the Pretender, or some German
princeling? And what would either one of these do for the
colonies? . . . Wheat was six shillings and sixpence the
bushel. . . . The New Haven bakers, to meet the house-

The Mills Grind Slowly 177

wives' demand for a Penny Loaf, were making three sorts of
bread for the price; a white loaf that weighed six ounces; a
whole-wheat loaf of nine and one half ounces weight; and a
generous, twelve-and-one-quarter-ounce Household Loaf, of
whole-wheat and rye and corn. . . . There was a man and a
family with not a word of English to their tongues building a
cabin over in Coon Hollow. ... A peddler on his way back
from the Carolinas reported that the planters down that way
were growing mulberry trees to feed to silkworms — "expect
to make money at it, too." And Elijah Griffin had stopped by
that morning to tell the miller to let folks know he'd caught
a pair of dirty-looking Indians hanging round his wood-lot.
!< 'Lije's got his eye and his musket on 'em. But best tell your
women folks not to go berryin' for a couple o' days."

The work which the Romans began had succeeded. The
mill was a man's world. No woman set foot in it. If a bare-
legged girl in a sunbonnet rode up to the door with sixty
pounds of corn in a sack slung over her horse for a saddle, she
waited shyly outside while the grinding was done.

Meanwhile, inside the dim, dusty-raftered barn there were
the sacks of corn piled and waiting to be ground; there was
the pleasant creak of the big wheel outside, and the rumbling
of the brook under the flooring; there was the sweet smell of
the pale yellow meal running out from under the steadily turn-
ing tedder into the bin.

XI

The Mills Become Towns

IN THE dull little princely town of Hesse, Christopher
Ludwick held the post of court baker. His pudgy fingers
mixed and kneaded dough for the rolls which the Prince
nibbled each morning with his chocolate. He iced the ten-
tiered cakes for the royal weddings. Using a secret recipe of
his own, he made the gilded gingerbread angels which hung
on the little princesses' Christmas trees. The Princess, who
was herself the daughter of the King of England, regularly
praised the excellence of his almond paste.

A happy man, Christopher Ludwick, but for one thing.

That was his son, another Christopher. The baker fre-
quently sighed and shook his head over him. It wasn't as if
the lad were a dummkopf. Ach, neinJ Any man would know
what to do with one of those; put him into the army, and let
the Prince pay for his blunders. No, Christopher was bright
and enterprising enough to be a baker. But he wouldn't be a
baker. That was the trouble. He obstinately refused to be
taught the secrets of the kitchen and the ovens. He was not
even interested in the famous Ludwick gingerbread, the recipe
for which his father promised to impart to him the very
day he completed his apprenticeship.

Instead, Christopher declared that he wanted to see the
world. To travel, as though he were a gentleman. He was
itching with curiosity about other countries — as though Hesse
were not sufficient for any reasonable man. He said he wanted
to see queer, outlandish places like China and Africa and the
English colonies in America.

If the Prince had kept a navy, his court baker would have

178

The Mills Become Towns 179

turned his son over to it with a happy heart. There being
none, and his father's insistence that he join him in the
bakeshop growing every day, young Christopher ran away to
London, and shipped in an English vessel to see the world.

He had had a fair view of it before his father died, leaving
him a tidy little fortune. He went to Hesse to collect it, to sell
the bakeshop and to strut his freedom before the envious
eyes of his old companions. Then he went to London and set
himself to the pleasant task of spending his money. There was
no lack of Germans in that city of which George the Second
was king. Christopher had friends to help him in his spending.
When all but twenty-five pounds of his patrimony was gone,
he shook himself hard, called himself a variety of names in five
languages, invested the twenty-five pounds in some ready-made
clothing and a peddler's pack, and sailed to Philadelphia.

So began the career of the man whom Congress appointed
Superintendent of bakers for the Continental Army, whom
Washington called affectionately "old gentleman," and "my
honest friend." He was to wield a power over the colonial
mills and millers that made him a public official to be respected
and obeyed.

It was in 1753 that Christopher Ludwick had his first sight
of an American city. He managed to see a good deal of it,
and of the country round about while increasing his capital
to one hundred pounds. He made up his mind to stay there.
But first he went back to London where he hunted out a baker
who had learned his trade under Christopher's father in Hesse.
Christopher apprenticed himself to him. He gave two years to
learning all the arts of mixing and icing which he had refused
to learn in Hesse. Especially, he learned the secret of the
famous Ludwick gingerbread. Then he came back to the
colonies and set himself up in his father's trade.

Ludwick's bakeshop was famous in pre-Revolutionary Phila-
delphia. The Quaker aristocracy ate his gingerbread, his
almond cakes and marzipan and signified their approval. The
Schermerhorns and Rittenhouses told each other that never

180 Singing Valleys

had any of them tasted anything more delicious. They ordered
cakes from Christopher Ludwick for all their parties.

Within ten years the baker had piled up a fortune which
more than equaled that which his father had left him. He had
nine houses in the city and a farm at Germantown, and
thirty-five hundred pounds in the bank, when a number of
grave-looking gentlemen began to arrive in Philadelphia from
all of the colonies and went into session in the city hall. The
atmosphere in the city grew tense; rumors went round. Would
the delegates dare to oppose His Majesty's laws? Could the
colonies exist as a free and independent nation?

In those last days of June 1775, the heat in Philadelphia
was intense. But none of the well-to-do families left the city
for their country homes. They stayed on, waiting on tenter-
hooks for the decision which the delegates should make. And
meanwhile Christopher Ludwick baked his loaves of bread, and
his cakes and his gingerbread to be eaten by men and women
who talked anxiously of the future. "If it comes to war . . ."

"If it comes to war . . ." thought the baker. And with in-
stinctive German thrift he set about securing a supply of
flour to be stored in his cellars. He went about buying wheat
and corn before the prices should go up. He bargained with
farmers for that fall's harvest. War meant men leaving the
fields to fight. It meant increased demands for food. If Eng-
land sent an army to quell the threatening revolution, that
army would require to be fed.

The bell in the city hall began to peal. It was the signal
the city had been waiting for. "Freedom . . ." "An independ-
ent nation . . ." "And now, for a certainty there will be
war. . . ."

Men who had been waiting with horses ready saddled to
ride with the news to Richmond and to Boston and to New
York set spurs to their mounts and galloped over the bridges,
away. Quaker merchants came home from their counting
offices and told their wives to have the doors and windows
locked and barred, and to buy supplies for a long emergency.

The Mills Become Towns 181

The officers of the militia called their men and commandeered
rations. Up went the price of wheat — up went the price of
corn. Farmers stationed their sons beside the green fields of
growing grain to protect the crops.

A plump little man in a pair of nankeen breeches and a
blue coat with shining silver buttons — a little man who looked
not unlike the caricatures of King George III which were set
up all over the city, appeared at militia headquarters.

"Mr. Christopher Ludwick to see the commanding officer."

The officer knew the name. Too, the Governor of Laetitia
Court was a well-known figure in the city. He was shown in
to the Colonel at once.

What Mr. Christopher Ludwick had come to do was to
turn over his supply of flour and grain, and his bake-ovens, to
the use of the Continental Army. He had come, too, to offer
his own services. Not as a soldier — for that he was too old and
too corpulent. No, but as a baker. There was no one in the
colonies, he ventured to say without boasting, better skilled
than he in the trade. No one who could get more out of a
pound of flour than he. No one with more cleverness in
substituting corn meal for costly wheat flour, and molasses for
sugar. Let him bake for the army, and the troops could be
sure of good bread.

So Christopher Ludwick served the cause of a free America
in a white apron and cap. He marshaled his cooks and he
measured out the supplies to them, keeping sharp watch of
every ounce. When the flour and the grain he had bought
were gone, he used his own money to buy more. He mounted
his fat pony — looking more than ever like King George —
and rode to the mills round about Philadelphia. There he over-
saw the grinding of the army's corn.

Each miller has his own way of grinding corn meal. Some of
them crack the corn first before feeding it into the tedder.
Some of them leave the stones far apart, making a coarse meal.
Others tighten the stones, and grind the kernels into a meal
only slightly rougher than a flour.

182 Singing Valleys

"Give me as fine a meal as you can grind," Christopher Lud-
wick told the millers. 'Til bake bread with that corn that the
men won't know from wheat; except that they'll get more
fighting strength out of it."

And then he watched that the millers took no toll of the
army's grain. "Every kernel in those sacks has got to go to feed
a soldier. An army can't fight without food. The farmers have
got to raise the corn, you millers have got to grind it, I and
my men will make it into bread. That's the way the colonies
will win. It's the only way."

The city of Philadelphia remembers Christopher Ludwick
for what he did for his fellow townsmen during the yellow
fever epidemic fifteen years after the war; and for his bequest
to the poor children of the city. The army remembers him
for his cleverness in going as a spy to the Hessian camps. He
peddled his famous gingerbread to the soldiers, and brought
back news. Moreover, he persuaded more than one Hessian to
desert his regiment and accept the Continental Congress's
offer of fifty acres of good farm land and American citizenship.

"Better be an American farmer, and free," the gingerbread
peddler counseled, "than to lose your lives fighting for a cause
that is not yours; and for a king you never saw."

But not the least of the little baker's services to his chosen
country was his work before the ovens and at the grist mills.
He had a jealous concern for every bushel of corn the army
bought.

"Give me the corn, sir," he said to Washington, "and your
troops will be fed. Not a toddick of it but goes into a loaf. As
long as there's a farmer left to plant corn we'll keep the army
in the field."

There are mills in this country which "Baker-General" Lud-
wick may well have visited, and which are still grinding corn.
One, not far from Valley Forge, ran until a very few years
ago. A sign in front of the old stone building tells that it
served the Continental Army.

The Mills Become Towns 183

At Milford, Connecticut, not half a mile off the Boston Post
Road, stands the Rose Mill. For two hundred and thirty-three
years, Fairfield County farmers have been bringing their rye,
buckwheat and corn there to be ground. When the old Post
Road became a wide, concrete highway, crowded with motor
traffic and lined with hot dog stands, shore dinner restau-
rants, gas stations and booths for the sale of garden pottery,
evergreens, toy windmills, maple sugar hearts, Mexican glass
and sweet corn in season, many people thought the need for
the old mill was over. They said the "summer people" were
pushing the farmers out of the county. Summer people didn't
farm. They let the cornfields go to daisies and ragweed, and
called it picturesque. Was it likely that a speed-crazed genera-
tion would wait for water power to turn buhrstones to grind
grain? Not when they could hop into their cars and ride to
Bridgeport and buy package goods at the chain stores. "Folks
want their things in cellophane, nowadays."

But the Rose Mill continued to grind. It was a New York
business man who saw its possibilities and bought it and the
old white house beside the millpond from the miller, who
had been there nearly seventy years. And it was an enterpris-
ing, modern woman, living in Fairfield, who conceived the
idea that people might like to buy bread which tasted home-
made, and which was made from flour ground at a historic,
colonial mill. Pepperidge Farm Bread became an instantaneous
success. New Yorkers were glad to pay a higher price for
bread they liked the taste of. The demand went up to ten
thousand loaves a week. The stones at the Rose Mill are kept
busy grinding whole wheat, buckwheat, rye and corn for Pep-
peridge Farm and for other customers. An early American
industry which seemed doomed to pass away has been revived,
and has become a sizable, modern business.

Van Wyck's Mill, at Fishkill Plains, in Dutchess County,
New York, is only a few years short of the Rose Mill's record.
It was in 1722 that William Verplanck, a nephew of the
Hudson River patroon, built a mill and a house at the far

184 Singing Valleys

eastern end of the family patent. When the first Verplanck
had bought thirteen miles along the river and as far to the
east as he could see — and had prudently climbed the highest
mountain in the tract to take that look — the wealth of the
land was in the furs it produced. But gradually English farmers
began moving into the eastern end of it from Connecticut,
closing in upon the river-bank Dutch. William Verplanck was
ready for them when they came. His mill was there to grind
the corn they raised.

How lucrative milling could be is shown by the house which
a grandson of the first miller built across the road from the mill
some forty years later. The low, red brick dwelling still stands
and in its original condition, with its fine, carved doorway,
paneled walls and floors of native oak in wide, hand-hewn
planks. Only once in more than two centuries have house and
mill and the thousand acres of farm land been sold. In 1828,
Colonel Richard Van Wyck, a relative of the Verplancks,
bought them. His descendants still live there and keep the
mill.

In Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, the house of the miller
of Millbach has been made a state museum. The farms in the
rich valley of Mill Run poured wealth into Jerg Miller's mill
and enabled him and his wife Maria to build a fine stone house.
Today this is filled with specimens of early Pennsylvania
Dutch furniture, pottery and homespuns.

Another mill which did service in pre-Revolutionary times
still stands and grinds near Bernardsville, New Jersey. Mention
has already been made of one in Columbia, South Carolina;
and Tidewater Virginia has several plantation grist mills which
have been grinding corn for more than two centuries.

As the tide moved westward, the frontiersmen built mills.
Brank's mill in Buncombe County, North Carolina, was one
of the earliest landmarks in the mountains. One, built by
the settler Reems on a creek named for him which empties
into the French Broad in western North Carolina, com-
bined the uses of a mill, a fort and a store. It was the first

The Mills Become Towns 185

building put up on the far side of the mountains. The upper
waters of the creek thread cornfields which are thirty-five
hundred feet above sea level. There were years when those
fields yielded fifty bushels of corn per acre.

The men who pushed westward, beyond Reems' fort and
mill, were rebels against the power of the trading class in the
Carolinas. In Cumberland Gap, in Tennessee, they built an-
other mill with an enormous overshot wheel which still stands
there, though ruined. Those who built it were the men who
gathered under the spreading tree on the Watauga and formed
the first republic on this continent to be based on a written
constitution framed by a community of American-born free-
men.

The New Englanders who followed in single file the cov-
ered wagon with the words FOR THE OHIO COUNTRY painted
on its black canvas top, as this started out at Ipswich, Massa-
chusetts, on December 3, 1787, had an eight-weeks march
before they came to SummernTs Ferry on the Youghiogheny.
The spring floods took them, and the twenty-six others who
had made the trip with Rufus Putnam, down the Ohio to the
mouth of the Muskingum. It was on that stream that they
built the first grist mill in the Black Wilderness. The mill was
also the first business venture west of the Ohio. In that rich
corn land it paid profitable dividends.

By the charter of the Ohio Company, lots were set aside for
mills, schools and churches, "the three essentials of civiliza-
tion." The first grist mill in Ohio was that built on Wolf
Creek two miles from its junction with the Muskingum River
by Colonel Robert Oliver, Major Hatfield White and Captain
John Dodge, all veterans of the Revolution. The stones were
brought from Laurel Hill, Pennsylvania, and the mill was ready
to grind in 1790. Its record flow was fifteen bushels per hour.
Today a Grange Hall stands on part of the foundations of
the original mill. Men who had spent their youth fighting
the Indians, the French and the English looked forward to
a comfortable and prosperous old age as millers. It was the one

186 Singing Valleys

business which the frontier afforded. George Rogers Clark
ended his days as proprietor of a ferry and of a mill on the
Indiana shore of the Ohio. This was not a come-down in
the social or economic scale of the frontier. The ferry and the
mill represented security. They gave their owner a position in
that constantly changing world. Usually the miller was the
Justice of the Peace, the banker and the sole representative of
law and order. He stayed put, while other men pushed on into
the wilderness. His mill and his store, his house — which was
frequently a tavern as well — where travelers were fed on rye
coffee, pork and corn bread, and put to sleep on cornhusk
mattresses, were the first civilizing influences in a raw, new
territory.

Bonnot/s Mill, on the Osage west of St. Louis, was mill and
fort in the days before the Louisiana Purchase. Once, during
an Indian attack, while the men were busy with the guns, the
wife of the French governor discovered that fire had broken
out in the mill which was also the storehouse for the settle-
ment. There was no water available to quench the flames. But
Madame called the other women, they ran to the sleeping
quarters and brought forth homely vessels seldom seen at a
fire brigade. They saved the mill, and the fort. And the gal-
lants of St. Louis presented Madame with a silver pot de
chambre in recognition of her feat.

The grinding of grain was a winter occupation. The fall
harvest was seldom dry enough to be ground before Decem-
ber, and all of it was milled by April. From spring to winter
the mills would have stood idle had not the millers used the
big water wheels to run sawmills, cider presses, flax-brakes,
fulling mills and mills for the manufacture of gunpowder. The
first of this ever made in Massachusetts was turned out by
the grist mill in Dorchester, in 1675.

This widely increased use of the grist mills was made pos-
sible by the discovery of iron ore, first in Saugus bog, later
near Salisbury, Connecticut. Iron bolts, bearings, screws and

The Mills Become Towns 187

shafts to replace the more primitive wooden ones enabled the
millers to add to their occupations. After the Revolution
scores of grist mills along the little rivers of New England
turned into factories for the making of tools, nails, notions,
cotton and woolen goods. Their products were sent out in
Yankee clipper ships to be sold all over the world. They were
loaded on Conestoga wagons and carted to the western
frontier.

One of Plymouth's old grist mills became Eli Terry's clock
factory. When he started work on five hundred clocks at once,
his neighbors shook their heads, aghast at such temerity. They
said there weren't five hundred people to buy clocks in the
whole country. Two years later, Terry sold out to two of his
workmen, Seth Thomas and Silas Hadley, to devote his time
to designing new models. One of these, for which Thomas paid
him one thousand dollars, was used to make six thousand
clocks one year, and twelve thousand the next. Each copy
sold for fifteen dollars.

At the close of the Revolution, the valleys of western New
York State were still held by the Iroquois Indians. But in the
same year that the first settlers started for Ohio, others began
pouring into the country around the Finger Lakes, "like bees
out of the Connecticut hive." A settlement was made at
Mountville on Owasco Lake in Cayuga County. Naturally
enough, the first business in the town was a grist mill. Ten
years later there had been added to the grist mill a barrel
factory, a triphammer factory, a harness factory, an auger fac-
tory, a plow factory, a scythe factory, a distillery, a linseed-oil
mill and a woolen mill. It was in the last that Millard Fillmore
served his apprenticeship.

The plow factory manufactured wooden moldboard plows.
This was the type generally in use on American farms. Vari-
ous experiments had been made with it. Jefferson spent some
time working out a scientific basis for the curve of the mold-
board; and a man named Newbold, living in New Jersey, had
patented a plow with an iron share, in 1797. But farmers are

i88 Singing Valleys

by nature cautious about newfangled contraptions. New-
bold's plow was practically unknown at the time that a small
boy named Jethro Wood, living on a farm on Poplar Ridge,
not far from Mountville, began some experiments of his own.
There is a story that little Jethro, at the age of five, melted
down his mother's pewter spoons and made a plow of the
metal. Then he cut bits from his father's boots to make har-
ness for the cat. He hitched the animal to the plow and ran a
furrow across the dooryard before discovery and punishment
came simultaneously. After that, he confined his experiments
to wood and turnips, from which he whittled various designs
for plows. One of these was his model when he melted iron
in a potash kettle lined with clay and made from it an iron
plow.

The year 1819, when the first iron plow was patented, is a
milestone in the story of American agriculture. Not that the
farmers took to it at once. They did not. Jethro Wood had to
give several of them away to make his invention known. Too,
American farmers looked even a gift-plow in the teeth. They
said the iron would poison the soil and would grow weeds.
That it would shorten the hours of labor and turn back the soil
in a deeper furrow than any wooden plow could turn was
something they had to learn.

But it was Jethro Wood's plow and Cyrus McCormick's
reaper which conquered the corn belt and the farther prairies.
Today, when the great wheat and corn farms are plowed by
tractors which turn over eighty to one hundred acres a day, it
is hard to realize that a gang-plow, drawn by five horses, which
could plow five to seven acres a day, was a notable agricultural
achievement. In 1850, four and one-half hours of labor were
required to raise one bushel of corn. Forty-five years later, the
labor was cut to forty-one minutes. That was before the days
of motor power on the farm. Today, the United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture estimates that one bushel of corn costs
sixteen minutes of labor to produce.

Horace Greeley, whose enthusiasm for the development of

The Mills Become Towns 189

the west was only equaled by his amazement that so many
people actually took the trail to Oregon, dedicated his book,
What I Know About Farming,

To the man of our age

Who shall make the first plough propelled by steam
Or other mechanical power.
Whereby not less than ten acres per day
Shall be thoroughly pulverized to a depth of two feet,
At a cost of not more than two dollars per acre,
This work is admiringly dedicated by
The Author.

The grist mills, run by water power, served the farmer di-
rectly. The toll which the miller took out of every turn was
fixed by law. He sold this to neighbors who did not raise their
own grain, or to the stores in the nearest towns.

Essentially, the grist mill was a community enterprise. Frank-
lin pointed out in his Almanack that it was the link between
agriculture and industry. It was in its way a symbol of the
simple democracy which obtained in this country before in-
dustrial wealth and power rose to the proportions of an eco-
nomic problem. Long after iron rolling mills, which were
made in England and in France, supplanted the buhrstones
for wheat and rye flour-milling, milling as a business was still
conducted along very simple lines. Oliver Evans, who fathered
so many mechanical inventions, devised a mill which required
no hand labor. Thus, at a distance of eighty years, the present
unemployment problem was forecast.

For as long as water power was the only power known, grain
farming was held in check. It did not pay to raise large crops
of wheat or corn many miles from a mill. And mills depended
on water to turn their stones or rollers. In the east, where
hundreds of little rivers flowed seaward from the fall line, this
did not constitute a problem. But west of the Ohio, in the
Black Wilderness, the value of farm land depended not only

190 Singing Valleys

on the richness of the soil, but on the distance to the nearest
mill, or to a canal which led to one.

It was the urgent need to get the corn to the mills that set
Ohio to digging a network of canals. What effect these had on
the development of the state is shown by the fact that during
the decade between 1840 and 1850 the population of those
counties through which the canals passed increased 400 per-
cent. The Ohio canals turned the tide of Ohio corn to New
York, and away from New Orleans.

The drivers of the Conestoga wagons who had made big
profits carting eastern goods to the western market and bring-
ing farm produce from the midwest over the Alleghenies to
the towns in the east, cursed the canals and the men who dug
them. At the taverns on the roads they passed the jug of
Monongahela whiskey around the table and drank

Bad luck to the man who invented the plan,
And beggared us waggoners, and every other man.

It seems impossible to tell the story of the rise of the Amer-
ican people without referring again and again to that Scotch-
Irish strain which stiffened the national backbone.

An Ulster immigrant, Thomas McCormick by name, set-
tled in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, in 1735. His son,
Robert, took the trail southward into the Valley of Virginia.
His son, another Robert, born in Rockbridge County, was a
blacksmith with a turn for invention. He made at his forge
several devices for use in grist mills, and worked at a crude
threshing machine and a horse-drawn reaper. On the last two
he was helped by his son, Cyrus Hall McCormick. Together,
on their two-thousand-acre farm, father and son dreamed of
machinery which would supplement manpower. Machinery
which would enable man to conquer more and more acres
of the waiting wild land, and which would pile up golden
harvests to be made into bread.

A little more than ten years after Jethro Wood patented
his iron plow, Cyrus Hall McCormick came along with a

The Mills Become Towns 191

mechanical reaper. Men who watched the clumsy machine
move across the fields cutting swathes of the standing grain
saw that this, with the plow, would make them conquerors of
the prairies.

True, there were no mills as yet in those miles of unbroken
grasslands. But flour-milling no longer depended on water
power. For there was steam. With steam at his command, man
could build mills wherever he grew wheat and corn. He could
plow the prairie in the tracks of the buffalo; he could reap the
harvest; and he could turn the golden wheat into flour in the
mills he would build.

The plow and the reaper and the steam-driven mills con-
quered the midwest. They carried America to the foot of the
Rockies. In 1849, Minnesota could count five thousand white
inhabitants. Seven years later she was a state with a popula-
tion of one hundred thousand. On the river bank, where Pig-
Eye had his saloon, and where the Indians brought their furs
to trade, men built mills to grind the harvests reaped from
those generous fields. Twin cities grew up around the mills.
The boats lying in the river basin were loaded with sacks of
wheat flour and of corn meal which they carried down stream
to the Gulf, and to all the ports of all the world.

"Some day," men said, "we won't have to ship flour by
the river. Some day the railroads will come."

Chiefly it was wheat which the big, steam-turned mills
ground. The demand for corn meal came largely from the
rural districts, and there the old-fashioned, water-driven grist
mills continued to make better corn meal than the steam-
power mills could turn out.

True, packaged corn meal, made by the big commercial
millers who had driven most of the local millers in the country
out of business, kept better than the water-ground meal did.
But Americans who had grown up on yellow bread wanted
something more than mere economy. They wanted flavor. In
the South the Negroes sang:

192 Singing Valleys

Cawn bread an' de black molasses

Is better dan honey en hash

Fer de fahm-han' coon en de light quadroon,

Along wid de po' white trash.

"Cawn bread" meant pones or batter cakes made from meal
ground between stones, and with the rich germ left in it.

It was this demand for flavor as against economy and mod-
ern merchandizing that preserved scores of old grist mills
throughout the country. The steam mills turned out better
wheat flour than the flow from the buhrstones. But wheat was
not like American corn. An alien grain, it submitted to
processes which standardized it. It imposed no restrictions on
the millers.

The corn did.

You could no more run it through a steam-rolling mill and
preserve its natural characteristics than you could enjoin Amer-
icans to become cogs in an industrial machine. Those who
submitted themselves to the mill — like the American corn —
lost the germ of their integrity in the milling process.

There is a deep significance, I believe, in the interest which
has grown steadily in recent years in whatever is "American."
As I see it, we are a people striving to recapture our own
flavor. It was very nearly milled out of us, thanks to Big
Business and bombastic advertising, and the zeal for standard-
ized equipment and schools and textbooks and college courses.
Thanks, too, to the enthusiasm for whatever was European
which followed naturally our rediscovery of Europe during
the World War.

But gradually the pendulum is swinging back.

Some of the terse, vivid American speech is coming back to
tongues which learned sophistication from the novels of
American authors who found their egos suffered less in Paris
or in Juan les Pins than in Gallipolis or Newburg. There is an
American look — it may have come from gazing steadily down
a rifle barrel at a wildcat or a grizzly. There is an American

The Mills Become Towns 193

willingness to "make shift" with what we have that I suspect
communists and fascists alike find distinctly irritating. Finally,
there is an American humor; though this is unknown to Broad-
way and to Hollywood. Perhaps, for that fact, it is all the
more precious, like the cypripedium aureale, or the fringed
blue gentian.

These are the ingredients of that flavor which is distinctly
American. Like the flavor of the American corn, it is too good
for us to suffer any social or political process, whether of our
own or of foreign invention, to mill it out of us.

XII

With Milk and Sugar Blest

JUST what is this corn which nourishes men and cattle,
which has opened vast new territories, dictated political
policies, built cities and railroads, and packed canals and rivers
with traffic — which, in short, has made American history?

Pull one of the kernels from an ear of corn. The rounded
top of the grain is golden yellow and hard. Even the tough
beak of a greedy barnyard fowl cannot peck it apart. The sides
of the kernels which have pressed against others in the ear are
paler in color and not quite so hard. At the base, which fits
neatly into a tiny hollow in the cob, the hull ends, leaving a
small opening into the center of the grain. Through that chan-
nel the juices of the plant have flowed to nourish each separate
kernel in the ear as it grew.

Now, with a sharp knife, cut the kernel vertically in two.
Even without a microscope you can see that the contents of
the horny hull are composed of two distinct parts. At the base,
where it is nourished directly, is a bit of substance darker than
the rest. This is the germ.

Look well at that bit of oily vegetable matter. It is no bigger
than a well-fed dog's flea, yet it holds the entire history of
zea mays. All this book, and infinitely more, is in that speck
which can be lost under your little fingernail. You cannot read
that history; but no more can you change it. It is more fixed
than the pyramids, and infinitely more mysterious. The
memories folded away in that bit of corn germ embrace the
milpas of the Maya and the unwritten wanderings of the corn,
back and forth across the Andes and Cordilleras. It knows the
degrees of relationship between teosinte and tripsacum. It

194

With Milk and Sugar Blest 195

remembers the ways of the Ozark bluff-dwellers, and the
harvest customs of the men who raised the earth mounds in
the valley of the Ohio. It recalls the Green Corn Thanksgiv-
ings of the Iroquois. Jamestown is there; and Plymouth. And
farmers whose names are gone even from the sagging stones
in country graveyards. They fertilized an ear of one variety of
corn with the pollen from a different variety, and produced a
new line.

But that tiny germ holds more than the past. The future is
there, as well. Somewhere within that tiny womb, though in-
visible to the keenest microscope, there are roots with power
to drive three feet into the earth. There is a stalk — round and
jointed and glossy green — which can spring twenty feet into
the air. There are crisp leaves to flutter like pennons in the
wind. There is a proud, pale yellow tassel. And on that tassel
eighteen million grains of pollen, each and every one of which
has power to fertilize the virgin ears.

A million, million bushels of corn stored in that infinitesimal
fleck of vegetable matter!

The corn germ is destiny. But even destiny has to be sus-
tained. Round and about the germ, keeping it warm and safe,
and ready to its use when the time comes, is a store of food.
This is the endosperm, which fills all the rest of the kernel
inside the hull.

If you plant this kernel of corn in the earth — before cutting
it, of course — what happens is just this: the warmth and
moisture of the soil soften the hull. At the same time the
moisture, seeping into the germ through the tiny hole at the
base of the kernel, awakens the dormant life within it. The
germ begins to grow. Immediately its need for food on which
to grow is telegraphed to the endosperm, and the supply of
protein and carbohydrates stored there are made available to
the embryo. Presently, a pale, fragile rootlet stretches out from
the base of the kernel, and fastens into the earth. Then another
comes. Then another. Meanwhile the top of the hull cracks,
and an inquiring leaf sprout emerges, and starts to work its

196 Singing Valleys

way upward through the earth of the hill toward the air and
sunshine. One day, about a week or ten days after you dropped
that kernel of corn into the hill, if the weather is favorable, a
brave green leaf shows itself above ground.

The crows will see it, if you don't.

That green leaf comes through the ground only just in time.
Like the chick when it comes out of the shell, it is ravenously
hungry. It has eaten up all the food supply that Nature put
into the hull for it, and it reaches out greedily for more, and
more. Now the earth feeds it. The air supplies it with oxygen,
and the sun's rays work chemical changes in the stalk and
leaves as they grow. Nothing is left of that yellow kernel you
once held in your hand. Even the horny hull has disintegrated,
and contributed its bit of nourishment to the growing plant.

This follows the general plan of the growth of every seed.
Except that the corn is not a seed, but a fruit. It is classed as a
fruit because the tough skin of the hull is actually the seed
vessel in which the seed is formed.

Every seed, even one as tiny as a grain of mustard seed,
contains the life germ of the plant and a store of food to
nourish the embryo as this develops toward planthood. The
endosperm of every seed of grain — whether wheat, barley, mil-
let, rye, rice or corn — contains carbohydrates and protein for
the food supply. It contains some fat too; but most of the
fat supply is in the germ itself. The endosperm of the Amer-
ican corn is richer in carbohydrates than is the endosperm of
any other cereal grain, except rice.

That high starch content in the substance which surrounds
the germ in the kernel of corn is the story of this chapter.

Eighty percent of this country's corn crop never leaves the
farms on which it is grown. It is fed to hogs, to poultry, to
horses and to cattle. Its cheapness, and its high percentage of
starch make it the ideal food to fatten animals for market.

But corn has another value on the farm besides that of mak-
ing pork and bacon and lard and beef. Corn is milk. And milk

With Milk and Sugar Blest 197

forms 20 percent of the total food of the people of the United
States.

Did you know that somewhere in this country your family
has a cow?

The more than thirty-six million dairy cows in the United
States, which statisticians have figured out as one cow to every
American family, carry the largest part of the national farm
program. They give us about one hundred billion pounds of
milk annually, which means an average of forty gallons per
capita. Our consumption of milk has been going up steadily
during the past twenty years. When Dr. E. V. McCollum,
working in the laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, dis-
covered the vitamins, and how these hitherto unknown ele-
ments in our food affected our health, and that milk was the
greatest single source of all six vitamins, he started a run on the
dairies.

Men and women who had not drunk milk since they cut
their first teeth got so interested in vitamins A, B, C, D, E and
G and what these would do for them, that they gave up coffee
or tea at least once a day for milk. Girls who wanted Holly-
wood complexions and shining eyes ran for the milk bottle.
Schools began to serve milk to pupils, and records showed that
marks in classes went up in proportion to the amount of milk
consumed. Milk bars opened on crowded city streets. Finally,
the debutantes decreed that it was smart to drink milk at all-
night parties.

This enthusiastic milk craze, which shows no sign of lessen-
ing, developed dairy farming all over the country, until it
became what it is today — the largest single source of income
to American farmers. Twenty-six percent of the total receipts
of agriculture come from the sale of dairy products, and of
dairy animals sold for meat. There have been years when
the butter, cheese, milk and eggs raised on our farms exceeded
the value of the nation's wheat crop.

All this is actually a by-product of the American corn.

In her simple way, the cow is a milk-making machine. The

198 Singing Valleys

amount of milk she gives and the quality of it depend very
directly on what she is fed, and how much of it. That is some-
thing which we have learned in the past century.

The first English colonists in this country hastened to im-
port cattle. In 1624, Edward Winslow brought to Plymouth
"three heifers and a bull, the first beginning of any cattell of
the kind in the land." "The land" meant Massachusetts; Vir-
ginia had had cattle before John Smith returned to England.
A great many of the beasts perished during the sea voyage.
John Winthrop notes in his Journal for July, 1630,

The Mayflower and the Whale arrived safe in Charlton harbor.
Their passengers were all in health, but most of their cattle dead,
whereof a mare and a horse of mine.

And in October of the same year, the same diarist records:

The Handmaid arrived at Plymouth having been 12 weeks at
sea, and spent all her masts and of 28 cows she lost 10.

Captain John Smith, in speaking of the storms of the Atlantic
and the perils of the supply ships, adds, "Of 200 cattell what
were so tossed and bruised, three score and ten died."

One might think that beasts which were transported with
such difficulty would have been so valuable that their owners
would have tended them jealously. On the contrary. In Eng-
land, at the time, farm animals received little care. Cows
grazed summer and winter alike. The colonists brought these
casual methods with them. A cow might be given a few corn
husks and some wheat stalks; but for the rest of her food she
was supposed to forage. As the wild American grass was quite
different from that of the lush English meadows, the beasts
became thin and diseased. They gave small quantities of milk,
and this for only a short period in the year. During the bit-
terly cold winters they huddled in thickets, or crashed into the
marshes seeking food there. In Virginia, it was estimated that
the number of cows which died every winter would supply the
Negroes and indentured servants with hides for shoes. When

With Milk and Sugar Blest 199

one of the emaciated creatures was seen staggering about the
pasture lot in the spring, the farmer would cut a crotch of
dogwood and fasten it about her neck, believing this would
cure her of the effects of months of starvation. However, the
German farmers in Pennsylvania gave their cattle the same
care they had given them in Europe, taking them into the
houses during the winters. To this day the barns in York and
Lancaster Counties are far more imposing and better built
than the farmhouses.

As the settlers moved westward, they drove their cattle
before them. The farms along the Connecticut River pro-
vided good pasturage. Later, Connecticut Valley butter and
cheese had a reputation throughout the colonies and in the
West Indies, to which quantities of these were shipped.
Rhode Island, too, was a dairy state. The salt hay of the
meadows running down to its indented shore was good food
for milch cows and for horses. Hull, the maker of Massachu-
setts' pine-tree shillings, conceived the idea of breeding horses
on the land near Point Judith. Narragansett pacers became
famous all over the colonies, and a source of income to Rhode
Island breeders. In Europe the gait of the pacer was a novelty.
It was said the colts learned it by being kept in the same field
with cows.

Though it was a boast in Carolina, in 1666, that it cost no
more to raise an ox there than it cost to raise a hen in England,
there was little advance in dairying in this country until the
middle of the last century. Up to that time it was accepted
that cows would freshen in the spring, give milk through the
summer, dry up in the fall and continue so until another
spring. Apparently it had not occurred to anyone that the milk-
giving period could be prolonged by proper feeding. Indeed,
many farmers held that a dry cow was better off with very
little food of any sort. In consequence of these dairying
methods, milk was scarce and expensive during the winter
months. Children got less of it. In colonial times babies were
encouraged to dunk their corn bread in warmed cider, in lieu

2OO Singing Valleys

of milk. But a century later, cider had come under a moral ban.
There were babies who got pork gravy instead. In those years
America shocked the world by her high infant mortality rate.

Until quite recent years, the milkman drove into town from
the farm very early in the morning, and went from house to
house, dipping the raw milk from his cans into the pitchers
which were set out for him on every doorstep. Milk was just
milk. There was no thought of grading it by its butter-fat
content. As for pasteurization — no one expected milk to keep
sweet longer than thirty-six hours. No one expected, either,
that cows and cow barns should be anything but dirty. As for
the milker's hands — when he sat down on the stool, he pulled
a little milk from the cow's udders onto his hands, rubbed
them well and let the drops run off his hands into the pail.
This preliminary ritual over, he leaned his forehead against
the cow's flank and went to work in earnest, until the warm
milk foamed over the sides of the pail.

The tremendous and rapid advance in dairying methods and
in the amount of milk produced in this country has all come
about within the past seventy years. The shipment of milk
to the cities first by rail, later by tank trucks, the discovery of
a means of condensing milk to be sold in cans, and the inven-
tion of the cream separator, turned dairying into a business.
It now represents 23 percent of America's income from agri-
culture.

The first step toward this was the improvement of the dairy
herds throughout the country. Probably the two men who did
the most to teach farmers that there was more money to be
made from cows of good stock, which were well fed and
tended, were Governor W. D. Hoard of Wisconsin, and J. H.
Monrad who served Illinois as assistant dairy commissioner.
Governor Hoard's writings in the agricultural journals of his
state and his speeches on the subject of dairying built up the
wealth Wisconsin has today. They also made Wisconsin a
corn-growing state. Far and away the greatest part of its corn
goes into the silos beside the barns to be fed to dairy herds
through the winter. The milk that comes from those herds

With Milk and Sugar Blest 201

goes to the cheese factories which turn out some eighteen vari-
eties of cheeses, under four hundred different names. Cheeses,
like Roquefort, which are made of ewes' milk in Europe, are
made of cows' milk in this country.

Our consumption of cheese is going up every year, as we
make better and still better cheeses. Strangely enough, as our
appetites for cheese grows, our taste for butter declines. We
are eating less butter and drinking more milk and eating more
cheese year by year.

It is not the cow's feed, but her breed, which determines
the richness of her milk. The Jersey leads the list in the pro-
portion of butter-fat and protein per pound of milk. The
Guernsey comes second. The black and white Holstein-
Friesian cattle give the greatest quantity of milk of any of
the breeds, but it is the lowest in fat and protein. No matter
how richly you feed a Holstein, you cannot increase the pro-
portion of fat in the milk. You get more milk, and through
a longer period; but the quality remains the same.

Every year our cows eat about half as much corn as we feed
to our hogs. This is not calculable in bushels because most of
it goes into ensilage, which means that stalks, leaves and ears
are chopped and packed into the silos for fodder. The round
towers beside the dairy barns are the first line of defense of
the nation's health. In the well-managed dairy herds, the daily
ration per cow is thirty pounds of silage (which means corn)
and ten pounds of clover or alfalfa hay. Cows which are fed
on this diet, with some cereal grain or prepared gluten feed
(also made from corn) frequently give forty-five pounds of
milk per day.

The chief ingredient in milk is water. One hundred pounds
of cows' milk contain eighty-seven pounds of water. The re-
maining thirteen pounds are divided thus:

4 Ibs. butter-fat

3^ Ibs. protein (casein and albumin)

5 Ibs. milk sugar

y^ Ib. mineral (ash)

202 Singing Valleys

Of these, the three and one-half pounds of protein, and
the three-fourths of a pound of mineral matter are the most
important ingredients as far as the healthful qualities of milk
are concerned. We can live a long time without fat or carbo-
hydrates. But not without protein. The last is needed to build
up the worn tissues of the body, to develop muscles, nerves,
skin, blood and lymph. The body of the average man is fifteen
percent protein. The adult requires one-half gram of protein
per pound body weight daily to keep in condition. Milk is a
valuable source of protein. It also affords phosphorus and
calcium. A pound of milk contains three times as much cal-
cium as a pound of wheat. It greatly exceeds the calcium
content of corn, though the corn is necessary to the making
of the milk. Too, cows' milk has four times as much calcium
as human milk contains. Bottle-fed babies should develop
good bones and teeth.

Do you know what gives beefsteak its distinctive, delicious
flavor? Protein. It's the protein you taste in beef tea and in
soups made of beef. All protein does not taste the same. But
the protein of the kernel of com and the protein in the
porterhouse steak taste so much alike that no epicure can tell
the difference. Perhaps that is what makes corn the ideal food
for cattle. At any rate, the corn protein is valuable to the soup
and seasoning manufacturer as a beef substitute which has
both the flavor and the food value of the meat.

Casein, which is one of the protein ingredients in milk, is
unlike anything found in any other food. It is this which
forms the skin on milk when heated. It is also the basis of
cheese. Casein has commercial values aside from the dairy. It
is used in plastics and to make substitutes for tortoise shell.
The comb you run through your hair was once a gallon or
two of milk. A month or two before that, it was an acre of
corn growing in a field. A hawk circled over it, watching for
field mice intent on stealing the grain.

The polish on the body of your new car came out of a
milk pail. So did some of the glue in the cold-water paints

With Milk and Sugar Blest 203

that finish your house walls. Eighty percent of all the casein
that goes into industry is used to size paper. However, the
corn does not have to go through the dairy to get into our
books and magazines and wallpaper. Even more cornstarch
than casein is used in paper manufacturing and finishing.

The corn which comes to us by way of the cow is chiefly
valuable as food. As butter and cheese and milk and cream.
As kefir and koumis and yoghurt and clabber. The first of
these soured milk foods is made by the natives of the Caucasus.
They make a yeast of grains of kefir, add it to milk and allow
fermentation to take place. Then the milk is strained and
cooled before serving. Like kefir, yoghurt is reputed to do
great things for one by cleansing the lower intestine. It was
Dr. Metchnikoff, director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris,
who advanced the claims of yoghurt, or Bulgarian soured milk.
He discovered that the peasants of that part of the Balkans,
in whose diet yoghurt figured largely, lived to a great old age.
Metchnikoff attributed this longevity to the action of the
soured milk on the lower intestine. Immediately Paris res-
taurants featured yoghurt on their menus, and the elderly rich
all over the world clamored for soured milk and youth. Amer-
icans who grew up on farms, or in the days before milk was
pasteurized, did not need a foreign doctor to prescribe clab-
ber to them.

Of course you can't make clabber in all weathers. The best
clabber requires a sultry day and a thunderstorm to sour the
new milk quickly. Lacking a dash of lightning, you can set
the crock of milk close to the kitchen stove until the milk turns
and becomes solid. Then it should be set on ice, or in the
spring-house to chill. Cold clabber with sugar, cream and
nutmeg is the finest of all milk desserts. It even seriously
rivals ice cream. Not in popularity, of course. Nothing else
approaches that. We Americans eat two gallons of ice cream
per person, annually. And our appetite for it increases every
year. It is our national sweet.

204 Singing Valleys

Ice cream is a product of American corn. Not only does the
milk which goes into its manufacture come from corn-fed
cows; also the sweetness of the cream is created by corn sugar,
or dextrose. Out of that starchy endosperm in the kernel of
corn which Nature provided for the feeding of the embryo
plant come syrups and sugars which rival the sweets of the
cane.

Maize and sugar made political history on this hemisphere.
When Spain had exhausted the mines in the West Indies, she
let the islands go to France and Britain. The new owners in
the Caribbean Sea imported sugar cane from India, planted it
in all the islands and reaped fortunes in sugar far beyond the
wealth the Spaniards had taken from the earth. The sugar
plantations and rum distilleries poured enormous revenues
into European treasuries. During the Seven Years' War,
Britain captured not only Canada, but also France's posses-
sions in the Caribbean. These were estimated at a far greater
value than Canada and the northern fur trade. In fact, when
the preliminaries of the Treaty of Paris were under discussion,
there was a serious debate in Parliament as to whether Canada
or Guadeloupe should be kept as a war prize. England elected
to keep Canada, in order to safeguard her American corn-
growing colonies, at the expense of her own sweet tooth.

A century later and the choice would have entailed no
sacrifice. In those hundred years science was to discover sugar
in the kernel of the American corn, and to develop a method
of refining it. The promised land, flowing with milk and
honey, was to be found at last — in the American corn belt.

There was nothing extraordinary or daring in looking for
starch in the kernel of the maize. Even the ancient peoples
knew that most cereal grains contained a sticky substance
which could be soaked out of them and used in solution to
stiffen textiles. Starched linens were worn by the ladies of
ancient Egypt, Crete and Greece. Homer's Nausicaa of the
white arms, when she wanted a wagon and mules to carry

With Milk and Sugar Blest 205

the family washing to the river, reminded her father of those
"five dear sons of thine, two married, but three lusty bachelors
who are always eager for new-washed garments wherein to go
to the dances/'

In Europe, throughout the Middle Ages, men and women
wore leather and woolen and velvet garments against the
damp cold. Only in Spain the Moors moved in white, linen-
clad procession through the courts of Cordoba's mosque and
the halls of the Alhambra. From Spain came the vogue for
starched linens, and for ruffs which set off the dark velvet
doublets and gowns. Elizabeth welcomed the fashion. Her
long, scrawny neck carried a wide ruff gratefully. Her courtiers
copied the style; and shrewdly, the woman who said "I am
England" levied a state tax on the manufacture of starch.

The high price of wheat started the search for some cheaper
source of starch. A French chemist derived it from potatoes,
and later from rice. The Louisiana colonists made starch from
the manioc roots, and undoubtedly many of the early settlers
in this country experimented with maize, as this was the
cheapest and most plentiful cereal in the land. Some time
after 1800, John Biddes in Pennsylvania made potato starch,
and this became so profitable an enterprise that he established
a factory in New Hampshire close to the cotton mills which
were his chief customer. It was nearly a quarter century later
that Thomas Kingsford, who was employed by the factory
of William Colgate and Company in Jersey City to separate
starch from wheat, worked out a process for the manufacture
of cornstarch.

Kingsford's yellow paper-covered package has been an Amer-
ican household commodity for close to a century. From it
have come cornstarch puddings and fillings for pies. There
were cooks who held out for arrowroot to thicken gravies and
over-juicy berry pies, but Americans, generally, felt safe about
a product whose base was the American corn. New-born babies
were dusted with cornstarch in lieu of talcum powder and
started on their way through life. Commercially, starch became

206 Singing Valleys

steadily more valuable as industry developed new and wider
uses for it.

Starch cannot be manufactured synthetically. It can only be
separated from the other constituents of the grain or the root.
Exactly what is starch? No one knows. Our knowledge of the
substance extends to what it does for the plant and how the
plant forms it. But just what it, itself, is remains a mystery
even to the chemists. In most plants starch is formed out of
water and carbon dioxide gas in the air by the action of the
green coloring matter in the plant under the activating influ-
ence of sunlight. It is made in the leaves as reserve food mate-
rial. There it is transformed into sugars, broken down into cell
juice and so passed through the cell walls of the plant to the
fruit and seeds. There the sugar is reconstructed into starch,
and stored as food for the embryo to feed on during the period
of germination.

All seeds of all plants contain some starch. And all starch
possesses certain distinct characteristics. It is insoluble in cold
water. But hot water causes the granules to burst and to
form a viscous, jelly-like liquid which becomes firm when it
cools. However, the various plant starches have also definite
characteristics of their own which identify them when seen
through a microscope. Spill a drop of water with a grain or
two of potato starch on the glass under a microscope and you
will behold dozens of miniature potatoes, and miniature clam-
shells floating in the water. Those clamshell markings, and
the potato-like form of the grains, identify the source of the
starch as incontrovertibly as a nest of blue eggs reveal parent
robins. The granules of cornstarch are sharply angled penta-
grams and hexagrams, each with a tiny cross marked on it.
There is no mistaking cornstarch for rice starch, or for the
starch of the tapioca.

Besides the varieties in appearance, the starch granules
show other peculiarities: potato starch snaps, tapioca starch
tends to be stringy. Cornstarch is one of the most amenable
of all. This fact, as well as the high proportion of starch in

With Milk and Sugar Blest 207

the endosperm of the corn, and the large quantity of corn
available at low prices, make this grain the chief source of
starch in America today. While potatoes run from 18 to 20
percent, and wheat from 54 to 48 percent starch, American
corn has an average starch content of from 68 to 70 percent.
Rice is still starchier, with a 70 to 79 percent content. For
several generations the planters in South Carolina and Georgia
looked over their rice fields and dreamed of cornering the
world's starch market.

The Union victory in the war between the states decided
the battle between the Southern rice-planters and the farmers
of the corn belt. It was a victory for zea mays. The abolition
of slavery meant ruin for the rice growers; it spelt wealth for
the corn-planters in Illinois and Iowa. For what corn the
farmer sells for cash goes largely to the refineries to be used
as a source for starch. In recent years Europe has taken to
making starch from American maize grown in the Balkans and
the valley of the Danube. Roumanian maize is towed up the
Danube to Bratislava and on to Passau to be poured into
refineries in Germany, whence it comes out as starch for high
explosives and as valuable sugar. Not only Roumanian oil,
but Roumanian maize, figure in der Fiihrer's politics in the
Balkans. American corn may possibly play a decisive part in
the present European war.

In the same year that Napoleon conceived the idea of
ramming the whole of Louisiana down the American throat
which had opened hungrily for New Orleans, he also estab-
lished a blockade against British goods. Chiefly, the embargo
was directed against sugar. The French loyally gave up me-
ringues; and the storehouses in England and in the British
sugar islands overflowed with sweetness for which there was
no immediate market. The embargo spurred French chemists
to seek a cane sugar substitute. One of them came to the
emperor with information that he had discovered that a sugary
substance could be extracted from the juice of grapes. Imme-

208 Singing Valleys

diately Napoleon saw new futures for the vineyards of Cham-
pagne. He offered a large sum of money to establish the
industry, and ordered that all state institutions should use
grape sugar. About the same time, another French scientist,
Bouillon Legrange, observed that when starch is submitted
to a high temperature, it undergoes a change, and when mixed
with water makes a viscous, gum-like solution. Actually, what
Legrange made was dextrin.

His discovery was employed by a German chemist then
working at the Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, in the
manufacture of porcelains. He needed gum arabic for his work,
and lacking this, substituted Legrange's dextrin. In order to
avoid the discoloration due to high temperatures, he subjected
the suspension of starch in water to the action of sulphurous
acid. He must have continued his treatment for too long a
time, for after neutralizing the acid and filtering off the
gypsum and evaporating the solution, he found that what he
had was a sweetish syrup instead of a gummy one. Through
accident, he hit on the way to refine starch into sugar.

The discovery startled Europe. What it offered politically
was freedom from British trade domination. Every nation grew
wheat and other cereal grains. If these could be separated into
starch and the starch refined into sugar, then no one need
pay England for sugar from the West Indies. The Jenarsche
Literaturzeitung exclaimed editorially,

All hail to our wheat fields! In the future they will give us not
only flour and starch, but also they will satisfy one of our most
refined needs — sugar.

All over Europe companies began to build starch-sugar
refineries. Only the defeat of Napoleon's hopes at Waterloo,
and the strengthening of England's power in world affairs as
the French empire crumbled, held back the new sugar-from-
grain industry, and re-established the trade of the West Indies.

But in America, where the farms continued to yield enor-
mous corn harvests, the chemists kept at work endeavoring

With Milk and Sugar Blest 209

to find more and wider uses for the farmers' crops. Naturally,
they turned their attention to the refining of cornstarch.
While the war between the states was engaging men's atten-
tion, an inventor patented a process which ultimately set the
present corn-refining industry in motion.

Sixty to eighty millions of bushels of corn from each year's
crop go to the refineries to be turned into corn oil, gluten
and starch. Besides the billion bushels which are eaten by
American hogs and go into pork, bacon, ham and lard, and
the billion, three hundred million bushels which feed cattle,
horses and poultry and make their returns in milk, cream,
cheese, butter, beef, eggs and farm labor, the flow to the
starch refineries is a mere basketful out of the corn harvest.
But that basketful is transmuted by the magic of modern
industrial science into vast wealth and industrial power. Some
of the gluten separated from the other constituents of the
corn kernel goes back to the farms on which it was grown
in the form of cattle feed. The oil goes into homes and restau-
rants for cooking purposes, and into the manufacture of
paints, toilet soaps, linoleum, glycerine. The starch is used as
starch in a score of ways, or refined into dextrins, glucose and
corn sugar.

Actually, the mechanical process which separates the germ,
the gluten and the starch of the grain of corn, and which
refines the starch closely parallels nature's process of mastica-
tion and digestion. The refineries are like mammoth stomachs
into which the raw corn is fed. As with the human digestive
system, the ultimate achievement is the derivation of blood
sugar (dextrose) from the cornstarch.

Briefly, the grain is received at the refineries, cleaned, and
mixed with warm water with a small amount of sulphurous
acid to prevent fermentation. After forty-eight hours or so,
when the hulls are softened, the wet mass is chewed by ma-
chinery, which breaks up the grain while keeping the germ

2io Singing Valleys

and the broken particles of endosperm intact. The chewed
corn is mixed with more water, and swallowed down a long
mechanical gullet. A vigorous stirring-up process brings the
germs to the surface of the mass so that they may be skimmed
off to be passed on to the machinery which extracts the oil
from them. One bushel of shelled corn is estimated to be
convertible into one and one-half pounds of corn oil and
thirty pounds of starch.

The yellowish liquor from which the corn germs have been
skimmed represents the starch and the gluten in the corn
kernels. The gluten carries the protein; it is the nitrogenous,
or flesh-building, part of the grain. Some of the protein is to
be removed for use as flavoring and food value in the manu-
facture of sauces, soups and other edibles which require the
taste of beef. Most of it, however, goes back to be mixed with
the corn germs after the oil has been extracted from these,
to form a gluten cattle feed.

The separation of the starch from the gluten is done by
running the liquid over long, sloping tables. The weight of
the starch carries it to the bottom of the troughs, while the
lighter gluten flows on. The tailings are run over the tables
again and again, until every possible grain of the precious
starch has been left on the bottoms.

This starch is the base of the syrups, dextrins and sugars.
Flushed off the tables, it is filtered, then dried. Part of it is
milled to be marketed as starch, for laundry, industrial and
food uses. Another part goes in water suspension to the
sugarhouse.

There the cornstarch is subjected to an actual digestive
process in great bronze tanks. It encounters the three elements
of digestion — heat, pressure, and hydrochloric acid. Twenty-
two minutes in the bronze stomachs turns the starch solution
into a liquor which when filtered, refined and evaporated, is
glucose, or corn syrup.

It used to be the fashion to decry glucose. Some writers on

With Milk and Sugar Blest 211

nutrition actually pronounced it dangerous to health. Mothers
taught their children to wash off the glucose from canned
fruit, and to substitute for it cane sugar from the sugar bowl.
As a matter of fact, glucose is digested sugar. A lump of
cane sugar converts itself into glucose in your stomach within
a few minutes after you have eaten it.

The longer the starch water remains in the digestive tank
the higher the percentage of dextrose becomes. Add another
thirteen minutes to the time required for the manufacture
of glucose, and the tank will yield corn sugar with a 70 to 80
percent dextrose content. Re-refined, this becomes pure dex-
trose, which is the most intimate sugar of metabolism and
which is absorbed directly into the blood stream, without any
digestive modification being necessary.

The relationship between this corn sugar and cane sugar
is told by the chemists in the formulas for the two. Cane sugar
is Ci2H22On. Corn sugar is written CeH^Oe. Starch, which is
the base of dextrose (corn sugar), becomes by the same fig-
uring CeHioOs.

Cane sugar is sweeter to the taste than corn sugar. This is
an advantage in favor of the latter when it comes to making
jams, jellies and certain types of confectionery in which sugar
is required for its values and not for its excessive sweetness.
Today the two sugars are combined in many candies and
confections. Corn sugar has another quality which makes it
especially amenable to certain manufacturing formulas: it will
absorb flavors without becoming moist. This is something
which cane sugar will not do.

Today a large proportion of the corn which goes to the
starch refineries goes back to the public in confectionery, ice
cream, desserts, soft drinks. The caramel coloring matter in
ginger ale, soft drinks and various tonics is actually corn. The
same caramel coloring tints leathers in belts, handbags, shoes.
Corn has found its way into so many things in our daily life
that it has truthfully been said, "Wherever you may be, and

212 Singing Valleys

whatever you touch, one or more of the products of corn
enter into its manufacture."

When evening comes, all up and down the Main Streets
of America the lights of the corner drug stores draw the
young people as inevitably as a lantern draws moths. Boys
and girls hitch themselves onto the stools in front of the soda
counters, and crowd into the booths along the walls. There
are much laughter, slangy greeting, and repartee of phrases
completely unintelligible to anyone who suffers the misfor-
tune of having been born prior to 1915. The Land of the
Ice Cream Soda belongs outright to American youth. The
soda jerker in his starched white linen coat and cap is still
another priest of Cinteotl, the maize-god. The philters he
mixes are sweet with the milk and honey of the American
cornfields.

XIII

Corn-Makers

TT WAS the German botanist, Camerarius who first startled
JL the world with the announcement that plants, as well as
animals have a sex life.

Though he worked in Europe, Camerarius conducted his
experiments with zea mays, the American corn. What he had
found true of the mulberry and the castor-oil plant, he found
equally true of the maize — that is, that the pollen from the
stamen is necessary to fertilize the ovules at the base of the
plant's pistils.

In a majority of plants the two sexes meet in a single flower
or flower cluster. In the corn the sexes are separated as far
as the tip of the tassel is from the silk-hung ears. By remov-
ing the silk from ears of growing corn, Camerarius proved his
belief that the pollen from the staminate tassel which is caught
and carried through the husks to the ear is necessary to fer-
tilize the ovules in the ears and to develop these into kernels
of grain.

The discovery of sex in plants which was made in the clos-
ing years of the seventeenth century was told in letters from
European botanists to enthusiastic botanists in this country.
So the information came to the eyes and mind of Reverend
Cotton Mather of Boston. This divine was fanatically orth-
odox on all points of the Separatist doctrine, and notoriously
severe against witches and sorcery. He exercised rigorous su-
pervision over the private lives of his flock. But he did not
shrink from the knowledge that "male and female created He
them" applied to the grass of the field as accurately as he

213

214 Singing Valleys

feared it applied to the Congregationalists living on Boylston
Street.

In fact, the Reverend Dr. Mather was not above making
certain observations of his own concerning Nature's way of
propagating the family of zea mays. His letter on the subject
to his friend James Petiver contains what are probably the first
reports on the way of a wind with a grain of corn pollen:

My friend planted a row of Indian corn that was colored red
and blue; the rest of the field being planted with corn of the yellow
which is the most usual color. To the windward side this red and
blue row so infected three or four whole rows as to communicate
the same color unto them; and part of ye fifth and some of ye
sixth. But to the leeward side, no less than seven or eight rows
had ye same color communicated unto them; and some small im-
pressions were made on those that were yet further off.

It would seem that these early American Christian fathers,
believing passionately in heaven, dared to believe in earth as
well. John Eliot did so. He set himself the task of translating
portions of the Bible into the Indian tongue for the conversion
of the Massachusetts savages. In the course of that work he
had occasion time and again to rejoice in the Indian names for
the maize which made possible a literal rendering of such
phrases as "the bread of the world," and "This is my body,
given for you." As he made his missionary journeys to the vil-
lages he invariably paused to survey the fields of growing corn
which ringed the huddle of huts. John Eliot found many a
text and a powerful argument for the Lord's cause in the
maize fields. "That thy sons shall grow up as the young plants"
meant to him, and to his hearers, "like the corn." "That thy
corn and thy cattle increase" was literally a prayer for bumper
harvests of zea mays.

No small proportion of his enthusiasm was passed on to
his grandson Jared Eliot of the Connecticut colony, who was
destined to become not only another minister of the Con-

Corn-Makers 215

gregational faith, but the most noted of all colonial physicians
and a leader in American agriculture.

Graduated in the fifth class at Yale College, young Eliot
was hardly out of the classroom before his neighbors in the
town of Killingworth, near New Haven, called him to be their
minister. His career is living proof that a man can be a prophet
in his own home town. Jared Eliot never had another parish,
nor Killing worth another minister for more than fifty years.
During that half-century he was also Connecticut's country
doctor, who rode from Hartford to New London, from Fair-
field to Putnam; with pills and powders in one saddle-bag,
and in the other seeds, roots and plants which he gathered as
he rode, to plant in his own garden, whenever he got home.
People had faith in Jared Eliot's religion and in his prescrip-
tions, too. Perhaps that is what made them curative. That
the doctor himself was by way of being a psychiatrist is re-
vealed by the powders he gave to a chronic invalid of hypo-
chondriac temper, which he made himself, sitting in his saddle
before turning in at her gate, out of the grit from a broken
clay pipe, sugar and starch.

How pleasant to think of that summer afternoon on which
the doctor saw a horseman ride up Killingworth's street
headed toward Boston. The doctor fully expected to see the
rider pass, as most of them did; and as this rider certainly
intended to do. It was not his will, but the horse's, which
brought him up the lane by the doctor's house and right up
to the doctor's stable door.

The man who sat the horse was a short, plump man, with
a broad, bland face. This, as he looked at his horse and where
that horse had brought him, wore an air of bewilderment.
He swept off his hat and bowed in apology to Dr. Eliot. Lift-
ing the reins he tried to wheel the horse away from the stable
door.

"On my word, sir, I do not know why the beast should
have brought me here into your stable yard."

"But I do." Jared Eliot laid a hand on the horse's bridle.

216 Singing Valleys

"I once owned that horse, and he remembers where I keep
my corn."

Was it a horse's memory of corn, or fate, that carried Ben-
jamin Franklin of Philadelphia to the one man in all of
Connecticut best qualified to appreciate Franklin's extraor-
dinary genius, and whom Franklin himself could best appre-
ciate? Chance does not explain such happenings. The cross-
fertilization of men's minds is not accomplished by chance,
but by some law of chemical attraction which operates as
inevitably as the hungry silk draws the ripened pollen to its
need.

The friendship of Franklin and Jared Eliot fired the imagi-
nation and the curiosity of each. Franklin shared with Eliot his
ideas for Poor Richard's Almanack. Eliot confided to Franklin
his plan to publish an Annual on agriculture and whatever
else might seem to him worth writing about. And Franklin,
with a gesture that only an author-publisher could appreciate,
immediately ordered fifty copies of the first number.

Jared Eliot's essays, published annually by the author, were
the beginnings of American literature on the subject of hus-
bandry. His ideas ran from methods for extracting good "if
not the best iron ore from black sea sand" to hog feeding
and swamp drainage. With the urgent enthusiasm of a man
constantly in the saddle, he piled suggestions for feeding
horses on a half-and-half mixture of corn and oats steeped
together, on reports of his own experience in planting corn on
drained muck land and gathering harvests of from sixty to
eighty bushels per acre. He advised fertilizing the corn hill
with wood ashes. Already, in the first half of the eighteenth
century, Connecticut farmers were complaining that their
fields were exhausted. "Drain the swamps," Dr. Eliot pre-
scribed, "fertilize the outworn field. Rotate crops. . . . Corn
is hungry; it must be fed to live. But if you feed it it will keep
you and yours from want. . . ." "Look upon that plant in
blossom time," he wrote, turning preacher in the midst of
agricultural advice, "when it is in its full pomp and pride.

Corn-Makers 217

Observe its height, its breadth of verdure. That deep green
shows it to be replete with rich sap. . . ."

And so into a sermon that his saintly grandsire would most
heartily have approved.

With the same degree of serious intensity he presented his
readers with a problem in arithmetical progression which the
framers of the Agricultural Adjustment Act might well have
studied: "If a man has only sufficient good farm land to give
him the corn sufficient to feed one hog, let him raise the
hog and feed it. Its dung spread on the outworn fields will
manure the land to feed another hog, and so on . . ." until
he drew a picture of a land literally swarming with cornfed
swine.

It was on such subjects as these that he wrote his long let-
ters to John Bartram, the king's gardener at Kew, and which
inspired Bartram's trip to and tour of the American colonies.
It was Bartram, one remembers, who discovered the giant
rhododendrons of the southern mountains and made these
known to the world. Jared Eliot's letters to that gentleman
farmer, Cadwallader Golden of the New York colony, were
forwarded by him to Linnaeus. So Europe became acquainted
with the Connecticut country physician of men's souls, bodies
and farms. The British Royal Agricultural Society honored
him with a fellowship — the first ever conferred on an Amer-
ican.

With President Clap of Yale, Eliot constructed an amaz-
ing piece of farm machinery which was drawn by two oxen
and which not only plowed a furrow, but dropped seed, and
fertilizer and covered these over as it moved clumsily across
the field. These experiments fathered Franklin's on his farm
near Bordentown, and Jefferson's at Monticello. They inspired
Washington's attempts to increase his crops of corn and
turnips at a saving of time and labor. Carefully, the ex-Com-
mander in Chief noted in his diary on a spring day in 1786:

Having fixed a roller to the tail of my barrel plow and a brush

2i 8 Singing Valleys

between it and the barrel, I sent it to the Muddy Hole Farm and
sowed turnips between the rows of corn.

How to raise more corn from every acre of cultivated corn-
land was a problem that presented itself acutely to the minds
of eighteenth-century American farmers. They believed with
Dean Swift "that whoever would make two ears of corn, or
two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only
one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do
more essential service to his country than the whole race of
politicians put together."

Generally, the efforts of these early corn-makers were di-
rected toward increasing the productivity of the soil and
in saving time and labor in the planting and cultivation of
the crop. Franklin was perhaps the first American farmer to
make scientific experiments with the cross-fertilization of zea
mays. His scientific interest in the subject was whetted by his
human appetite for corn. The letters to his wife, sent from
London in 1768, beg her to send him by the first packet out
from Philadelphia the American foods for which his tongue
watered — apples, cranberries, dried peaches, buckwheat flour
and corn meal. And when these finally arrived, what a time
there was in the kitchen in West Mount Street, with the
American minister instructing incredulous English women in
the mysteries of yellow bread and griddle cakes.

Even the French cuisine at Passy many years later was
threatened by the philosopher's appetite for cornbread. The
last thing Franklin wrote in Europe, besides letters, was the
engaging "Observations on Mayz or Indian Corn," which he
sent to the chemist Cadet de Vaux on April 28, 1785. It told
all that was then known about the use of corn as food for
men or animals, green corn roasted, boiled or dried, lye
hominy, corn meal, coarse or fine, hasty pudding, hoe cake,
cornbreads, popcorn, corn syrup, corn liquor, and corn fod-
der.*

* Benjamin Franklin, by Mark Van Doren, p. 719.

Corn-Makers 219

But Franklin's greatest contribution to our national corn
culture, aside from the formation of the American Philo-
sophical Society which encouraged the study of all sciences
and was the genesis of later agricultural societies in all the
states, was his discovery and introduction of broom corn. He
found the wild grass and planted some of the seed in his
garden at Bordentown. There he cultivated it and experi-
mented with cross-fertilization until he produced a crop
which had commercial value.

Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker colony, in-
stilled into her followers the doctrine, "Hands for work,
hearts for God." The Shakers who settled at New Lebanon
in New York were quick to see the advantage to them of
Benjamin Franklin's creation. They planted fields of broom
corn and sold the seed in packets — the first seed to be so
sold in this country. It was they who made the first flat house-
brooms in their settlement at Watervliet.

The various religious communities which sprang up in
western New York, Pennsylvania and throughout the midwest
during the first half of the last century did more than add
extraordinary tinges to the American culture. All of these
foundations were primarily agricultural. And all of them
became, in due course of time, agricultural experiment sta-
tions. The Shakers in Warren County, Ohio, developed the
Warren County hog which played its part in making Cin-
cinnati the Porkopolis of America.

It may very well be that in joining a community, the mem-
bers surrendered their share of the American dream of moving
farther west, at some not too distant time, whenever the
horizon threatened to come too close or the fertility of their
fields waned. Americans who were possessed by this dream
seldom developed scientific farming methods. They were in-
herently pioneers, developing a genius for making shift, rather
than a scientific approach to perfection. But the com-
munists were pledged to remain on the communal lands. As
the country round about their claims filled with other settlers,

220 Singing Valleys

many of whom looked askance at the religious and social
practices of the brethren, they were driven inward upon them-
selves and so forced to develop intensively what they had. It
was this principle which has developed the rich folk cultures
of all oppressed and segregated peoples, working among the
Mennonites, Dunkards and Moravian Brethren in Pennsyl-
vania, surrounded by the scornful and scoffing Scotch-Irish and
Welsh, which gave them their agricultural superiority. The
community at New Harmony near Pittsburgh was another
fertile oasis of agricultural and horticultural lore.

That extraordinary American mystic, Jemima Wilkinson,
who took to herself the title of "The Universal Friend," went
in for bigger and better corn. Jemima was born among the
Rhode Island Quakers shortly prior to the Revolution. The
miracles she worked and her reputed power to raise the dead
brought eager disciples flocking to her home. The neighbors
were disturbed and shocked, as the cautious faithful always
are when the religion they have professed is proved to work.
They were not sorry to see the Universal Friend pack up her
goods and lead her little band over the new Berkshire road
into the Genesee country. There Jemima claimed twelve hun-
dred acres of rich farming land. She settled fifty families on
this tract and promptly built the first grist mill in western
New York. Her crops of rye and corn and her herds of sleek
cattle occasioned wonder and envy among other farmers in the
valley. Were Jemima's harvests, they demanded, brought about
entirely by prayer, or did the Universal Friend work black
magic in the barns?

Jemima could have told them that she joined to her prayers
a brimming measureful of common sense. She carefully se-
lected the seed she gave to the earth and prayed over. None
but the largest and best-filled ears were saved for the next
year's crop. Her disciples, working in the communal fields,
learned secrets in seed selection which some of them later took
to the corn belt.

Bishop Hill, in Henry County, Illinois, which was founded

Corn-Makers 221

by the Norse evangelist Eric Jansen and four hundred fol-
lowers, was made rich by its broom corn. Four years after
founding, the colony numbered eleven hundred persons, and
they had put fifteen thousand dollars in circulation in the
county where trade until then had been entirely in mink and
beaver skins. They even sold their broom in Boston. When
the men turned out to do the spring plowing in 1855, they
ran furrows two miles long through fields of one thousand
acres. When the harvest was gathered, men, women and chil-
dren marched through the stubble hand in hand, singing
Norse folk songs before sitting down to a harvest feast and
an impassioned two-hour sermon by their leader.

Thanks to its corn, Bishop Hill prospered mightily until
the members of the community became contaminated by the
heresy of the Shakers living across the river in Kentucky. The
Shaker doctrine of celibacy worked havoc in the corn-growing
foundation. The fields were wasted. Tumbleweed rolled
crazily down the two-mile furrows. Coatlicue claimed her re-
venge. The contrast between the latter days of Bishop Hill in
fertile Illinois and Brigham Young's settlement on the edge
of the alkaline Utah desert would seem to prove that the
Freudian theory of sex repression carries its significance even
into agriculture.

The first settlers in this country knew four types of maize.
When Captain Richard Bagnall discovered the virtues of the
Iroquois' sweet corn he added a fifth corn family to the roll.
It stands at the same number today.

The five first families of zea mays from which hundreds of
lines have sprung, and from both sides of the blanket, are

zea mays everta popcorn

zea mays indurata flint corn

zea mays indentata dent corn

zea mays amylacea soft corn

zea mays saccharata sweet corn

222 Singing Valleys

Popcorn is easily recognized by its small ear and small, hard,
pointed kernels. At least that is the type familiar to most
Americans who have burned their faces red popping corn
over an open fire. There is a variety grown in Jala, Mexico,
with ears three feet long and borne on stalks so tall and strong
that the crop must be harvested from horseback. The stalks
are used to fence stockades.

What makes popcorn pop is the large proportion of hard
starch in the endosperm. The moisture in this, when subjected
to heat, explodes the starch granules so violently that the ker-
nel is turned inside out. This was the parched corn which the
Indians ate and which amazed the English colonists.

The growing of popcorn is a specialized industry. It is
localized in Ida and Sac counties in Iowa, and in Greeley and
Valley counties in Nebraska. There the popcorn cribs stand
along the railroad tracks. In the fall when the crop is harvested,
it is carted to the crib and stored to dry through the winter.
In summer, when the next crop is growing in the fields, the
corn in the cribs is shelled and shipped to the "Cracker Jack"
and other candy manufacturers, to empty the cribs in time
to receive the new supply.

Popcorn is believed to be a variant of flint corn whose char-
acteristic is its large proportion of hard starch. The flints are
the earliest maturing varieties. Therefore they are especially
suited to northern climates. It was flint corn growing around
the village of Hochalaga, on the site of present Montreal,
which amazed Carrier. The flints seldom grow taller than
four feet but they bear more than one ear to the stalk, which
gives them great value as fodder corn. Flint corn, too, makes
the best corn meal, though Southerners stand out for Boone
County White, one of the family of zea mays indentata.

Dent corn receives its name from the indentation in each
kernel — sometimes smooth, sometimes rough but always there
— and caused by the shrinkage of the soft starch in the endo-
sperm. This little hollow in the top of each kernel in the
ear was recognized by the tribes of primitive Americans as a

Corn-Makers 223

female symbol which proclaimed the maternal nature of the
corn.

Dent corn forms the bulk of the American corn crop. Its
aristocracy are Reid's Yellow, Boone County White, Learning,
Clarage and Silvermine. Each of these F.F.C.'s has a score
of descendants, some of which are in the social-register class
while others are regarded as family disgraces. Dent corn his-
tory really begins in Brown County, Ohio, where a pioneer
farmer, Gordon Hopkins, by name, developed a breed of
reddish-colored corn which gave such good yield that his
neighbors began coming to him for seed. Gordon Hopkins'
corn was famous in the Scioto and Paint River Valleys when
these were the greatest corn-growing sections in the land,
a full century ago. It was a farmer from Brown County, mov-
ing westward to Illinois a few years after the Lincolns took
the trail to Sangamon, who took with him a sack of Gordon
Hopkins' red corn.

That farmer — Robert Reid was his name — planted his
Gordon Hopkins on his corn title in Illinois. He was late get-
ting that first crop into the ground — it takes time to clear
land to plant — and the first year's yield was small. The Reids
tightened their belts against hunger and saved corn for
seed the next spring. When it was planted, young Reid was
stationed with his rifle on watch for the first marauding crow.
Anxiously, the Reids watched for the appearance of the green
shoots which would mean their life. When these began to
break the soil they counted the hills. And anxiety deepened
to actual fear. A great many of the hills never sprouted at all.
It looked as though Gordon Hopkins' corn wouldn't stand
the Illinois climate or the soil.

Robert Reid's lips tightened grimly. He harnessed the horse
and rode round to the neighbors to beg for seed for those
empty hills. Any seed so long as it would sprout and make
returns in yellow bread. What he brought home in the saddle-
bag was "little yellow corn," all that any of the settlers had to
spare at that after-planting time. He set the kernels carefully

224 Singing Valleys

in the empty hills and prayed for crop enough to keep the
wolves at least at baying distance.

June spent itself in fair warm weather. July brought a long
hot spell when the leaves of the corn crackled and rustled as
they grew. The tassels shot up straight and proud and in the
last week of the month the hoods came off the anthered
stamens and the gold dust drifted on the little breeze that
rippled the fields.

On the plants of Gordon Hopkins' corn and on the little
yellow corn, too, the young ears stretched greedily from the
culms with the soft new silk just protruding from the tips of
the ears. Down on the silk fell the golden pollen. Through a
whole week the golden rain went on while the corn silk
reached out for more and yet more of the life-giving dust.

August came in with rain — and two weeks of hot, damp
weather in which the corn seemed to take on fresh life. The
ears were swelling fast. Robert Reid went cautiously along
the rows and felt the ears with his thumb. His practised hand
told him that the rows were well filled, that each green sheath
enclosed a vigorous ear.

The corn which was born that summer in Robert Reid's
corn title was destined to become the backbone of America's
corn crop. Reid's Yellow Dent corn, with the reddish tinge
in some of the kernels which betrays its Gordon Hopkins
blood and the small dark red cobs, is grown widely wherever
the farmers want a soft starch corn. The ears are nine to ten
inches long and seven inches in circumference. The stalks are
tall, heavy and leafy, with the ears borne high.

Also from Ohio comes the variety still called Clarage for
Edmund Clarage who developed this strain on his farm in
Fayette County during the first years of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Ohio, too, was the original home of Learning, a deep
yellow variety which has the virtue of maturing early. Learn-
ing won the prize at the Paris World's Fair of 1878 and gave
American corn an international reputation.

Yellow corns are richer than the white corns in vitamin A,

Corn-Makers 225

and most farmers prefer them. But in the southern portion
of the corn belt, from Columbus, Ohio, to the southern
border of Tennessee, the fields are filled with Boone County
White. This is a dent corn which was originated by James
Riley, a relative of the Hoosier poet, in the rich, dark soil of
the American Bottom on the Wabash. It is Boone County
White ground between buhrstones turned by water which
makes the fine white corn meal Southern cooks prize for spoon
bread.

Soft corn (amylacea) is the type least grown in this country,
though still widely planted by the Mexicans and Indians of
our southwest. Its extra large proportion of soft starch makes
it desirable for grinding on the metate-stone. As for sweet
corn — its story merits a chapter to itself later on.

On an April afternoon in 1859, a tall, lanky man in ill-
fitting black clothes and with his trousers tucked into his boot
tops, country fashion — a figure half itinerant preacher, half
lumberman — squatted comfortably on his hams on the bluff
overlooking the Missouri at the raw settlement of Council
Bluffs and stared speculatively across the river at the westward-
rolling prairie.

A little more than a half-century before, Thomas Jefferson
had hastened to assure a jittery nation that it was not in line
with the American interests to cross the Mississippi "for ages."
Thirty years after that pronouncement, young Josiah Gregg
was camped at Council Grove in Kansas, preparing for his
second trip of seven hundred miles to Santa Fe. The panic
of 1833 and the "hell buster" which followed this four years
later had not cut down the westward-moving tide. Rather they
had acted like tidal waves, which washed a flotsam and jetsam
of humanity onto the cheap government lands west of the
Ohio. In Jefferson's day Ohio was "the Black Wilderness,"
and the American Bottom was the far-flung west. But in
1859 men spoke casually of Illinois as "middle west," and were
dreaming of the conquest of the buffalo plains and of what

226 Singing Valleys

might lie hidden in Colter's Hell. Already the railroads were
running as madly as gophers around and across the midwestern
states and up to the Mississippi and to the Missouri. Would
the railroads stop there, leaving the plains to the Arapahoe
and the Sioux buffalo-hunters?

Abraham Lincoln, two years short of the Presidency, and
squatting there on the bluff, knew that they would not. The
story of American civilization would be written once again
on the dun-colored plains. First, the fur-trader, following the
Indians. Then the long-rifle men, claiming tomahawk rights,
living a less than semi-civilized existence, yet for all that the
first advance guard of the civilization they despised and turned
their backs on. Daniel Boone, fleeing from the plows which
followed at his heels, showed the plowmen the way to the
west. After the long-rifle men would come farmers, walking
beside their ox carts. Farmers with plows and women with
spinning wheels. Carts laden with sacks of seed corn where-
with to subdue the prairies and the plains. And after the first
farmers — peddlers, merchants, steamboat and railroad men,
promoters of every sort, exploiting the country for the lining
of their own pockets, yet, somehow, always being used by the
genius of the land to further its wealth.

By these well-remembered beats the American rhythm re-
peated itself again and again. First the lonely scout's camp-
fire of buffalo chips; then the sod hut. Ten years after the sod
huts, frame houses and windmills beside them, pulling the
precious water up from depths beneath the prairie. Another
ten years, and there would be graded roads, and savings banks
standing sedately where today the sagebrush sheltered a rat-
tlesnake's den.

And then cities. . . .

There are men who live so close to the wisdom of the uni-
verse that they know truths long before the scientists arrive
at these by the tabulated steps which science decrees. So Lin-
coln was intimately aware of the theory laid down by von
Liebig that "perfect agriculture is the true foundation of all

Corn-Makers 227

trade and industry." This knowledge prompted him, once
he was in the White House, to establish a Federal Department
of Agriculture, which would aid the farmers in their prob-
lems and, not incidentally, arm the man behind the plow to
trade safely with men behind the desks of banks and the
counters of the produce exchanges.

The second Secretary of Agriculture was "Uncle Jerry"
Rusk, a corn farmer from Wisconsin, who had been born on
a poor farm in Perry County, Ohio. Uncle Jerry knew from
experience drought and wheat rust and grasshopper plagues.
He knew that in Iowa the wheat farmers were even then
facing ruin. Herbert Quick, who as editor and journalist served
the cause of agriculture in the midwest, has told in his auto-
biography, One Man's Life, how the Iowa pioneers, of whom
his father was one, were impelled into wheat-growing on a
large scale by the pressing need of money to buy the necessities
which the prairie did not yield. "As soon as I was able to
work," he says, "I became a bond servant to wheat."

At first all that the farmers had to do was to tickle the new-
broken prairie with a harrow, and it sang with a harvest. The
spring fever was a fever of seeding. Teams, seeders and har-
rows moved across the black fields from mornglome to dusk.
The golden grain went into the soil for a fortnight or so, and
then men went out to look for the sprouting blades.

We grew wonderful wheat at first; the only problem was to get
it to market and to live on the proceeds when it was sold. . . . But
the worst, however, was yet to come. A harvest came when we
found that something was wrong with the wheat. No longer did
the stalks stand clean and green as of old until they went golden
in the sun. The broad green blades were spotted red and black
with rust. . . . And when it grew worse year by year, it became a
blight not only on the life of the grain but on human life as well.
Wheat was almost our sole cash crop. If it failed, what should we
do? And it was failing. . . .

Of course what was happening was that the farmers were
paying the penalty for a one-crop system. But even the experts

228 Singing Valleys

in agriculture did not know that until a quarter century later.
All that the Federal Department of Agriculture knew was
that farm values were down and dropping further every year.
It knew too, as even the wheat-growers knew, that the land
would return rich crops of maize. But farmers are proverbially
slow to change. It took famine and financial panic, as well as
the persuasion of Uncle Jerry's department, to move the Iowa
wheat farmers over to a corn and hog basis.

Perhaps if their resistance had been less, the corn-maker
would not have exerted so much energy to improve varieties
of corn and to discover more and more about corn values. The
man who made probably the greatest contribution to this
campaign was William J. Beal, who held the post of Botany
Professor at the first state college of agriculture to be opened
in the country, in Michigan.

Beal's experiments with zea mays made corn history. He
it was who advanced the theory that the open pollination of
the plants prevented the growers from ever being sure of the
parentage of the seed. When the mating is left to Nature,
there's not a corn kernel so wise it knows its own father. And
every kernel in an ear of corn can be begotten by a different
father. Beal made the first experiments in detasseling plants,
thereby permitting only selected plants to fertilize the em-
bryos in the cobs. Beal had no knowledge of Mendel's Law —
that was still buried under piles of papers in a dusty room in
Brno, Moravia. But, working in his trial garden at Lansing,
pollinating corn by hand, firing the imaginations of his stu-
dents with visions of future harvests, William J. Beal made an
unfading contribution to American agriculture.

Many efforts have been made to work out a test for the
fertility of seed corn. Today thousands of corn farmers pa-
tiently make "rag dolls" and watch these with grave concern.
Six or eight grains of corn are nipped spirally from each ear in
a numbered tray, and laid in vertical rows on a strip of wet
muslin, which is then carefully rolled over and around each
row. The ends and middle of the roll are tied securely, it is

Corn-Makers 229

soaked in warm water several hours and then laid in a special
box, like a cradle. After five to seven days the kernels will have
sprouted, indicating the fertility of the ears from which they
were chosen.

These corn mothers have brought prosperity to numberless
farms. Not many years ago a professional man in a western
manufacturing town withdrew his capital from stocks and
bonds and bought a corn farm in one of the Ohio valleys. He
himself was no farmer. He engaged a superintendent at a
salary of five thousand dollars a year. Even after meeting this
and all other expenses, he found his capital paid him a better
rate of interest than the preferred stocks and guaranteed mort-
gages had done. And it was the rag doll which assured him
his yearly dividends. Rag dolls and hybrid corn — the latest
achievement of the corn-makers — are making fortunes in the
corn belt.

The story of hybrid corn begins in the cloister of the
Augustinian monastery at Brno, Moravia. Today that cloister
is quiet and deserted. The monks have departed, and only a
few old couples who lease the tiny houses which form the
cloister for a tiny rental cultivate the little walled gardens
where formerly the brothers grew their own vegetables accord-
ing to the rules of the order.

About the middle of the last century, German, Austrian
and Czech immigrants began coming to the farmlands in the
American corn belt. Those pioneers who built their sod huts
and battled stoically against drought, grasshoppers, blizzards,
cyclones, loneliness and the tumbleweed, never knew that in
the land they had left, a priest son of a poor peasant was
making experiments in plant heredity which would ultimately
make their grandchildren rich.

Johann Mendel — Father Gregor as he was called in religion
— was too delicate in health to be a farmer. Poverty and the
rigid Austrian caste system might have kept him from get-
ting the education he ardently craved had not the Church

230 Singing Valleys

provided a means. Father Gregor was no theologian. His ser-
mons would not have converted a hungry beggar. It was
only in the classroom where he taught that his shyness and
ineffectuality left him. There, and in the little garden plot
before his house in the cloister, he moved and spoke with
authority. Father Gregor had ways the other monks thought
decidedly queer, not to say indecent. He had an extraordinary
fancy for mice. This was not just a pious tolerance for even
the least of God's creatures, such as the blessed Francis would
have commended. He actually seemed to care more about,
and to give more time to, the contemplation of the gray and
white mice he kept in cages — as finer souls kept canaries and
finches — than he gave to his books. The rest of the community
did not know how much attention Father Gregor gave to the
tiny creatures. Or that he did not lower his eyes modestly
before their innocent enjoyment of each other according to
the laws of biology. Or much more heinous, that he actually
encouraged and assisted at the mating of gray mice with white;
breaking the solemn canons that had held since the days of
the Jewish patriarchs.

Nor did Father Gregor confine his studies of sex to the
mice in his cell. Shamelessly, in his garden, he married plant
and plant, watching jealously over each mating and the birth
of the offspring. Working delicately — nastily, some of the
pious monks might have declared had they understood what
it was all about — he performed castrations and abortions,
played midwife to blossoms and procurer to concupiscent
stamens. All in all, Mendel experimented with the sex life of
some ten thousand individual plants before he felt prepared
to give his theory concerning heredity to the scientific world.

The tragedy was that the world was so little interested in
it. No one, not even the German botanist Carl von Nageli,
to whom Mendel timidly sent a copy of his paper, paid any
heed. Something in Father Gregor seemed to wilt from that
day. "My day will yet come," he said; but there was more
futility than ringing hope in his tone. He never lived to see

Corn-Makers 231

that day. It was a full thirty years after the publication of his
findings that three other scientists, all of them working inde-
pendently, arrived at the same conviction which Mendel had
proved and then discovered among the archives in Brno,
Mendel's report which confirmed their own.

Mendel had conducted his experiments almost entirely
with peas. Two of the later scientists, De Vries and Correns,
worked out their conclusions from experiments with zea mays.
American corn led to the re-discovery of the Mendelian law.
It proved to the satisfaction of the entire world that heredity
operates by a mathematical rule which is as true for mice as
for men, for the corn as for the pea.

The acceptance of Mendel's law advanced the science of
genetics a full half century. American corn-makers, working in
various experiment stations, used it as a starting point for the
development of new and improved varieties of zea mays. One
of them, G. H. Shull, working at the Carnegie Institute's Sta-
tion for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long
Island, began to inbreed corn. His original aim was to study
the inheritance of the number of rows of kernels on the ears
as influenced by cross-pollination and self-pollination. His
experiments led to an entirely new method of corn breeding,
and to the creation of the first hybrid corn.

Actually, what Shull, and after him innumerable other corn-
makers, did, was to inbreed certain selected lines for four and
five generations, thus intensifying their peculiar characteristics.
The seed of these inbred corns was not nearly so prolific as
other cross-pollinated varieties. But the experimenters were
not looking for fertility of seed. They were interested in in-
tensifying the hereditary characteristics of the chosen strains.
After four or five generations, two inbred strains were crossed.
The seed so produced had the vitality of a released prisoner,
greatly in excess of that of either of the two parent stocks,
even before the inbreeding was done. It had also the char-
acteristics of the two parent lines to a marked degree.

In hybridizing corn it has been found that a "single cross"

232 Singing Valleys

between two inbred parent lines produces a better corn than
either of the parents. A "double cross" between two hybrids,
in which four inbred parent lines contribute to the offspring,
is still better. A "three-way cross" between a hybrid and an
inbred variety — with three family lines involved — is not so
satisfactory as a "two-way cross." A "multiple cross," in which
eight families are inbred and brought together, is less reliable
than a "double cross."

Shull first published his findings in 1908. Immediately the
creation of hybrid corns became the chief interest of corn-
makers in all the agricultural experiment stations. In this con-
nection it is interesting that previous to 1900 corn had been
self-fertilized very rarely by the experimenters. Indeed many
persons believed that corn was self-sterile. The World War
held back the development of hybrid corns while corn farmers
went in for mass production. But soon after 1920, hybrid corn
was put on the market for sale and immediately changed
corn-growing methods in this country.

Says Merle T. Jenkins, principal agronomist of the Divisions
of Cereal Crops and Diseases of the U. S. Bureau of Plant
Industry,

It is an outstanding example, perhaps the most outstanding
example, of the influence of theoretical scientific research in revolu-
tionizing the production practices of an agricultural crop. Although
it is a new development, the hybrids already produced have estab-
lished their superiority in productiveness and in resistence to wind,
disease and other unfavorable conditions.

It is the peculiarity of hybrid corn that its value lies in the
first generation following the cross. It is like the mule, a supe-
rior animal in every respect except as regards its procreative
powers. The farmer who plants hybrid corn cannot save out
some of the crop to seed his fields the next spring; he must
buy new hybrid seed from the seed growers. True, the cost of
seed each year is more than made up by the extra large returns
per acre of hybrid corn. Meanwhile hybrid corn is building

Corn-Makers 233

profitable seed-growing businesses. Henry A. Wallace, United
States Secretary of Agriculture, and owner of the Iowa Seed
Company at Des Moines, introduced the hybrid "Copper
Cross" in 1924. This, and other hybrid corns, played a part
in the A.A.A. program. Farmers could comply with the A.A.A.
contracts to cut down their corn acreage, for which the govern-
ment paid them, and still raise on a smaller acreage, and with
less labor, more bushels of corn than they had previously raised.
Hybrid corn made this possible.

There were die-hards in the farming ranks who protested,
after the manner of the old woman who pronounced the Day-
light Saving Law a scheme of the government's to make people
buy new clocks, that the A.A.A. contracts were a measure to
force farmers to buy Secretary Wallace's hybrid corn seed. But
the protests and the grumbling could not go on against the
overpowering fact of sixty bushels per acre.

Figures like that renewed faith in the American dream.

XIV

The Courtship of the Corn

WHEN mathematicians hold converse together their
speech is pure poetry. The same may be said of the
botanists and geneticists. Indeed, it would seem that the fur-
ther one advances toward the truths of being, the more is
knowledge suffused with a sempiternal beauty.

Half-truths, like half-gods, tend to be ugly and obscene.
Veils and subterfuges hide the glory from eyes too fearful to
behold effulgence. Most of humanity has spent its time with
the timid prophet, cowering in the rock, conscious only of
the Lord's back parts.

But the cool, impersonal laboratories of the scientists where
truth is invoked are the holiest of holies. There, the mere fact
that a thing IS is sufficient to make it reverence-inspiring.

The English tongue, which has voiced the greatest poetry,
has no impassioned sonnet to place beside the courtship of the
corn. Not even Malory can summon a pair of lovers whose
desire for each other flames with the intensity of the male and
female elements of the maize. Year by year, and a billion bil-
lion times over, the greatest of all love stories is enacted in the
American cornfields.

The corn enters proudly upon its courting. From the mo-
ment the first green blades prick the hills, the plants have
been preparing themselves for their great adventure. The
culms have grown tall and straight and strong, toward the
moment when each one of them shall lift the symbol of its
invincible maleness to the sun. As that day draws near, the
sheath which has wrapped the stamen through its adolescence
can no longer contain the urgent vigor within. It breaks. The

234

The Courtship of the Corn 235

sheath slips back, and a stiff spike of staminate flowers rears
above the growing corn.

Each blossom along that spike is laden with grains of liv-
ing pollen. Eighteen million of these pollen grains have been
counted on a single corn phallus. The energy contained in a
single corn tassel is beyond man's present mechanics to com-
pute.

These eighteen million pollen grains have developed in the
anthers of the flowers according to an exquisitely just law.
Each grain had its origin in a "mother cell" containing ten
chromosomes. There came a moment when, obediently, this
"mother cell" divided itself; dividing also its original chromo-
somes equally between the two new cells, five and five alike.
Nor was this all. The two cells then divided themselves, form-
ing four immature pollen grains. But in this second division
the chromosomes followed a different pattern. This time each
chromosome divided itself, forming twenty out of the original
ten, and grouping themselves in fives in the four pollen grains.

The pollen grains contain something more than the rod-
like chromosomes which carry the plant's hereditary character-
istics. Each grain has a nucleus. This too, in its turn, receives
a signal to divide itself in two in order to perform two sepa-
rate and distinct functions of procreation. Last of all, one of
these two new nuclei divides to form two sperm nuclei which
are genetically identical. A microscope reveals these two
sperms, shaped like minute crescents, in the mature pollen
grain.

During these adolescent changes in the male body of the
corn, changes equally dramatic have been going on in the
female body — that is, the ear. All along the immature ear are
"mother cells" from each one of which grows a filament of
fine silk. These "mother cells," which are to perform a female
function, obey the same law of growth which compelled the
pollen cells to divide first reductionally, and then equationally.
Their ten chromosomes, too, fall into the same pattern as the
chromosomes in the pollen. Ultimately, where there was one

236 Singing Valleys

egg "mother cell" at the base of each thread of corn silk,
there are four megaspores.

Thus far, Nature has made no distinction between the male
and female elements. Now she does. For while the four pollen
grains mature and achieve fertility, three of the four female
spores die off. Of the four virgins she has created, Nature
selects one to be mated and to serve the race.

This chosen bride develops into the embryo sac. It con-
tains eight nuclei, all genetically identical. One of these is
destined to be the corn germ in the kernel, rich in precious
oil. Two others will play their part in forming the starchy
and glutenous endosperm of the completed kernel.

All through the months of June and July, while the corn
has been growing taller and taller, while the roots have been
driving deeper and deeper into the earth seeking nourishment
in the form of ten necessary chemical elements, this sexual
development has been going on. The rabbits and the birds and
the field mice have played about the corn, men have paced the
rows, and driven tools into the ground about the roots, una-
ware or heedless of the tremendous and eternal forces silently
at work in the green plants. Only when the stamen sheaths
burst, and the proud tassels are uplifted above the waving,
leafy green, the sowers of the corn stand back, conscious that
the great drama of the fields is beginning.

For a day or two the stamens dominate a world which is
completely male. No trace of the corn's female nature yet
escapes the husks folded about the ears. Do the maiden cells
ranged in patient rows along the ears know that their lovers
are waiting without, impatient and ardent? What deep bio-
logical necessity, all the stronger for the shyness which sur-
rounds it, urges the silk to quicken its growth until the eager
tentacles stretch beyond the open ends of the husks?

In the dry, still heat of August even the lightest breeze
shakes the ripe pollen from the anthers of the stamen's flowers.
The male pollen blows over the cornfields in a fine golden
mist. For a week that rain goes on until eighteen million

The Courtship of the Corn 237

lovers have left home in search of the beloved. Only a very few
of that host are destined to find her. Nature knows full well
that the first duty of the artist is selection. As she was pre-
pared to create four female megaspores and to sacrifice three
of them, so she brings millions of pollen grains to maturity
only to let them float away on the summer wind, unfulfilled
and unused. Only a very small proportion of those borne by
the stamen find lodgment on the quivering silks.

What sense tells the pollen grain that this thin, wavering,
green thread is the one sure route to his mate? Immediately,
on that first contact, the first of the two original nuclei in the
grain develops into a tube which runs down the corn silk,
six, even eight inches to the sac embryo to which the silk leads.
What a journey for a bit of an infinitesimal fleck which only
the keenest lens makes discernible! Odysseus and Ulysses were
stay-at-homes compared with this lover. Down that tube, as it
grows along the silk, travel the twin sperm nuclei which were
formed in the pollen grain.

The Quiche Indians of Guatemala tell a tale of twin brothers
who made a journey into the Underworld, and there met
their deaths. One of them, though dead, caused the princess
of the Underworld to conceive. For a time she remained in
the Underworld, hiding her condition, but ultimately this
became known and she was cast out into the Upper World.
There she gave birth to twin sons.*

Xquiq of the legend is the American Persephone. All Un-
derworld goddesses have a connection with fertility and with
grain. True to the universal pattern of the myth, Xquiq on
reaching the Upper World exerts amazing power over the
maize. Her twin sons work maize magic.

Did those long-ago tale tellers among the Quiches have
the knowledge botanists have arrived at by scientific experi-
ments that not only is the embryo sac in the ear fertilized by
twin sperm nuclei, but the kernel of corn itself is actually

* See Chapter XVIII, "Maize Magic in American Folklore."

238 Singing Valleys

twins? One twin is the oil-rich germ. The other is the starchy
endosperm.

After all, there are ways of knowing without the aid of
microscopes and test tubes. Does not Goethe say,

Is not the kernel of nature
In the hearts of men?

The male contributions to the germ and to the endosperm
are identical. So, too, are the female contributions, genetically.
But the female contribution to the endosperm is twice as
great, quantitatively, as it is to the germ. The mother in the
corn provides liberally for the child she carries in her womb.
Two of her nuclei went into that mating with one of the
pollen nuclei to create the protein and the starch stored in the
endosperm.

The ten chromosomes of the male element and the ten
chromosomes of the female element meet, mingle and still
remain ten. They are the bearers of the plant's hereditary
characteristics — the genes. Botanists have identified no fewer
than three hundred and fifty genes in the American corn
which are divided into ten groups, one of which is carried on
each chromosome. Some chromosomes carry a great many
genes; others are responsible for only two or three. But, by
inevitable law, the genes which are linked together on a
chromosome are inseparable. For instance, the gene for pod
characteristic and the gene for sugariness are united. You
cannot have one without the other. Apparently their union
is as indissoluble as the Hapsburg lip and the genius for
political blundering.

The genes located on the same pair of chromosomes tend
to be transmitted from parent to offspring. This law of
heredity which never fails and which the researches of Mendel
and of later botanists and geneticists have worked out into a
mathematical formula, has recently disclosed a hitherto un-
known chapter in corn history. It has presented science with

The Courtship of the Corn 239

a solution of one of the botanical mysteries. It has found the
origin of the American corn.

The origin of zea mays has been explained by various bot-
anists in various ways. Some authorities believed that the corn
as we know it developed from a primitive corn very similar
to the present cultivated varieties. Others believed that zea
mays traced its descent from euchlaena mexicana, the wild
grass which the Mexicans call teosinte (gods' grass). Still
others played with the idea of a possible relationship between
the maize and tripsacum, another wild grass of the Guatemalan
highlands.

About the middle of the eighteenth century, the Chevalier
Lorenzo Boturini Benducci, an Italian nobleman whom Dr.
Borrull of Salamanca called "an ornament of all sciences and
a stranger to none/' went botanizing in Central America. He
reported:

I found in New Spain a wild maize that grows amidst forest or
woods with a small ear whose few grains were more delicate in
flavor than the cultivated kind.

This sentence of the Chevalier's acted on botanists like a
pirates' map on treasure-seekers. Again and again, through the
two centuries since he wrote them, men have gone into the
highlands of Guatemala seeking the wild maize which might
solve the mystery of the origin of our American corn. Within
the past decade, Oliver La Farge started up the quest again
by a statement that at a village between Menton and Chacula,
at an altitude of five to six thousand feet, he ate young corn
ears two inches long, "like oat sheaves without the whiskers."
He added that in the same district there grew "a tall grass
like silage corn run to seed, the ears and tassel of which were
edible and were green in rainy weather. This," he concluded,
"may be the maize Boturini described."

While various eager botanists like Dr. Wilson Popenoe
of Guatemala City were combing the country for clues which
might solve the mystery, in the Texas Agricultural Experiment

240 Singing Valleys

Station two geneticists were at work on the same problem.
Using Mendel's law as a basis for their experiments, they
set to work with zea mays, teosinte, tripsacum and several
other possible relatives of the family, even including the fa-
miliar garden plant called Job's-tears, to discover how the
chromosomes on which the genes are formed differ in and
resemble each other in maize and its relatives.

It was a stupendous task, involving thousands of individual
plants and years of research. In 1939, the experimenters, P. G.
Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, published their findings in
a bulletin put out by the Texas Agricultural Experiment Sta-
tion. Actually, they had solved by science the mystery which
had baffled botanists since Columbus first brought maize to
the attention of the European world.

The steps by which Mangelsdorf traced the lineage of
our American corn are so complicated that only a geneticist
can follow them in order. Briefly told, they prove that ten to
twenty-five thousand years ago, before the Asiatic immigrations
to this continent, a wild maize flourished in the highlands of
Central America. The winds blowing south carried its seed as
far as the Andes. The winds blowing north bore it to Mexico.
In the highlands of Mexico this primitive wild maize met and
mated with the Mexican tripsacum. The child of that marriage
was teosinte (euchlaena mexicana).

For centuries wild maize, tripsacum and teosinte flourished
side by side. But the winds were not through with their
alchemy. Teosinte and its parent the wild maize mated. Of
that cross came zea mays, the foundation of Mayan and Aztec
culture, and destined to be the food of the American nation.

What became of the wild maize which blew south into
the Andes? Its story is lost with the four civilizations which
flourished and vanished before the Incas ruled Peru. Whether
tripsacum went south with it or not, no one knows. But
seeds of tripsacum and seeds of a primitive dent corn have
been found in the ruins of the Ozark Bluff Dwellers, showing

The Courtship of the Corn 241

that tripsacum did not remain entirely within the limits of
Mexico.

Since the geneticists have provided our corn with a family
tree that stretches back a possible twenty-five thousand years,
and with an ail-American ancestry, there is nothing to make
it feel abashed in the presence of the cosmopolitan wheat.
No truer emblem of pan-American relationships can be found
than zea mays, which feeds the three Americas with bread.

XV

Cornfed Culture

OLD theatregoers in Chicago still recall the stage cur-
tain at the Garrick Theatre, with its florid decorations
of ripe corn and the painted legend:

The corn! The corn! Within whose yellow hearts there is of
health and strength for all the nations. The corn triumphant!

The lines, as every Illinois schoolboy knew, were a quota-
tion from Governor Oglesby's famous speech at the Harvest
Home Festival of 1892. In the flowing rhythms of the era of
the Prince Albert coat and rippling whiskers, Illinois's chief
executive paid rhapsodic tribute to the crop which made the
state rich.

And the state remembered the speech with pride. School-
boys learned it in elocution classes in country schools, and
recited it at commencement exercises. Their parents, mostly
Illinois corn farmers and their wives, filled the audience. Their
hands, hardened and gnarled by long service in the fields, lay
quietly in broad laps. Their minds were divided between
humble admiration for their offspring and a dim awareness
that the green crops in their fields had a value not entirely
computable in bushels and dollars. The corn they sowed
each spring and harvested each fall offered more than nourish-
ment for men's bodies. It had a cultural and spiritual sig-
nificance as well.

America's cornfed culture is peculiarly her own. It has
dominated this continent through four centuries. We have
swallowed Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Swedish, German
and a dozen other cultural ideas. As wave after wave of foreign
immigration washed up on our Atlantic shore, and swept far-

242

Cornfed Culture 243

ther and farther west, they brought traces of a score of Euro-
pean cultures. The Norskies who drove their kubberulles into
the new lands of Wisconsin and Minnesota took with them
folk customs of Scandinavian origin. The Norwegians, Danes
and Swedes who came to this country were moved to emigrate
by no resentment against conditions at home. Their motive
was economical. They had therefore no urge to forget the
past, and for a generation they kept their folkways. But within
that space of time their persistence in these began to manifest
the fanaticism which is inevitably inspired by a cause known
to be already lost. The small grain cultures of Europe were
eventually blotted out by the corn.

The earliest and most striking evidence that there is an
American culture is to be found in our national oratory. The
Gaelic gift for discourse which was part of the heritage of the
Scotch and Irish who came to the colonies during the seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries was prompt to assert
itself. Americans were quick to speak their minds. Even
quicker to speak their feelings. They protested and they ad-
jured. They exhorted and they preached. They testified at
religious revivals, and they confessed their sins with a rich-
ness of simile that an Old Testament prophet might have
envied. They led lengthily and rhapsodically in prayer.
Wherever two or three were gathered together one was sure
to make a speech. Though they spoke in English, they de-
veloped an American speech and an American style. The con-
trast between the speeches of Burke and of Patrick Henry,
born of the same racial stock and inspired by the same cause,
is the contrast between oats and corn.

A generosity of phrase and of gesture marked the oratory
of Clay, Calhoun, of Thomas Benton who dreamed of a road
across Missouri to India, and of many of the politicians of the
Mississippi Valley, down to Bryan. These men sprang from
the cornfields. The corn was in their blood. Its largess bred
in them a corresponding generosity of emotional expression
which found an outlet and an appreciative audience at torch-
light processions, county elections, Fourth of July outings,

244 Singing Valleys

Grange picnics, Harvest Homes, camp meetings and Chau-
tauquas. At all of these, soon or late, someone was sure to
launch into a tribute to one of the three national symbols
which never fail to stir American audiences to enthusiasm.
These are the flag, our mothers and the American corn.

Beside this flow of florid oratory the economy of Lincoln's
phrases becomes the most vivid evidence of his genius.

Not that audiences objected to the rhetorical flights they
were treated to. They, too, were cornfed. They were bred to
lavish exuberance. They had no fear of giving vent to their
emotions. The gift for understatement which was no small
part of the genius of New England, and which resulted di-
rectly from their lean harvests, would have struck a corn-belt
audience as too stingy to be truly American.

A cornfed culture is not nice in the sense of esthetics. Van
Wyck Brooks has called attention to the "village mind" of
Connecticut. This is keen, witty, carping. But not, truly
speaking, critical. In general, the American mind has de-
veloped small genius for analysis. That property belongs to
peoples who have threshed and winnowed small grains and
who have lived on small lands and in walled towns. It does
not mark those who have gathered into baskets four hundred-
fold. We produce propagandists and objectors, but, to date,
no great critics.

Europeans are apt to find the sweeping gestures which
distinguish the American style particularly irritating. Ameri-
cans, who are childlike in their eagerness to like everybody
and to be liked, are frankly puzzled that English lecturers
will make derogatory remarks about a people who are so will-
ing to part with their dollars for tickets. They want to know
where the catch is. There is no catch; only the entirely natural
resentment of an underfed people toward the evidences of
another nation's wellfedness.

New England boasted that its chief export to the Black
Wilderness was schoolmasters. Schools were as important as

Cornfed Culture 245

churches in colonial Massachusetts. The two ministers who
came out with the first supply of colonists to Salem prayed,
and then drew lots, to decide which one of them should serve
in the pulpit and which behind the schoolmaster's desk. Tui-
tion at those early schools was paid in corn. The Reverend
Francis Higginson of Salem, who drew the school and not the
meeting house, used to station a pupil at the schoolroom win-
dow to sell the surplus of corn to passers-by. When the plans
for Harvard College were going forward, every family in New
England was pledged to give one peck of corn, or twelve-
pence, or its value in wampum peag to the institution.

Meanwhile Virginia evinced a happy disregard for educa-
tion. That choleric governor Sir William Berkeley exclaimed,
"Thank God there are no free schools or printing presses. I
hope we shall not have these for one hundred years."

His hope was to go unfulfilled. Only thirty years later his
capital was selected as the site of the College of William and
Mary. Not that there was widespread enthusiasm over plans
for educating either the sons of the planters or the young
Indians.

"You must not forget," Dr. Blair reminded Sir Edward
Seymour, "that people in Virginia have souls to save."

"Souls," Sir Edward snorted. "Damn your souls! Grow
tobacco."

Virginia did grow tobacco; but she also built her college
which started immediately a pattern in education very differ-
ent from that of Harvard, and later of Yale. William and Mary
was the first college in America to allow students to elect their
studies. In the English world it was the second college to have
a chair of Municipal Law. It was the first in America to teach
history and political science. The men who went out from it
carried the idea of a university which served the growing cul-
tural and social needs of a people. This idea was the germ from
which grew our state universities.

The Virginians who ran over the mountain line into Ken-
tucky, and gathered eighty bushels of corn to the acre from

246 Singing Valleys

that rich soil, started their own seminary at Lexington. The
educational ideas on which it was founded in 1788 originated
in Williamsburg. But these ideas, like the men who carried
them, had crossed the mountains. The classic pattern was
abandoned in favor of utility. The Transylvania Seminary was
the first intellectual center west of the Alleghenies. The tuition
was £53 year, half of it payable in corn, pork or tobacco.
Board cost £9; but all of this could be paid in barter.

Kentucky's amazingly rapid growth from a population of
sixty-one thousand whites three years after the opening of the
Seminary to 180,000 in 1797, kept the Seminary filled with
students. The boys who studied there, who walked across the
fields of bluegrass to talk with Henry Clay on his six-hundred
acre farm, or who crossed Clark's Ferry to the mill for a
glimpse of the old scout, nonetheless a hero for his affection
for the jug of corn whiskey beside his chair, who saw the
militia mobilize and march north to fight the British in
Canada, received an education which was acutely alive and of
the time. Harvard, Yale, William and Mary were as remote
from the scene where America was being made as some
medieval cloister. But Lexington was on the frontier where
things were happening.

When those boys went out to raw, new settlements in Il-
linois, Indiana, Missouri and farther west they carried into
the wilderness ideals of education which were to leave an in-
delible stamp on our American culture. The constitution of
Illinois, framed in 1816, called for "a general system of educa-
tion ascending in regular gradation from township schools to
a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally
open to all."

New England had never dreamed such a dream. It was in
the corn belt that the idea of the state university came into
being. What made the essential difference between these state
institutions and the old endowed universities in the East was
the strong link between the first and the public schools of its
state. In those schools every pupil was encouraged to seek

Cornfed Culture 247

higher education. A college degree was not held up as some-
thing too sacred for the majority to dare aspire to. It was
presented as the common right of all Americans.

Frederick Jackson Turner, in discussing "Pioneer Ideals,"
declares, "By its system of public schools from the grades to
graduate work in the state universities, the West has created
a larger single body of intelligent plain people than can be
found anywhere else in the world."

Not the least of the power of the state universities was
vested in the fact that they were the property of the people.
Their roots were in the soil. As state institutions they were
free from the control or influence of any church or religious
or social group. They were essentially democratic. So they
have created a culture which represents American democracy.
That spirit began to be blown eastward about a century ago,
profoundly affecting the culture of the Atlantic seaboard. The
midwestern universities with their acceptance of science and
their zest in applying science to all the problems of the time
and the environment jolted eastern scholasticism out of its
bondage to classical traditions. Michigan, the first of the state
universities, booted Yale into organizing a department of
scientific agriculture which was presided over by the great
Dr. Norton, whose influence touched all the agricultural
writers and editors of the country for a generation.

From the state universities, too, came the idea of shaping
the university to the needs and demands of the student body;
not selecting a student body to fit the inflexible shape of the
university. This ideal has gradually influenced the old colleges
in the east, though they resisted it for years. Their trustees
and governors, the majority of whom had found small use
for Greek and Latin in Wall Street but who had the successful
business man's fixed idea that the road by which he has trav-
eled is the only one to success, stubbornly held out against
innovations from the corn belt. The competitive, cutthroat
world of high finance gave them no outlet for their latent
sentimentality. Their relations with their wives and daughters

248 Singing Valleys

were rigorously controlled. But on the subject of "dear old
Alma Mater" they could let themselves go. They were as
jealous of every one of her funny, old-fashioned eccentricities
as Cromwell was of his wart.

Ultimately, however, the demand for realism was pressed
too hard by the student bodies to be denied. Student strikes
demanded a more flexible elective system, and a voice in uni-
versity affairs. Even Harvard has partially succumbed to the
ideals of cornfed culture.

To Benjamin Franklin belongs the honor of founding the
first society devoted to the study of agriculture. That was
thirty years before the Revolution. In the two decades after
the struggle, similar societies sprang up in the new states.
Men like John Jay, Robert Livingston and Elkanah Watson,
the builder of the Erie Canal, recognized that the true founda-
tion of the nation's wealth and security was the farm. So New
York had its Society for Promoting Agriculture, Arts and
Manufactures, and at the meetings discussed such ideas as
"Raising Crops of Corn from Street Manure" and "The Ad-
visability of Turning Loose Alpine Chamois in our Moun-
tains."

In the rapidly developing agricultural region west of the
Ohio, farmers were too busy, and lived too far apart to attend
meetings. When two or three of them chanced to meet at the
grist mill or at the wharf from which they shipped their crops
by boat, they swapped experiences, horses, mules or a handful
of seed corn. They were much too occupied with the struggle
of growing up with the country to take stock of how they
grew. The social unit was the individual family, not the com-
munity. Life centered about the single hearth.

The settlers on the corn belt farms had left villages and
towns in the eastern states or in Europe to undergo the experi-
ence of isolation on the frontier. That experience had an effect
upon men and women from Connecticut and the Genesee
Valley who went to the Black Wilderness and the Illinois

Cornfed Culture 249

Country similar to the effect of inbreeding on the American
corn. It intensified hereditary characteristics. It strengthened
genetically the American mind.

Just as the corn, during the generations of its inbreeding,
dwindles in height, vigor, beauty and creative power, so the
generations of men while the inbreeding process continued
produced little of cultural or spiritual value. The midwest, dur-
ing the half-century that preceded the war between the states,
presented the world with a picture of crudity which has seldom
been surpassed. The legendary heroes of the era were Paul
Bunyan and Mike Fink. Those were the years of the lanky,
whiskered, tobacco-spitting land speculators; of the sleek, soft-
spoken gamblers smoking long, Cuban cigars; of the show-
boats on the river and the medicine shows on the roads. It
was the America of Joseph Cobb's Mississippi Sketches, the
America painted by William Sydney Mount whose brush rel-
ished the raw flavors of his time as much as Hogarth's or
Daumier's pencils caught the peculiar tangs of their London
and Paris. It was the America which the New York Times sent
Frederick Olmstead out to discover and to report. Olmstead's
newspaper articles — later these were published as a book, and
republished a few years ago — belong with William Byrd's
History of the Dividing Line and John Smith's Virginia, as
chapters of our national saga.

English and French literary observers who visited the Ohio
and Mississippi Valleys — Chateaubriand, de Crevecoeur, Har-
riet Martineau, Mrs. Trollop, Dickens, to name only an out-
standing few of those who came — were frankly nonplused by
the gap between transmontane America and Concord. The
thought in the communities lying along the seaboard was
crossed and recrossed by a dozen different strains. It was
fertilized by every wind that blew. It heaped harvest baskets
with the golden hoard of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne,
Lowell, Melville. Critical Europe bowed before these titans.
At Casa Guidi, Margaret Fuller was received with homage.
Carlyle admitted the fact of American genius.

250 Singing Valleys

But it seemed to most observers that the cause of culture
in the corn belt was already lost. What was happening west
of the Alleghenies was a process beyond the understanding
of the generations whose metaphysics had never embraced
Mendel's Law.

The New England stock planted in Ohio and Illinois and
undergoing that process of inbreeding had among its heredi-
tary genes the zeal for missionary endeavor. This gene would
seem to be on the distaff side. In the midwest it began to
manifest itself in the country schoolmarm. In hundreds of lit-
tle red schoolhouses, scattered across half a dozen farming
states, women teachers armed with Puritan consciences and
McGuffey's Readers, dedicated themselves to the cultural
conversion of the country's heathen youth. The majority of
the men who rose to positions of prominence in the midwest
taught school at the outset of their careers. They taught for a
livelihood while they studied law at night and dreamed of a
future in politics. But the women who became teachers en-
tered the profession with the holy zeal of nuns answering a
call to religion. These granddaughters of Massachusetts minis-
ters and sea captains brought into the district schools the
spirit of the evangelist and the discipline of the quarter-deck.

Grandmother Webb was fourteen in 1849. That year her
father caught the gold fever and sailed round the Horn for
California. Her mother packed up the children and her goods
and went to live with her brother on his farm. At the Christie
Street School in New York, fourteen-year-old Julia Needham
had been the star pupil. The only one in the class who could
spell "Nebuchadnezzar" for the examiners when they made
their yearly visit, she had been promoted and was in line for a
scholarship at the Albany Normal College. The fame of her
scholarship went to the farm with her. Before fall term, and
long before the ship Samoset made San Francisco, the district
school trustees called on "Miss Julia" and offered her the
post of teacher. It carried a salary of fifty dollars a year. Her
duties were to teach all the children who might come to

Cornfed Culture 251

school, ranging in age from five to eighteen, to sweep out the
schoolhouse every day, ring the bell and keep up the fires.
The trustees supplied wood for the round-bellied stove, but
the splitting of the cordwood sticks into stove lengths was
left to the teacher.

Grandmother taught that school until she married Grand-
father Webb. After that she had her own school in her
kitchen, at night, to teach the Negro stable man and his boys
how to read and write.

Though reared a Universalist, she offered her services to
the Episcopal Academy in the neighborhood and was wel-
comed there until the rector came to call on her one day and
caught her reading Swedenborg. Grandmother's teaching
career ended in disgrace and social ostracism.

But generally, throughout the country, the district school
teacher exerted an incalculable influence on American cul-
ture. Her Puritanism acted as a check on the flamboyant
rhetoric the local politicians indulged in. She taught Spen-
cerian penmanship, spelling, the simple, declarative sentence
and an innocent reverence for the classics. She imparted to
the youth of the corn belt her own feeling about culture,
which was only comparable to what early New England had
felt about religion. Her school boys who became lawyers,
senators, judges, railroad builders, and oil kings never lost
that feeling. Their response to it presented Cincinnati and
Chicago with art galleries and conservatories of music. It
endowed dozens of schools and universities throughout the
midwest. It built grand opera houses and subsidized lecture
programs and classes in art and literature and music. It sup-
ported the Chautauqua.

Still later, it inspired many of the foundations dedicated to
philanthropy and scientific research. A number of the largest
of these spend corn millions. The money in their endowments
came literally out of the cornlands. Even the wealth repre-
sented by Standard Oil, and administered by the Rockefellers
and others in the Standard Oil combine, is mixed with corn.

252 Singing Valleys

It is a fact that many of the richest oil fields in the country
were discovered not by engineers sent out by companies, but
by wildcat prospectors, the sons of corn farmers who were too
impatient to follow the plow. Instead of furrows, they drove
wells. When the cornlands turned black, not green, they sold
out to Standard Oil, which made millions where the original
prospectors made thousands. And where the farmer, who had
been first on the land, had rejoiced to reap thirty bushels to
the acre.

It is not without significance that a number of the mid-
western millionaires should have evinced a willingness to dedi-
cate millions to culture and scientific research, an attitude
toward the responsibility which wealth imposes which is not
generally shared by rich men whose fortunes have been made
by trade and speculation in the eastern towns. One has but to
examine the record in philanthropy of the Vanderbilts, Wool-
worths and Astors and that of the Rockefellers, McCormicks,
and Armours to discover, behind the midwestern millionaires,
the shade of some long-ago Miss Julia in a little red school-
house somewhere in the corn belt, who impressed upon her
pupils that money spent on culture was, in a sense, given
to the Lord.

The harvest of the hybrid corn is derived from the crossing
of two inbred lines. The meeting of various inbred foreign
cultures, and the inbred American variety there in the states
of the midwest, and above all in the state universities, has
produced the most vital influences in American literature
during the past forty years. Even before Dreiser, Sherwood
Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Willa Gather, Edna Ferber, Booth
Tarkington, Vachel Lindsay and Sinclair Lewis came out of
the cornlands, Mark Twain and Bret Harte had taught Amer-
ica to laugh at Mississippi Valley humor. Later than these,
though of their tradition, was Charles Stewart, a writer too
little known. Following them, O. O. Mclntyre brought Gal-
lipolis to Broadway. The country was inclined to accept the

Cornfed Culture 253

midwest with amused tolerance. It responded to Eugene Field,
and to the folksy quality of James Whitcomb Riley, even
though it refused to take them seriously as poets. They were
"cornfield writers," as Joel Chandler Harris dubbed himself.

Riley knew his country. Well he might. Early in his career
he was a blackboard artist and sign painter advertising Doctor
Townsend's Magic Oil. When the medicine show drove into
town, with the horses sleek, the harness polished and the
plumes atop each bridle tossing proudly, Riley and the Doc-
tor's son Jim were already at work leaving handbills at the
homes of the town's leading citizens, enlisting the sympa-
thetic interest of the mayor and his lady. At night, when a
crowd filled the town square in front of the torchlighted plat-
form, the show went on. Farmers gaped at the juggler, laughed
at the clown, applauded the sentimental ballads and listened
earnestly to the speech made by young Jim Townsend, who
was destined later to be a political force in Ohio. Jim's best
speech was about the human "hopedunum" and the ills it
could fall heir to, and the suffering these ills would cause the
hopedunum's unfortunate possessor. What the human hope-
dunum needed, the speech made clear, was Doctor Town-
send's Magic Oil. And plenty of it, at one dollar the bottle.
Without the Magic Oil the hopedunum would grow more
and more cantankerous, the individual would grow thinner
and thinner — here Riley's chalk went to work on the black-
board, sketching a cadaverous human being with what ap-
peared to be a snake eating its vitals — the marks of acute pain
would show in the face — chalk marks by Riley — the hair
would fall out (work with the eraser) then the teeth. Finally
. . . There was no need to put the end into words. Riley
would draw a coffin about the hopedunum victim, and already
the crowd would be pushing forward, dollars in hand, to buy
bottles of saving oil.

The west behind Sherwood Anderson, Lindsay, Sandburg,
Lewis and Willa Gather is the west of the medicine shows
and the Chautauquas, of grange picnics and state corn-

254 Singing Valleys

huskings. All of them knew state and county fairs, corn-
judging contests and hog-callings. At the time they began
sending manuscripts to publishers in New York and Boston
the East was still under the spell cast by Henry James, in
whose veins the American blood ran so thin that he was
driven to retreat to London from the frontier as represented
by Beacon Street. James' flight had coincided with the advent
in Boston of William Dean Howells. Howells was born in
the corn belt. He had "limped beside his father, with his eyes
on the cow but his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare." As
James had sought security in England, he ran away from the
farm to the bosom of the Atlantic Monthly. "You have more
passion than I have," James confided to him after reading one
of his manuscripts. It was the faint trace of cornfed culture in
Howells which the born Bostonian detected. Poor James, who
could look at a quince tree and only see it "full of antiquity
and contortions." How gratefully, after that, one lets Sandburg
take one up-river with Lincoln in the cool, American Spring.

Frequently it was hard for the East to understand that these
young writers out of the corn belt were not funny. They were
as serious about people living in sod houses on the Nebraska
prairie as if these had been Ethan Fromes. They wrote as if
the midwest mattered. And as if Main Street were all of a
piece, from Bangor, Maine, to Denver, Colorado.

In the cities of the corn-growing midwest the Rotary and
Kiwanis Clubs developed a business fellowship which the
East, at first, found faintly amusing. It laughed, even while
it adopted the idea. These clubs, dedicated to bigger, better
and friendlier business, accomplished something more than
profits for the members. When Professor Edward Lee Thorn-
dike made a survey several years ago of three hundred Amer-
ican cities, he discovered that wherever there was a large
membership in these organizations, this proved to be "a symp-
tom of a community of good people of low incomes and of
average total welfare."

It was not only writers who came out of the cornlands;

Cornfed Culture 255

George Bellows sprang from the midwest. Howard Chandler
Christy was born in a cabin on a corn title near McConnells-
ville, Ohio. In Paris, in 1915, Ralph Barton, out of Kansas
City, and Thomas Benton, another Missourian, shared an
attic studio. What betrayed Barton was the abandonment of
his native, corn-fed culture for a pseudo-cosmopolitanism;
Benton was loyal to his genius. He has gone back to Missouri,
to drive his roots deep into his native soil. Benton and Grant
Wood, painter of the Iowa corn lands, represent the American
spirit in the realm of art.

The artist, like the corn, is sustained by two sets of roots.
One of these needs must drive deep into that which is uni-
versal, epic. The other set of roots runs out on all sides, close
to the surface of the artist's environment and his time. The
permanence of his genius depends upon his ability to develop
this double-root system. It may be said that the future of art
in America rests on our artists and writers growing like the
corn.

XVI

Some American Corn Gods

A DMIRABLE is the account" (so begins the Popol Vuh,
£lL which is the sacred book of the Quiche Indians of
Guatemala) "in which it came to pass that all was formed in
heaven and upon earth. . . . Lo, all was in suspense, all was
calm and silent, all was motionless, all was quiet; and wide
was the immensity of the skies. . . . There were only im-
mobility and silence in the darkness in the night. Alone was
the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, the Lord, and Gucumetz, the
Plumed Serpent; those who engender, those who give being,
alone upon the waters like a growing light. ..."

At that time Tepeu, the Lord, and the Plumed Serpent
spake together. At their words light dawned; and with the
first day, man appeared.

"... Tepeu and Gucumetz held council together touching
civilized life; how seed should be formed, how light should
be produced."

First they made the animals, and assigned to each his place
in the earth. But the animals disappointed their creators,
because they had no speech. The two said, "Let us make those
who shall be our supporters and nourishers." And so they
made men.

The first men were made of mud. But these were even less
satisfactory than the animals because they could not move
about. Tepeu and the Plumed Serpent then made some men
out of wood. These could move but they could not think.
They stupidly made war on each other and filled the world
with trouble. To get rid of them Tepeu caused a great flood.

256

Some American Corn Gods 257

The few who escaped by climbing to the tops of the trees be-
came monkeys, and their descendants are still with us.

"After this the gods made another attempt. This time they
took grains of white and yellow maize ..." Only yellow
maize and white entered into their flesh. These were the sole
substance of the legs and arms of man. "Thus were fashioned
our first fathers. Men they were. They spoke and they rea-
soned. They saw and they understood. They moved and they
had feeling; men, perfect and fair, whose features were human
features."

According to the Popol Vuh there were four of these maize
men. These four brothers appear again and again in various
guises through the whole body of Mayan and Aztec myth.
They are the Four Bacabs who guard the corners of the earth
and have charge of the four winds which blow on the corn-
fields. They preside over the various parts of the human body,
as the Egyptians believed the four sons of Horus did. They
represent the four elements of which all things are composed.
In a sense, they are the Four Evangelists, also.

All Indian tribes have paid especial attention to the quater-
nity. When the Navajos perform their Mountain Chant the
dancers proceed from a central medicine lodge to the four
points of the compass where they scatter maize, water and
cornmeal. This part of the rite accomplished, the dancers re-
turn from the four points of the compass to the central lodge
where the ceremony is continued.

Actually, the pattern of this dance reproduces the ancient

Mayan day-sign, Lamat ^ which signified planting, and

which was presided over by the Four Bacabs. The similarity
between this sign and the hill in which four grains of maize
are set to sprout has been pointed out in an earlier chapter.
But the sign has another and a far deeper significance than
that of a corn-hill. Most certainly this significance was not
lost upon those who devised it to express all that is meant by
the growth of a seed in the earth. To all races of men, living

258 Singing Valleys

at all times, the design of a cross has signified the bringing
together of opposing forces. Its central point, where those
warring forces meet, is where energy — life — is born. The union
of the opposites is a conflict, which generates force. It is, too,
the place of reconciliation and rebirth, where a secret transfor-
mation is brought about.

Undoubtedly the Maya believed that it was the union of
the four opposites which generated the force that caused the
maize to grow. More dimly he perceived that something of the
same sort must take place within himself for his life to spring
up like the young plant. The rituals he performed in the
temples of the fertility goddess, and those he performed in
the fields where he planted and harvested his crops, were not
intended alone for the improvement of the harvest. They
were intended to work magic on the individual who per-
formed them. The primitive believed in cosmic law, the same
for man as for the plants and the animals. A rite which en-
couraged growth and productivity in the corn could not fail
to be equally good for man, whose body, according to the
legend, had been fashioned by Tepeu and the Plumed Serpent
out of the white and yellow maize.

The ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America had
corn in four colors — white, yellow, red and black. The colors
were associated with the different points of the compass, and
therefore with the Four Bacabs. The Bacab of the south was
called Kan. This was also the name of the day-sign which
meant maize. To Kan was ascribed the yellow corn. This was
the sacred color, worn by the priests in their temple cere-
monies. When Captain Cook visited the Sandwich Islands,
he was impressed by the king's ceremonial cloak of yellow
feathers. The yellow and white papal banners have the same
original significance.

The Popol Vuh is the most striking and instructive of all
the myth-records of primitive America. Though it was not
written down until after the Conquest, and though its story of

Some American Corn Gods 259

creation has undoubtedly been influenced by the teachings of
Catholic missionaries, it presents us with tales told by the
Quiches through uncounted generations. The name means
literally "Book of the Mat." Its stories are those which were
told while the family sat on the mat together. It was entirely
natural that many of those stories should be concerned with
that which furnished old and young with their daily food.

The four maize men were not the first men on earth. Be-
fore Tepeu made men of wood or of clay, at least two beings
had appeared with the dawn of the first day. These were the
First Father, and Xmucane, the First Mother.

These demigods lived in the green land of Maya. To them
were born twin sons. The boys were strong, handsome and
skillful in all games. It was they who invented "pok-ta-pok,"
the game of ball which was played in a paved court, and in
which the early Mexicans were amazingly proficient. The ball
used was made of solid rubber, about one foot in diameter.
Two players stood across the court from each other and kept
the ball in continuous motion, each trying to send it through
a ring at the end of the opposite court. It was against the rules
to use the hands to bat the ball. It must be volleyed from the
body. Diego Duran relates that the players he watched had
"such dexterity and skill that they, during one hour, suc-
ceeded in not stopping the flight of the ball from one end of
the court to the other without missing a single hit with their
buttocks/'

The twin sons of Xmucane were playing this game one day
when their laughter reached the ears of the Lords of the Un-
derworld. These promptly dispatched four owls with a message
to the brothers to come and test their skill against that of the
champions of the House of Gloom.

The brothers accepted the challenge. They bade farewell
to Xmucane who stood at the door of her house and watched
the owls carry her sons away.

What happened in the Underworld is exactly what one
might expect. The Lords fell on the brothers and cut off their

260 Singing Valleys

heads. One head they threw away; the other, that of the hand-
somer twin, they hung on a tree over which grew a gourd vine.
It was almost impossible to tell the head from the gourds.

But not entirely impossible. Xquiq, the daughter of the
Master of the Underworld, discovered what she thought was
the most beautiful ripe gourd she had ever seen. She reached
to pluck it when suddenly it spoke, and spat into her hand.

In this miraculous fashion the virgin Xquiq conceived, and
was with child by the dead. For six months she hid her condi-
tion from her father. Then concealment was no longer pos-
sible. The Master of the Underworld was enraged against his
daughter, and determined to do away with her and her shame.
He called for the four owls and bade them carry her away to
the upper world to die. When she was dead, the owls were
to tear out her heart and bring it back to him in a little vase
he gave them.

The owls picked up Xquiq in their strong beaks and flew
with her to a forest in the upper world. They set her down
under a tree and took up their places on one of the limbs
to watch her die.

"Look," said Xquiq. "It is going to take me a long time
to die. I am strong, and there are plenty of fruits here to
eat, and water to drink. You will get very tired sitting there
on that branch waiting." Then, cleverly, she bargained with
them: "I will make a heart out of the gum of the blood wort.
My father will not know it from mine. Carry it back to him
in the little vase, and save yourselves a long wait."

The owls saw the advantage of this and agreed to Xquiq's
proposal. They took the vase with the bloodwort heart in it,
and flew away. Then Xquiq got up and walked out of the
wood.

There was a house. A woman stood in the doorway, shading
her eyes with her hand, watching the flight of the four owls.
It was Xmucane. She saw at once the way it was with Xquiq,
and kindly asked her to come into her house to rest.

The princess of the Underworld told her story, and for the

Some American Corn Gods 261

first time Xmucane knew that her sons would never return to
her. But the First Mother was a woman of experience. She
shook her head when Xquiq told her by what manner she had
conceived.

"In this world such things happen very differently. It could
only happen so with you if you are a magic-making person.
How can I tell that unless I see you make magic?"

"Give me a basket/' said Xquiq.

Xmucane put one into her hand.

"Now come and see."

Xquiq went out to a cleared place where maize was
planted, and to a single hill. From that one hill she picked
so many ears of maize that the basket was filled to overflow-
ing. Xmucane ran and threw her arms around her.

"I know now that you speak the truth. And your son is the
son of my son."

To appease the sorrow of Xmucane, Tepeu sent Xquiq
twin sons who carried on the tradition of their father and
uncle. They are the heroes of countless stories in the Popol
Vuh. They too had a magic way of making maize grow where
none had grown before. It was told of them, as of Quetzalcoatl
the embodiment of the Plumed Serpent, that in their time
the maize grew so tall and so strong that a single stalk was all
that a man could carry.

One of Xquiq's sons was called Xbalanque, "Jaguar," in
honor of the beast which protected the maize by springing on
the deer who would have eaten the crop. In many ancient
Mexican carvings the jaguar is identified with the maize, as its
guardian. The frog was another animal which came in for spe-
cial honors on account of its supposed rain-making powers.
Frogs of gold and of jade have been found in many of the
buried temples and tombs. There was a frog of jade, weigh-
ing more than ten pounds, and sacred to Coatlicue, which
was part of the loot the Spaniards stole. This never reached
Spain as the caravel was sunk in the Caribbean. There, sup-
posedly, it still lies with other Mexican treasure.

262 Singing Valleys

Jade, which was mined in the southern part of Mexico, was
considered sacred to Cinteotl or to the Earth and fertility
goddesses by reason of its green color. As for the rain-making
abilities of the frog, most of the Indian tribes have believed
in them. And most country-bred American children have
looked for a rainy day to follow the killing of a toad.

It is easy to see how much of the elaborate worship of the
Plumed Serpent and of Coatlicue the Earth Mother was
a rain cult, natural enough to tribes whose chief food was
maize. The offering of human sacrifices and the shedding of
human blood on the altars was intended, through the laws of
sympathetic magic, to draw down rain on the earth. The
blood served a second purpose, however. It was supposed to
nourish the earth and give it strength to produce. Mother
Earth was a dragon which would bring forth vegetation only
if fed. And the Great Mother was always hungry.

So at the festival held when the maize plant had attained
its full growth, when the tassels were forming, women danced
before the statue of the goddess shaking their unbound hair
in imitation of the waving silk of the maize ears. This, it was
believed, would show the corn the way it should grow. One
of the dancers in the ballet and trained in the temple dancing-
school, was selected for the sacrifice. Her face was painted red
and yellow, the colors of the corn. At the climax of the cere-
mony she was seized by the priest who ripped open her nude
body, as one tears apart the sheath surrounding an ear of
corn. The still beating heart was offered to the goddess. This,
it was supposed, would revive her strength and enable her to
bring the maize to its full fruition.

One aspect of the goddess, called Chicomenecoatl, "She
of the Seven Maize Ears/' presided over the sowing of the
maize. On her feast which fell on April twenty-seventh by our
calendar, young girls carried ears of corn to the temples to be
blessed. There the priests sprinkled the ears with rubber oil
to give fertility to the seed.

Some American Corn Gods 263

Chicomenecoatl was also sometimes called "Seven Ser-
pents," doubtless in reference to the rattles which were used
in the rain-making ceremonies. Her brother was Tlaloc, the
rain-god. This is literally "He Who Makes Things Sprout."
The brother and sister lived in Tlalocan, called in the Popol
Vuh "The Place of the Division of the Waters." It was that
happy isle in the west which figures in the myths of so many
peoples, and which always holds the sum of all their desires.

The rain-god was aided in his work by moon fairies and by
numberless little dwarfs who carried jars of water to the
fields. Clay figures of these "tlaloques," grinning, and holding
tiny water jugs, are still made by the Indian potters in our
southwest and are offered for sale at the Albuquerque railroad
station. I bought one of them there several years ago and set
it in a corner of my garden. Whether thanks to the "tlaloque"
or to the saint on whom the Pilgrim Fathers pinned their
hopes I do not know, but that summer there was no drought
in the Hudson River Valley.

The rain-gods had their own feasts when the women baked
little cakes of maize paste in the form of serpents and of
mountains, and offered these on the altars. At the conclusion
of the ceremony, the priests broke the cakes and gave them
to the people to eat. Thus, it was believed, they would receive
in their bodies the good which the rain did to the fields.

A Mexican manuscript in the Bodleian Library pictures
the proper education of a girl. In her thirteenth year — that
is, when she has reached puberty — she is to be instructed in
the use of the rnetate-stone. Her entrance upon womanhood is
marked by her admission to the ranks of the meal-grinders.
From her mother and grandmother she is commanded to
learn the ritual for grinding corn for the tortillas for family
consumption, and for the little butterfly-shaped cakes to be
laid on crossroads altars as offerings to the Haunting Mothers
— the spirits of women who have died in childbed.

It seems probable that Chicomenecoatl was a maize and
moon deity of the Toltecs who lived in the Valley of Mexico

264 Singing Valleys

before the Crane People came down from the north. Her
worship persisted for several centuries. Then, gradually, it
became fused with that of the Aztec goddess Tlazoteotl, the
mother of the maize god.

Like Xquiq in the Quiche legend, Tlazoteotl was a god-
dess of the Underworld. She, too, was a moon divinity who
was associated with childbirth and with witchcraft. Her hus-
band was the god of war. Once a year her priest, dressed to
represent Tlazoteotl, his face painted red and yellow like the
maize and his mouth black to represent rain, went to the
temple of the god of war and lay down before the statue there.
Thus was enacted the mating of Tlazoteotl and the war god.
Presently another priest, dressed to represent their son Cin-
teotl, came and stood beside the pair. So, every year, the
maize was born.

As queen of the witches, Tlazoteotl rode on a broom. She
is so pictured in several old manuscripts. It is interesting that
American tribes who had no horses, and no animal to ride,
should have imagined the Witch Queen as mounted. And
mounted upon the very steed European witches were sup-
posed to ride when they went to their sabbaths.

The German savant Eduard Seler, who is the authority on
Aztec picture-writing, says that Chicomenecoatl represented
the forces in the growing maize. Tlazoteotl was the ripened
ear. The latter's son, Cinteotl, was the maize itself. His name
is but a variant of the Mexican name for the plant "teocintl,"
"Food of the Gods."

Like Persephone and all other grain deities, Cinteotl the son
of the Witch Queen was associated with the Underworld. He
was male; but the power which produced and sustained him,
and which had to be invoked on his behalf, was feminine.

Each Indian tribe in the Americas had its own — and several
— legends concerning the miraculous creation of the maize.
Roger Williams tells that the Narragansett Indians believed
that a crow flew to them out of the southwest with a grain of

Some American Corn Gods 265

maize in one ear and a bean in the other. Therefore the
Rhode Island Indians would not kill a crow.

The Iroquois had a legend of a chief of their tribe who
prayed to the Great Spirit for more food for his people. He
was directed to take his wife and children and go to the plains
in the rainy moon, and there to wait for three days. While
waiting, the chief and his family fell asleep. When their
tribesmen came to seek them they found only a field of green,
growing corn.

Mondamin, the maize spirit, figures in the Chippewa legend
of the maiden "White Earth/' who was sought by five suitors.
When she refused the first one, the blanket dropped from
his shoulders, and he became tobacco. The second suitor,
when he was refused, rolled down the hill and turned into a
pumpkin. The third became a melon; the fourth a bean. The
fifth suitor was the maize spirit, and him "White Earth" took
for her husband.

The Zunis ascribed the creation of the maize to powers in
the sky and the stars. The Cherokees honored the moon as
"Mother of the Corn." The Algonquins believed that the
moon had two sons, one the White Manitou who created all
that was good, including the maize, the other the Black Mani-
tou who wrought evil in the earth.

It will be remembered that Chicomenecoatl was a moon
goddess; and Tlazoteotl, who came to Mexico with the Aztecs,
was in process of becoming one when the Spaniards destroyed
her temples. It is a striking fact that wherever agriculture is
developed, the moon goddesses increase in power and impor-
tance. Among all the maize-growing tribes in the three
Americas, only two had a sun worship. These were the Incas
and the Natchez of the lower Mississippi Valley. All other
Indians paid homage to the power of the moon.

Like all primitive peoples, the early Americans reverenced
a mysterious, procreating power, essentially feminine in na-
ture, which appeared in the moon and in the earth on which
the moon's light fell. This same power was also in woman.

266 Singing Valleys

The Zunis, who maintained a large population in their pueblos
by their irrigated and carefully cultivated maize fields, had
elaborate rituals connected with corn-growing. At the head of
their college of priests was a woman, called the Priestess of
Fertility. Other tribes had woman shamans, and even the male
shamans dressed in women's attire for their ceremonies. The
good brothers of St. Francis felt it necessary to burn alive a
number of these priests and priestesses of the earth before they
could establish Christianity in San Francisco. It is interesting
that the monks who were so horrified at the Indian shamans
also had set aside their masculine breeches, and wore skirts
like women.

In all the North American tribes women exercised a re-
markable power. At marriage, the woman did not leave her
home for her husband's. Instead, the husband came to live
with her and her parents. The children belonged to the
mother. In the Senecas' Long House as many as twenty
families lived together. But the women owned the house and
all that was in it. A man who made trouble, or who refused
to do his share of the work, was promptly ordered out. Father
Charlevoix reported of the Algonquins: "The woman never
leaves her home, of which she is regarded as the mistress and
heiress." About a century before the coming of white settlers,
the Cayugas were threatened with extinction in the tribal
wars. They sent to the Mohawks and asked for a supply of
husbands for the Cayuga women to raise up a new and vigor-
ous generation.

The high prestige held by Indian women could not fail to
impress the white colonists. Practically all the early land deeds
carry the signatures of Indian women. When the Iroquois met
the American representatives to settle the question of their
lands, Good Peter spoke to Governor Clinton on behalf of
the women of the tribe:

Brothers! Our ancestors considered it a great offense to reject
the counsels of their women, particularly of the Female Gov-

Some American Corn Gods 267

ernesses. They were esteemed the mistresses of the soil. "Who/'
said our forefathers, "brings us into being? Who cultivates our
lands, kindles our fires, and boils our pots, but the women?"

Our women, Brother, entreat that the veneration of our ances-
tors in favor of the women be not disregarded, and that they may
not be despised. The Great Spirit made them. The Female Gov-
ernesses entreat the Great Chief to put forth his strength and to
preserve them in peace. For they are the life of the nation.

It is impossible to understand the relationship between men
and women in all its rich variety without some knowledge at
least of what that relationship has been in their united service
to the Earth Mother goddess. For in the very real ritual of
sowing, dressing, harvesting and grinding corn, men and
women stand in their true relationship to each other and to
the earth. The eager desire to return to the soil on the part of
many intellectualized city dwellers during the past few years
frequently reflects a longing for release from a neuroticism and
from a false relationship to each other in which society and
economics have enmeshed them.

The whites who came to the Americas from the old civiliza-
tions of Europe, brought with them subliminal memories of
ancient moon and earth worship. True, that worship had
ceased centuries before the new world was discovered. As
knowledge overcame ignorance and fear, and as science re-
placed magic, men had ceased to feel a necessity to bow to
the mysterious, fructifying, feminine force in nature. They
began to feel power within themselves. As they became in-
creasingly aware of their own intellectual powers, they turned
from the moon to the sun, which was their symbol of mascu-
line energy and understanding.

John Smith and those he inspired with faith in America
were sun-worshippers, in the sense that they believed in their
own powers to deal with the unknown. The Plymouth colo-
nists, and those who gathered around the Reverend Francis
Higginson at Salem, had faith in the printed Word of God, in
gunpowder and in their own intestinal fortitude to deal with

268 Singing Valleys

whatever situation they might find themselves in. God and
gumption saved New England from famine, the "salvages/'
communism and Salem witchcraft. The combination was in-
vincible.

But as the colonists began to push up the Tidewater rivers
toward the Back Woods, and westward to the Connecticut
Valley and the Housatonic, they removed themselves further
from the thought of Europe and closer to the life of the In-
dian. They came into contact with primitive forces which
awoke echoes in their own unconscious. The genius loci is a
very real presence. That of the corn-growing American fron-
tier led the pioneers to lay aside the concept of woman as
the mate of man which they had brought with them from
Europe, and to revert to the worship of an older and more
primitive woman-image, that of the Mother.

America has a mother-goddess. Her worship was born on the
frontier. There Coatlicue, mistress of the cornfields, gave
birth to her progeny. There the "Old Woman Who Never
Dies," as the Sioux called the moon, demanded of her sons
service and worship, even to the offering up of their own
hearts. Henry said, "An American Virgin would never dare
command; an American Venus would never dare exist." But
the American Mother commands with an authority which is
vested in all the ancient earth and mother worship of the race.

The women who made the journey on horseback down into
the Great Valley, who hoed corn in clearings in the Back
Woods while their men were hunting; who held the doors
against Indians and their own hearts against fear, were in every
sense the mates of their men. They sprang from a Europe
which had attained to a concept of women which prompted
Frenchmen who believed in the Salic Law to follow The Maid
into battle. It had enabled an ill-favored, neurotic British
spinster to say, with full confidence that men would accept
her statement, "I am England." It was the next generation
of American women, born in the tamed and fertile cornlands,
who became Mothers.

Some American Corn Gods 269

The American Mother is the last of the maize goddesses.
Like all who have preceded her, she demands homage to her
maternity. On her feast, which is celebrated annually at corn-
planting time, her children pay her tribute in flowers, in spe-
cially worded verses invented by the greeting-card manufac-
turer and the telegraph companies. On occasions she has
demanded human sacrifice. The years between 1914 and 1918
revealed a blood-lust in women of all the warring nations
which struck terror to the hearts of men. An American in-
fantry officer who was gravely wounded on the Meuse, told
me that the greatest horror the war held for him was a woman
who caught at his stirrup as he rode through Liverpool on his
way to the front. "Rip the living hearts out of them for me,"
she shrieked. The face and the voice were those of the mother
of Pentheus who joyed in the dismemberment of her son.
But only in America did mothers who lost sons in the World
War adopt an emblem which proclaimed pride in their sons'
deaths. American Gold Star Mothers, convening in Paris to
go sight-seeing, shop, and visit the army cemeteries, pro-
foundly shocked numbers of European women whose loss by
the war had been far greater than that of the Americans.

Men and women of all peoples and of all times have loved
the women who bore them. But no other people in world
history have enveloped their human mothers in the habili-
ments of the ancient moon and earth deities. For this we
have to thank the American corn.

It is not at all improbable that this bondage to the mother-
image is in large measure responsible for the failure of Amer-
ican marriage. The case records of the psychiatrists, family
courts and marriage clinics all over the country reveal how
far-reaching is the power of the Mother. Scores of folk tales in
all the languages of the earth remind man that he cannot
achieve a realistic relationship to his mate until he is free of
bondage to the mother-image. Americans do not have to seek
confirmation of this psychological truth in Arthurian legends

2jo Singing Valleys

or in the Greek hero-myths. "As certain of your own poets
have said . . ."

At the door on summer evenings

Sat the little Hiawatha,

Heard the whispering of the pine-trees,

Heard the lapping of the water;

Sounds of music, sounds of wonder . . .

Sounds which the boy imagined to be the voice of the
mother who had died in giving him birth. His grandmother,
"Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis," brought him up. Her
tales helped to build the mother-image in young Hiawatha's
mind.

Hiawatha's youth is lived under the dominance of these
two mothers, his own and his grandmother. When he reaches
manhood, he seeks to escape. True to the archetypal pattern,
he conceives the idea that if it were not for his father he could
possess his mother — that is, she would be to him like any
other woman. She would lose her mysterious, powerful influ-
ence. He would be free. Accordingly he seeks out his father
and kills him. The same thing happens in a hundred other
hero-myths. The prize the hero wins by overcoming his father
is his inheritance of his father's strength.

But still, Hiawatha is not free within himself. On his return
journey he meets and falls in love with the maiden Minne-
haha. Her name means Laughing Water; but to Hiawatha's
ear the sounds of the trees and the waters are still his mother's
voice. He is unable to give himself to this love because he is
still in bondage to the mother-image.

Restless and frustrated, he retires to solitude in the forest.
In this sense, he gives himself up to the Mother.

One might think that the hero had now lost reality com-
pletely. Not so. Reality comes to him:

Dressed in garments green and yellow
Coming through the purple twilight,
Through the splendor of the sunset;

Some American Corn Gods 271

Plums of green bent o'er his forehead,
And his hair was soft and golden . . .

It is the maize god, Mondamin. He bids Hiawatha rise and
wrestle with him.

"I, the friend of man, Mondamin,
Come to warn you and instruct you,
How by struggle and by labor
You shall gain what you have prayed for. . . ."

The author of Hiawatha came from a New England which
still believed in gumption, if not in God. And in work. It is
work which will give the young man the freedom he craves.
Work will give him possession of himself.

Longfellow's New England had lost its most virile sons to
the western cornlands. They had had to struggle to wrest those
lands from the Indians and from the forest. That struggle,
coming as it did after their overcoming authority in the form
of government by a power outside themselves, gave them their
freedom. That generation of Americans possessed themselves
in a very real sense.

The real inspiration for Hiawatha, I believe, was not merely
a Chippewa legend, but what an American poet, born in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, had seen happen to his countrymen
living in the corn belt.

The sons and the sons' sons of those conquerors of the
midwestern cornlands, born on the farms, have not had to
struggle in the same way. The fatness of the furrows their
fathers plowed fed them and made them rich. As their barns
filled to bursting, as their corn and their cattle increased,
they themselves lost something. The mother-goddess who fed
them so liberally robbed them of their maturity.

Today, American youth, like Hiawatha, which is its symbol,
chafes under its bondage to the mother-image, which tends
to keep it childish. It, too, conceives of winning freedom by
conquering the Father-in-authority. Not an American "Papa."
He has never loomed as a power in our national firmament.

272 Singing Valleys

And "Uncle Sam" is notoriously a bachelor. But authority in
the form of convention, of orthodox religion, of established
government, of capitalism. One cannot see and listen to our
youthful radicals in the university forums and on soap boxes
in Union Square without being reminded of Hiawatha, strug-
gling with West Wind for the power to free himself from the
great American Mother.

They will tell you, for so they believe, that it is the existing
order of things which holds them in bondage. By overthrow-
ing that order, they say, Youth will come into its own.

One only wishes that it were so easy. Youth never knows
what middle age pays a price to discover: that bondage is
always within ourselves. Freedom begins in the soul. For our
forefathers, the struggle for reality lay in the wresting of lands
from savages and the conquest of the fields. Today's struggle
lies in meeting the economic problems which are the result
of an enormous national, natural wealth. The battle-ground
is no longer in the forest and the fields. But no more is it in
the legislatures and the courts of law. It is within the soul.

Freedom comes high. Like experience, "it is the price of all
that a man hath." For Americans, the price of freedom may
well be the sacrifice of the thing we value most — youthfulness.
Not in the bodies of our young people, as has happened in
the past, and as still happens today; but the childish, de-
pendent state of mind which makes countless millions of us
willing to have someone else do our thinking for us.

It may even be that as a people we shall have to grow up.

XVII

Maize Magic in American
Folklore

MAG SIX is a granny-woman, little and wizened, deaf
as an adder, and with a snake's bright, unwinking
eyes. Mag knows things. These are not the sort of things that
city people think make a person smart. They are useful things,
like how to cure warts, and the right signs of the moon for
the planting of gourds and cucumbers and beans; the way to
give a child power to staunch blood, and more tricks that
will bring rain than just to hang a snake, belly up, over a
fence.

To girls who show all the symptoms of being sixteen and
lovesick, Mag says: 'Take your bed-sheet and go lay it onto
the hills where you got your corn planted. You got to do it
on the last night of April, though, to make it work. Come
morning, that sheet'll be all over wrinkles. Them wrinkles
will spell your mister's name."

Mag's mister has been dead for many years. She speaks of
him without regret, but also without resentment. "He had
a kind of mean streak to him." He suspected — and not with-
out cause, if one can believe Mag's neighbors — that her inter-
est in visiting her sister down the branch was that sister's
husband, and he quietly emptied some gunpowder into the
corn-cake batter she was preparing to fry. Mag told me
about it.

"When I slapped them cakes onto the griddle they went
off like Judgment Day." She smiled, like a child remembering
a grand and glorious Fourth. "And I hain't heerd so much as
a cricket sence."

273

274 Singing Valleys

Mag is frankly suspicious of our doctor's ability to heal the
sick. She walked six miles down the valley to see a woman
whose little daughter had died a week before of whooping
cough. "Efen I'd a known how 't was with the young 'un I'd a
been here quicker'n a flea. Efen you'd a slapped a hot corn
poultice onto her chest she would 'a been skippin' out there
in the yard this minute. A hot corn poultice'll suck out any
pizen there is in a body."

Hot corn poultices for coughs and pleurisy and pneumonia;
a salve of cornmeal and honey for boils and sties on the eyes;
a slice of salt pork, well peppered, bound round the throat
in a rag of red flannel for the quinsy and a cornsilk tea for
urinary troubles — these are Mag's remedies.

"What's the use o' bein' pukin' an' ailin' when pretty near
everything a body needs to keep well is a-growin' right in your
own yard?" she says. "These here women with their headache
powders and their bottle medicine . . . Shucks. Efen they
was to string some corn onto a thread and wear it round their
necks like it was beads, they'd be as peart as a day-old chick.
There's some folks likes to go doctorin', though."

The hills that wall the valley have held all of Mag's life like
a cup. Whatever lies beyond them interests her as little as what
lies beyond Judgment Day. All that is the Lord's affair, not
hers. But everything that happens to anyone within the valley
is of instant and acute concern to Mag Six, in her little two-
room, whitewashed stone cottage by the Furnace.

"That measly Sam Hostetter'll land in the County House,"
she said. "Burns his corncobs."

"What's wrong with that?" I shouted. "You do it. I've
seen you throw on a whole apronful to heat up the oven."

"Not my seed corncobs," she snapped. "Catch me putting
one of them into the stove. You've got to bury the cobs you
take the seed off'n. Or else throw 'em into the branch. Earth's
got to have the cobs, same as the seed, to raise you a crop."

"Not worth hoein' corn for" is the worst Mag can say of one
of her sex. A man "too lazy to hoe a row" is less than the

Maize Magic in American Folklore 275

dust he refuses to stir. It was Mag who recited for me the
ballad of "The Lazy Man." She explained that "rightly, hit
oughter be sung." And that the tune to it "was real pretty.
Folks useter dance to it when I was a gal." It goes this way.

Come all my good people, and listen to my song.

I'll sing you of a lazy man that wouldn't tend his corn.
The reason why I cannot tell,

For this young man was always well.

He went to the fence and he peeked therein
The chinkey-pin bush was as high as his chin,

The weeds and the grass they grew so high
They made this poor young man to cry.

In July his corn was almost knee-high

Come September, he laid it by.
And in October there came a big frost

And all this young man's corn was lost.

He went to his nearest neighbor's house,

A-courting, as you may suppose,
And in conversation the question came round;

Says she; "Young man, have you hoed your corn?"

The young man made a quick reply;

"Oh no," says he, "for I've laid it by,
It ain't no use to strive and strive in vain,

For I can't raise a single grain."

"Oh, then, kind sir, why do you wish to wed,
When you can't raise your own corn bread?

Single I am, and single I'll remain,
The lazy man I never will maintain."

There are people in the valley who say that Mag Six can hex.
"Never heerd me say as I couldn't," she cackles. I have noticed
that she invariably draws a five-pointed star across her big

2j6 Singing Valleys

iron kettle when she takes it down for a hog-killing. Mag is
always in demand at local butcherings. She is known to be the
best casings-maker in the valley.

Everybody knows that a five-pointed star will keep off any
hex. There are people who laugh at this and call it a super-
stition. But not infrequently their barns have stars painted
on the gable ends; and whenever the barns are repainted the
stars are put on again — Even when the job is being done by a
son home from the state college. When Mag whitewashed her
corncrib last year she brushed a crooked hexenfuss on the
door.

"Might's well be keerful," she explained.

A lifetime of poverty has made Mag "keerful" of everything
that can be eaten. Her "keerfulness" of corn, however, springs
from a different source than the thrift which inspires her to
find a use for every scrap of pig which falls from the butcher's
knife. Corn is food in a larger sense than just something for
tomorrow's dinner. Her feeling for it is similar to that which
makes the Sicilian peasant woman, if she drops a piece of
bread, snatch it up and kiss it penitently.

The Mexican woman has this reverence for the maize. If
any of it is spilt, she gathers up every grain, lest her careless-
ness invite want. Before she grinds the corn, she blows on it
"to make it live." Nothing to her mind is a truer portent of
bad luck than for her to break the merate-stone. Greedy chil-
dren who beg to lick the metate for the sake of the sweet
yellow grains that cling to its surface are warned that to do
so will cause their teeth to fall out. The same women foretell
their luck at the market by dropping a dozen kernels of maize
into a jar of water. If all the grains sink to the bottom — as
sound corn will do — then the day will be lucky. But if more
than three or four float on the surface of the water, then it is
best to stay at home and avoid the threatened disaster.

There are few Mexican village homes in which there is a
new-born baby where anyone would put a corncob in the fire

Maize Magic in American Folklore 277

without first touching it to the baby's cheek. Not to do this
will cause the child to be freckled.

All of the North American Indian tribes made maize medi-
cine. Many of them observed the custom of cutting the um-
bilical cord over an ear of corn. The ear was carefully wrapped
up and saved to be given to the child for his first sowing. The
first toy an Indian child played with was frequently a doll
made of a corncob with a butternut head, and dressed in
fringed husks. These were "gaga"; that is, meant for amuse-
ment. But they were also representations of Loose Feet, the
friendly spirit which watched over children at play.

The Iroquois, who amassed such notorious corn wealth,
held a corn-planting festival each year. Prior to this, the
women chose one of their number to be the "corn mother"
and to direct the work in the fields that summer. She de-
cided whose field should be worked and planted first, and she
saw to the soaking of the seed in a solution of water and
hellebore root. When a thieving crow got one of these kernels,
he flapped and fluttered drunkenly over the field, to the
squaws' derisive laughter.

When the ears were formed, and the kernels were filling
with sweet milk, then came six days of Green Corn Thanks-
giving. The villagers marched in procession around the fields,
carrying armfuls of corn, cakes of cornbread and kettles of corn
soup. These were offered to the three spirits of the maize,
"our sustainers." At sunset each day there was a feast of
roasting ears, roasted pig or a roasted puppy.

The Natchez, living along the lower Mississippi, had a year
of thirteen months, each one dedicated to the food eaten
during those four weeks and which had been hunted or har-
vested during the previous month. The year began in March
with the Moon of the Deer. After this came in succession:

The Strawberry Moon
The Moon of Old Corn

278 Singing Valleys

The Watermelon Moon
The Moon of Fishes
The Mulberry Moon
The Moon of New Corn
The Moon of Turkeys
The Buffalo Moon
The Bear's Moon
The Cold Meal Moon
The Moon of Chestnuts
The Walnut Moon

During the Moon of Old Corn, the last of the last year's
harvest was eaten. The Moon of New Corn marked the new
harvest, and was therefore, the chief feast of the year.

How good the green roasting ears were the English colonists
soon discovered. John Smith enters in his diary under July
1607:

It pleased God to move the Indians to bring us corn ere it was
halfe ripe to refresh us.

The newcomers learned how to test the ears by pressing
the kernels with the thumb. If no milk squirted, then the corn
was already too far advanced for boiling or roasting.

Naturally enough, corn figured in many of the Indian re-
ligious rites. Smith's own account of his capture and captivity
in the Powhatan's village tells how the medicine man per-
formed a twelve-hour ritual before Smith's fate was decided.
First the priest laid a ring of cornmeal around the campfire.
Outside this he made circles of grains of corn, laying these in
a careful pattern of red and black kernels, and in fives and
threes and twos. During the ceremony the priest and the
other Indians fasted solemnly.

The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest have developed their
maize magic in numerous dances, songs and legends. The
dances, which come at appropriate seasons, are intended to
encourage the growth of the corn and to frighten away the

Maize Magic in American Folklore 279

enemies of wind, drought and blight that might destroy the
crop. The Corn Maiden figures in dozens of Zuni and Hopi
folk tales. The dancers who represent her are masked, or have
their faces painted in designs of red and yellow — the colors
of the maize.

Interesting, too, is the triangular design which frequently
decorates the masks and robes of the "corn maidens." This
is a symbol of the life-giving properties of the maize. Actually,
the design is that of one of the ancient obsidian knives car-
ried by primitive Americans, and used by the Aztec priests
to perform the human sacrifices in the temples of the earth
and corn goddesses. This design of the hunter's knife has
represented food for so many ages that it has come to stand
for the corn as well as for meat that is killed to be eaten.
This design runs through all the arts and crafts of all the
Indian tribes. You will find it in baskets and on pottery,
woven into blankets, and embroidered in the beaded gar-
ments. It has become a symbol of life.

Few plant forms are found in Mayan art except that of
the water plant. This is used to represent the source of human
life. There are several pieces of ancient Mexican pottery in
the museum collections which are modeled like ears of maize.
A Costa Rican jug is shaped like an ear of corn and realisti-
cally painted. In the Museum of the American Indian is a
bowl of silver found in Peru. The bowl is upheld by three legs
made like stubby ears of corn. But this realistic art is the
exception and not the rule.

All the early Indian tribes used art primarily in the service
of religion, not as an end in itself. The grotesqueness of the
Mayan and Aztec gods, as their artists depicted them, was in-
tended to tell the people that the gods were a special creation,
apart from men and from the beasts. A deep reverence kept
these people from representing realistically that which they
considered sacred. It was the same holy fear as that which
kept the ancient Hebrews from speaking the name of Jehovah.
Even so, in Christian churches all over the world, doves,

280 Singing Valleys

eagles, lions, lambs, lilies, grapes, pomegranates, palms and
stars symbolize aspects of divinity. Moved by the same spirit,
the Indians forebore to make realistic pictures of the Serpent
which sent them the rains they prayed for and who was,
therefore, their preserver and savior. They conventionalized
the serpent into the design which is found all over the world
and is commonly called "the Wall of Troy," though ages
older than the city Helen's beauty ruined. They represented
the maize, which was their chief source of food, as the life-
taking and food-bestowing triangular knife. Often too, they
pictured the maize as a deer which fed on the crop and so
might be considered to have absorbed its spirit. Or as a jaguar
which preyed on the deer and so protected the cornfields. The
jaguar was a preserver and a savior. The name for the beast was
balam. The word also meant priest; that is, one who protects
the people as the jaguar protects the corn.

The Maya considered the red-colored corn to be the prop-
erty of the Bacab who ruled the gates of the East. The Crows
gave the ears of red corn a sacred value. These were blessed,
and distributed to the tribesmen at the time of planting. The
Iroquois called a red ear "chief," and said that anyone who
got one was marked for greatness.

The Puritans of New England quickly seized on this super-
stition and used it as an escape from some of their social
repressions. At a husking, whoever got a red ear was privileged
to kiss the girl of his choice. If a girl got a red ear she had to
single out one of the swains and kiss him before the laughter
of all the company. In the Court Records of Long Island it is
solemnly entered that at a husking-bee in 1661, "one James
Chichester did kiss Bette Scudder." Whereupon Bette, who
seems to have been a pert young thing, threatened to "whip
his brick." James retaliated with a second kiss and Bette made
good her threat. The husking broke up in a scuffle and a
scandal. Goody Scudder took the case to court and James was
fined two shillings and costs.

Maize Magic in American Folklore 281

Among the Indians, it was the women who husked the
corn. Spelman writes admiringly of their skill: "wringing the
eares in peises between their hands and so rubbinge out the
corne into a great baskett." But the English who came to the
New World brought with them memories of country thresh-
ings and harvest merrymakings in which men and maids
worked first and then frolicked together. It is possible that
some of them may have heard in the Low Countries or in
England a harvesters' song which began as a hymn in Italian
churches, but which quickened its tempo as it came up
through Spain to the Netherlands. There it lost its piety and
acquired doggerel verses in Flemish in which the words
"Younker, Yanker, Doodle" occurred many times over. The
Flemish harvesters carried it to England and sang it up and
down the English countryside as they threshed barley. Crom-
well brought it to London. The jeering London crowds who
loved a king better than a commoner any day, fitted words to
the country air deriding a yokel who came to town and
thought himself as good as a king because of the feather in his
hat. British red-coats took the air to America. They tried to
drum the Continentals out of Boston with its derisive jig
tune. It is said that Lord Cornwallis exploded one day, "May I
never hear that damn tune again."

He was to hear it played by a band of Continental soldiers
as he walked across the grass of a dooryard in Yorktown to
hand his sword to the Continentals' Commander-in-Chief.

It is not beyond the range of possibilities that the early
New Englanders may have known the tune and that they
may have sung it many times as they husked corn.

Husking bees were a regular feature of colonial social life
in the rural districts. They were looked forward to all sum-
mer. October meant not one husking, but as many as there
were farmers in the neighborhood who had a larger crop than
the hands in their family could handle. Husking-time was
courting time. Many blocks of Boston's Back Bay have been
populated as a result of New England huskings. Joel Barlow,

2 §2 Singing Valleys

who was the first American poet to win international fame,
while in Switzerland gave vent to his homesickness in a long
poem in praise of Hasty Pudding. In it he follows the saga
of the corn from planting time till the ground meal is turned
into pudding. There is a picture of a husking bee:

For now, the corn-house filled, the harvest home,

The invited neighbors to the husking come.

Where the huge heap lies centered in the hall

The lamp suspended from the cheerful wall,

Brown, corn-fed nymphs, and strong, hard-handed beaux,

Alternate ranged, extend in circling rows.

Assume their seats, the solid mass attack

The dry husks rustle and the corn-cobs crack.

The song, the laugh alternate notes resound,

And the sweet cider trips in silence round.

The laws of husking every wight can tell,

And sure no law he ever keeps so well,

For each red ear a general kiss he gains,

With each smut ear he smites the luckless swains.

But when to some sweet maid the prize is cast,

Red as her lips, and taper as her waist,

She walks the rounds and culls one favored beau

Who leaps, the luscious tribute to bestow

Till the vast mound of corn is swept away,

And he that gets the last ear, wins the day.

Out in the Back Woods, husking bees were not so polite
as the one Barlow pictures. It was "corn likker," not cider,
that moistened the huskers' labors. A big jug of it was ready
for the men as they came, and each one had a long drink
before they paired off in sides under two captains. The women
folks didn't husk; instead, they prepared the feast which was
to come. The main dish at this, according to Dr. Daniel Drake
who spent a boyhood in Kentucky during the years just
before the Louisiana Purchase, was squirrel pot-pie. Squirrel
was an appropriate meat for corn-huskers. Didn't the crows

Maize Magic in American Folklore 283

and the squirrels ravage the outside rows of every cornfield?
There was a joke in the Back Woods about the old lady who
asked why didn't the farmers plant only inside rows, to cheat
the crows and squirrels.

At those Kentucky and southern Ohio huskings the corn
would be piled in a high rick in the farm yard. The two cap-
tains paced off the length of the rick to find the exact
middle. When that was decided on, a second jug of corn
whiskey was buried in the corn at that point. Then, at a
signal, the two teams of huskers went to it. Any man who got
a red ear was entitled to a pull at the corn-likker jug which
had greeted them. The team which reached the middle of
the rick first won the jug buried there. The captain was lifted
to the shoulders of his team and carried triumphantly about
the farm yard, jug in hand.

Then came the supper, and after that it was time to bring
out the fiddles for "Old Dan Tucker" and "Sourwood Moun-
tain/' The harvest moon would be going down by the time
the huskers started for home, to be in time for the morning
milking.

"Leave out the corn fairies, and there wouldn't be any
corn. . . ."

Apparently these American fairies had to wait for their
story to be told until a boy should be born in the corn belt who
had hearing and sight that extended beyond the corn-hog
ratio and yields per acre.

A lot of people have heard the corn growing. Practically
anyone can hear this on a clear, hot July day. But not every-
one has seen a corn fairy. Carl Sandburg has, though. The
best time to catch one of them, so he says in his Tales of the
Rutabaga Country, is "when the harvest moon comes up red
as blood early in the evening." Then, if you are very sharp-
eyed, you may see the corn fairies sitting cross-legged and
sewing the clothes they have to wear next spring and summer.

How can you be sure that they are fairies?

284 Singing Valleys

Listen.

When a corn fairy sews, he always points his big toe slant-
ing toward the east. It's an infallible sign.

And if you do see one of them, and the adventure goes to
your head a bit, so that you are no longer quite sure where
you are, or what direction you are traveling in, here is the
way to get your bearings. Just look closely at the number of
stitches the corn fairy is putting into his sewing. "In Illinois,
the corn fairies stitch fifteen stitches of ripe corn silk across
the woven corn leaf cloth. In Iowa, they stitch sixteen stitches;
in Nebraska, seventeen stitches. And the farther west you go,
the more corn silk stitches the corn fairies have in the corn
cloth clothes they wear/'

With a safe rule like that to go by, nobody need ever get
lost. At least, not in the corn belt. So, if you look when you
drive by a cornfield when the harvest moon comes up, and
if you listen, "maybe you will hear the corn fairies going pla-
zizzy, pla-zizzy, zizzy, "softer than an eye wink, softer than a
Nebraska baby's thumb."

XVIII

Old Daddy Flicker Likes
Corn Likker

IN THE first half of the eighteenth century this country
received a sudden transfusion of new blood. Half a million
Ulster folk poured into the ports of Philadelphia, Baltimore
and Charleston and took the roads to the western frontier.
They were by nature hardy and hot-headed, invincible in pur-
pose and unrestrained in passion. Their generosity to a friend
was only equaled by their zest in hating an enemy. They had,
according to Justin Winsor, "that excitable character which
goes with a keen-minded adherence to original sin, total de-
pravity, predestination and election."

They were whiskey drinkers and whiskey makers. In Scot-
land they had distilled their liquor from barley. Transplanted
to northern Ireland, they had carried their pot-stills with them.

The wild Irish who watched them come in to possess the
good farmlands from which the Sassenach had driven them
into the bogs of Connaught, grinned at the sight. Was it the
way it was these Scotchmen thought they could teach an
Irishman to make poteen? Hadn't they, themselves, been at
it since before ever time began? And wasn't it an Irish saint,
no less, who sailed his coracle up the Firth of Forth and
generously instructed the poor heathen Scots in the civilizing
art of distilling barley into usquebaugh?

The newly-planted Scots found to their delight that the
glen waters of Antrim and the springs which fed? the Liffey
were as potent in drawing the spirit out of the fermented
barley and oats as the burn waters of their native land. They

285

286 Singing Valleys

found, too, another good in Ireland which they had lost in
Scotland. The Crown's exciseman was not so diligent. For
years a whiskey rebellion had been grumbling under the sur-
face of political life in Scotland. The farmers resented the gov-
ernment's tax on the grain which they chose to distill and not
to grind. "The gauger," they called the unwelcome collector
of excise. They were not above taking a shot at him from the
heather.

But the Crown was lenient toward the Scotch who were
helping in the conquest of Ireland. If having their own stills
and making their own whiskey would encourage them to
stand against the Catholic Irish, why the loss in excise was
less than the cost of keeping British regiments in the Pale.
For a century the Ulstermen made whiskey and smuggled
quantities of it into England. There were connoisseurs in
London who preferred the smoky flavor of Bushmills to the
"King's whiskey" made in licensed distilleries at home.

Before their one-hundred-year leaseholds had run out, some-
thing happened to the Scotch in Ulster. It may have been the
whiskey distilled out of Irish water and Irish grain which
effected a metabolic change. Those transplanted Scots took
on certain distinctly Irish characteristics which turned them
into a problem to the Crown and the Parliament. They even
expected the government to keep its word about protecting
the Irish linen industry. When it did not, with really Irish
effrontery they proceeded to make trouble. And when that
trouble did not bring the relief they wanted, and their lease-
holds ran out, they set sail for the colonies in America.

Froude estimates that "in the two years that followed the
Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster for a
land where those who sowed the seed could reap the harvest."

Few of those who came remained in the cities. They wanted
freedom and they wanted land. They pushed on to the fron-
tiers in the Berkshires, to western Pennsylvania and down
through the Cumberland valley into the Back Woods of Vir-
ginia, the Carolinas and Kentucky. How much of the spirit

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 287

of our westering frontiers came out of the worms of the stills
which these Ulster whiskey makers set up in lean-tos beside
every cabin along the ridges of the Alleghenies is a nice
matter for conjecture. The backwoodsmen themselves did
not hesitate to pay tribute to their "corn" any more than the
British seaman withholds honor from the grog which stood
by him at Cadiz, Trafalgar and Jutland. "Corn likker" manned
many a stockade in the days when the Shawnees were harry-
ing the frontier settlements. It kept many a scout alive on
the trail. It brought more than one woman through a diffi-
cult and unattended childbirth. It fought off snake poison,
country distemper and the fatal "yaws." Scores of ballads and
fiddlers' tunes flowed from little brown jugs set out at wed-
dings and "swing-arounds."

Old Daddy Flicker
Likes corn likker.
He picks up his feet
Quicker'n' quicker. . . .

More than one circuit-riding preacher took his fee in "corn
likker," which was as good as cash money at any crossroads
store in the mountains. You could no more have persuaded
those indomitable servants of the Lord that they sinned in
exchanging the Word of God and a Christian funeralizing for
Kentucky corn whiskey than you could have made Martin
Luther believe the devil made Rhine wine.

In Pennsylvania rye was a plentiful crop. The Ulster folk
who settled in the Kittatinning Valley and on the York
"barrens" promptly fermented this for use in their stills.
Where rye was not so plentiful, a formula of two parts corn
to one part rye was followed. American corn was found to
contain more starch — and therefore more spirit — than any
other grain. Its disadvantage was its weight, which tended to
make it sink to the bottom of the mash tub, and slowed up
the process of fermentation.

There was nothing new in the idea of fermenting corn. The

288 Singing Valleys

Indian tribes had made various intoxicating drinks from maize
which they used in their religious ceremonies and dances. In
ancient Peru the natives made "sora" which was so potent that
the Inca forbade it to the common people. Today, "chica," a
kind of maize beer, is the common drink in that country. Its
manufacture is primitive, to say the least. Old women, squat-
ting in the sun, chew maize kernels to pulp and spit them into
jars of brackish water. By the natural process of fermentation,
this becomes beer. Probably the liquor which Columbus re-
ported the Indians of Veragua made from maize was brewed
in much the same fashion.

The English who came to the early settlements in Virginia
and Massachusetts imported malt and used this with the
native corn in the making of beer. Jamestown had a brewery.
There were a brewery and a malt house on every large planta-
tion in the Tidewater, although the planters' own ships
brought rum from the sugar islands, and French and Spanish
wines from Europe.

American beer was plentiful and cheap in Massachusetts.
A quart for a penny was the legal price; and a fine of ten
shillings hung over the taverner who charged more than this,
or whose beer fell below the standard of quality. Cotton
Mather complained that every other house in Boston was an
ordinary. The Puritans may have been ferocious moralists, but
they were no teetotalers. They knew that the inner man had
to be fortified against the rigors of a New England winter.
And they had no great faith in spring water. The best that
the author of New England Prospects would say of it was that
"any man would choose it before bad beere, or before butter-
milk or whey." Frequently the village baker was the brewer as
well. One industry supported the other. President Dunster,
the first head of Harvard College, petitioned the County
Court that "Sister Bradish be encouraged in her calling of
baking and the brewing of penny beer, without which she can-
not continue to bake."

One is inclined to speculate on the effect on the Puritan

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 289

metabolism of the drink called "whistle-belly-vengeance"
which a tavern-keeper in Salem is said to have invented. It
was made of sour homemade beer, simmered in an iron kettle
with molasses and brown bread crumbs, and drunk piping hot.
Or of flip, made of homemade corn and rye beer, sweetened
with molasses, laced with Massachusetts rum and beaten to a
bitter-tasting froth with a red hot poker. There may have been
a burning hunger and thirst after righteousness at the pit of
the Puritan stomach, but one suspects acidosis.

The seventeenth century found it easy to believe in witch-
craft, eternal damnation and the capacity of the human frame
to stand anything. Mothers were advised to see that their
sickly children got their feet wet every day in cold weather,
to harden them. Also, they were recommended to feed the
young on cheese, brown bread and warmed beer. It is probable
that the two prescriptions balanced each other. At least, those
who escaped death by pneumonia had no lack of vitamins
A, B, C, D and G on which to perpetuate the Mayflower
posterity.

When the apple orchards which the New England settlers
planted almost as soon as they set their corn came into bear-
ing, maize beer declined in popularity beside cider. An ale-
quart of cider, sweetened with molasses and spiced, cost a
groat in any tavern. On the frontier farms, as soon as the apple
harvest was gathered, an "Indian barrel" was prepared and set
ready with a gourd dipper for red-skinned visitors. Sometimes
the callers brought a trapped patridge, a piece of venison, or a
basketful of corn to offer in return for the drink. Often the
"Indian barrel" was a bribe. Its contents were the price of
immunity from attack during the treacherous days of balmy
weather after the first frosts. Then the savages frequently de-
scended upon the frontier settlements for a last foray before
the deep snows. "Indian summer" was a fearsome time for the
pioneers.

The distilling of cider into applejack took place on hundreds
of farms. Just as the distilling of molasses into rum was car-

290 Singing Valleys

ried on in all the towns near the seaboard. Massachusetts rum,
at two shillings the gallon, made up in cheapness what it
lacked in quality. Most of the colonies placed a tax on the
distilling of spirits; but this was not so heavy as to discourage
the distillers, or to make the exciseman's task dangerous.
Though always there was a natural inclination to do the gov-
ernment out of its revenue from stills whenever possible. The
little stream which runs through the town of Portchester,
and which is the dividing line between Connecticut and New
York was named "Buy Rum River." The local distiller had his
pot-still set up so he could move it from one bank to the other
depending on the side from which the hated exciseman ap-
proached.

Colonel William Byrd of Westover was the greatest planter
on the upper James River. His father's caravans to the Chero-
kees had brought back pelts which sold in London for good
round sums. Westover tobacco, carried to the same market,
gave the Byrds a fine credit on the books of British merchants.
And Westover corn, pork, lard and beef cattle were sold in the
West Indies for molasses, sugar and rum which brought good
prices in the colonies.

As a boy, Colonel Byrd had talked with the scouts who
led his father's pack-caravans. As a young man, he had made
the journey with them over the mountains and down into
what is now the state of Tennessee. If any man in Virginia
knew that wild country, it was he. Accordingly, the governor
appointed him chief of the commission to settle the vexing
problem of the dividing line between Virginia and Carolina.

William Byrd — to the day of his death he took pleasure in
the fact that admirers of his elegance called him the "Black
Swan" — made the trip down to the Dismal Swamp and be-
yond with the dignity of a king's messenger. What he saw
on that momentous journey, and what he reported to the
governor, fill two volumes. They are the first contribution to
American literature. One, the official History of the Dividing

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 291

Line, describes that section of Virginia's frontier and the set-
tlers along it. Many of these were runaways from Maryland
and Virginia, ne'er-do-wells and idlers, evaders of justice.
Many were descendants of the indentured servants who had
served their terms, and then moved out to the Back Woods.
The Black Swan found them a rag-tag, bobtail crew; shiftless,
dirty, illiterate. Their custard complexions told of malaria,
country distemper and other ills due to a constant diet of
pork without salt. Their 'Indian corn," he reported, "is of so
great increase that a little pains will subsist a very large family
with bread."

Much of that corn went into whiskey which was their
remedy for snake bite, hookworm and all other miseries.

Pushing farther into the mountains, Colonel Byrd en-
countered the advance tide of the Ulster immigrants who
were flowing down into the Great Valley from Pennsylvania.
These too, he noted, had brought their stills with them. Lack-
ing mills, they had made for themselves rude querns with
which they also ground the sprouted corn for the making of
"corn likker." They brought with them, too, their home-made
fiddles, their Scotch superstitions, ballads, and their Gaelic
gift for ballad-making. Away in the coves of the mountains
they perpetuated a folklore and folkways that were passing
from the British Isles. They had the Gael's enjoyment of a
wake or a burying, and saw to it that the corpse was toasted
on his way to the spirit world in powerful, clear white "corn
likker."

To that "corn likker" we owe the second volume of the
Black Swan's History, which is no less than an unblushing
account of his and his fellow commissioners' sexual adventures
on the expedition. Some of the exploits are worthy of the
author of Moll Flanders. That the Colonel enjoyed the experi-
ence is proven by his purchase of twenty thousand acres in
western Carolina which he named his "Land of Eden." Part of
this he proceeded to sell to the Ulster immigrants as they came
down the valleys from the north. Later, when many Scotch

292 Singing Valleys

who had been sympathizers with the Stuart cause came out to
Carolina, these too moved westward into the Black Swan's
Land of Eden.

It was truly the land of "corn likker." The steeply sloping
fields, many of them three to four thousand feet above sea
level, would grow corn and little else. Before the rich humus
in the top soil was eroded, the returns per acre were ex-
orbitant. But there were no roads by which the grain could
be carted to market. And no carts to take it in. There were
only rude trails which could be ridden on a horse, with saddle-
bags; or walked, with a tow sack slung over one's shoulder.

Roots of the wild ginseng were toted that way to be traded
at the nearest country store for gunpowder, salt and calico.
Ginseng brought fabulous prices in China. All sorts of magical
properties were ascribed to it. The Black Swan took to chewing
a bit of it on the trail for the enthusiasm it gave him. "It
chears the Heart even of a man that has a bad Wife/' he
wrote. But four bushels of corn were all that a horse, or a
mule, could carry on the mountain trails. That amount of
grain was not worth the trip to the trader's store. But the
same pack animal could carry two eight-gallon kegs of
"corn likker," slung one from each side of the saddle. Sixteen
gallons of whiskey represented eight bushels of corn. At
twenty-five cents the gallon, the trip over the mountains paid.

It was not moral depravity which made the Scotch-Irish
settlers in the Back Woods whiskey distillers, but economics.
And it is economics, not lawlessness, which has made them
and their descendants rebel against the excise on spirits when-
ever this has been imposed heavily, and take to "blockading."

When corn sells at twenty-five to forty cents the bushel, a
man quickly sees the advantage in distilling two bushels of
corn into four gallons of whiskey which, thanks to the high
price of the legally distilled product, are tradable at any coun-
try store in the mountains for four dollars worth of groceries.

During the Revolution, and after it, there were farmers

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 293

throughout New England who found it paid better to distill
their corn and rye than to carry the grain to market. There
was a demand for whiskey. During the war years, the importa-
tion of rum and molasses had fallen off. Both armies bought
spirits for rations. And the soldiers of both armies were not
unwilling to trade gunpowder, blankets or a musket for a gallon
or two of American whiskey.

John Adams complained of the dissipation which spread
over the New England states, and of the number of stills
being operated in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

In western Pennsylvania, distilling had become the most
profitable branch of farming. A one-hundred gallon still was
reckoned to be worth a two-hundred acre farm — and this
within ten miles of Pittsburgh, which was the capital of the
whiskey trade. A traveler along that part of the Back Woods
reported that it was hardly possible to be out of sight of the
smoke from a still. Monongahela Rye was shipped down the
rivers to New Orleans. The usual price was twenty-five cents
the gallon — including the jug. German potters did a thriving
trade in making demijohns. Meanwhile "Old Monongahela"
was achieving distinction in Philadelphia and New York where
the merchants were not ashamed to fill their decanters with
it at forty cents the gallon. The New England rum importers
and molasses distillers began to grumble at the competition
offered by this "Back Woods liquor." How were their ships to
pay if American farmers were going to distill spirits from
American-grown corn and rye, and sell their product for less
than the price of rum?

Washington had every reason to know that the Scotch-Irish
farmers in western Pennsylvania and down the mountain
valleys would defend their right to distill their corn and rye
before selling the crops, as passionately as they had defended
the forts along the Ohio frontier. These backwoodsmen had
formed the first regiment of foot soldiers enrolled by Con-
gress. They were the first outside colonists to assist New Eng-
land at the siege of Boston. They had made history, and won

294 Singing Valleys

the reputation of being Washington's favorite troops, at
King's Mountain, Saratoga and The Cowpens. The war won,
they had gone back to their farms and to the lands which they
had taken as pay for their services in the war; to their keel-
boats and fur-trading. Their backs were to the eastern cities,
their faces to the new west.

On their farms the still was as important as the barn. The
crop of corn and rye was not harvested until the meal had
been mashed and distilled into "juice," which could be carried
on horseback to the traders. Small boys put in hours at the
"armstrong machine" which was the Back Woods nickname
for the hand mill, grinding sprouted corn to be ready for the
mash tub. The teacher and the preacher were frequently paid
by the gallon.

Washington had every reason to know what Jefferson knew,
and said bluntly, that Hamilton's proposal to place a federal
excise on distilling was to make a bid for trouble. It was to
legislate against the farmers in favor of the New England ship-
owners and their imported rum. True, the various colonies had
taxed spirits during the Revolution, and during the French
and Indian troubles which preceded it. The farmers had paid
those taxes without grumbling. But a federal tax, for a purpose
beyond the understanding of most of those who would be
called on to pay it, would seem to undermine the very prin-
ciple on which the Revolution had been fought.

Only four years before, a Scotch-Irish farmer on the Berk-
shire frontier in Massachusetts had led eight hundred other
disgruntled farmers against the merchants and bankers whose
power in the state legislature overweighed that of the land
workers. Daniel Shays had sold the sword which Lafayette
presented to him for what it would bring, to try to save his
farm. He and his farmers had demanded a moratorium on
farm debts, which had greatly increased during the war and
during the period of deflation which came afterward. His revo-
lutionists had prevented the Court from sitting on the debt
cases. There had been the beginnings of a nice little war in

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 295

western Massachusetts, and the arsenal in Springfield had
been burned before the militia could restore order. Shays and
many of those who sympathized with him had left their over-
burdened farms for new land in the Genesee Valley and in
Ohio. They had turned New England over to the merchants
and the manufacturers.

Would something of the same sort happen in the Back
Woods if an excise were levied on whiskey?

"Let it." Hamilton dismissed the Back Woods with a snap
of his fingers. "We have the militia to enforce the law, and to
collect the tax on stills if necessary." It is not to be forgotten
that Hamilton came from the rum-exporting sugar islands.

The law went into effect in 1791. The tax on whiskey
amounted to seven cents the gallon. But that additional seven
cents gave New England rum a commercial advantage. The
excise discriminated against American grain in favor of im-
ported molasses.

Shouts of protest came from the Back Woods. What was
the government in Philadelphia trying to do? Ruin the Missis-
sippi River trade? And the fur trade in the Northwest, where
whiskey paid for pelts? Where there were no roads, a man
had to distill his grain to get it off his farm. Albert Gallatin
protested for the Pennsylvania farmers: "We have no means
of bringing the produce of our lands to sale, either in grain
or in meal. We are therefore distillers through necessity." And
he pointed out that farmers in the East were able to sell their
corn and rye for higher prices than the western farmers could
get for their whiskey. Farmers in Westmoreland County,
Pennsylvania, got up a petition. "Why," they demanded,
"should we be made subject to a duty for drinking our grain,
more than for eating it?"

The law struck at the very roots of that independence which
had made the Scotch-Irish leave Ulster for the colonies. They
had fought for that independence during seven years of war.
They would go on fighting for it. And they did.

For four years the resentment against the tax on stills, and

296 Singing Valleys

against those who tried to collect the excise, rose. In Virginia
and the Carolinas and in Kentucky very little attempt was
made to collect the duty. In those states the farmers' whiskey
did not offer serious competition to the stock which the mer-
chants imported for sale, or the products of the commercial
distillers. But in Pennsylvania whiskey-making had assumed
the proportions of a major industry. The excisemen reported
that the farmers refused to pay the tax. When the exciseman
threatened them with the law, they leveled their rifles at him
and told him curtly to "get going/' One or two obstinate col-
lectors who did not go quickly were tarred and feathered.

Despite the law, the settlers in the Back Woods went on
with their distilling. They even boasted of it when some of
them came together at "The Whale and the Monkey" or
"The Green Tree" in Pittsburgh. "Black Betty," as they affec-
tionately called the whiskey jug which stood on a shelf in
every cabin, became the toast of the Back Woods. They made
ballads about her, and sang them; as well as ribald ditties
about "the gauger" and his dishonorable intentions toward
Black Betty.

Those farmers who paid the tax on their stills became the
object of the "Whiskey Boys' " revenge. Bands of them, with
blackened faces, rode about the country and destroyed stills
on which the tax was paid. One night a company of them
marched into Carlisle, and when the citizens retired into their
houses and bolted the doors, they set up a tall pole in the
square. A board nailed to it proclaimed

LIBERTY AND NO EXCISE
OH, WHISKEY!

General Neville was called on to enforce law in Pennsyl-
vania. When a company of farmers called on him to protest
against this intrusion on their rights as citizens, he ordered
his soldiers to open fire on the crowd. Five farmers were killed.
A few days later, five hundred "Whiskey Boys," many of them
armed with the rifles they had carried during the war, and led

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 297

by Tom the Tinker, burned the General's house. He fled, and
his guard surrendered.

In Philadelphia, Washington bit his lips and determined to
crush the rebellion by force. He himself at the head of fifteen
thousand militia marched to Pittsburgh where the rebels, now
five thousand strong, were encamped. They had taken over
the city. Terrified citizens carried supplies from their cellars
and storehouses to the camp on Braddock's Field. Judge
Brackenridge loudly lamented the four barrels of old prime
Monongahela he had had to surrender before the militia put
the rebels to rout.

The bill for quieting the Whiskey Rebellion amounted to
one-third of the governmental expenditures for that year. And
yet illicit distilling was not done away with. Disgruntled, many
of the Pennsylvania whiskey-makers moved farther south
where the excisemen were not so diligent. Many crossed the
Ohio into the new frontier. They took their stills with them,
and set them up wherever they grew their corn.

The Scotch-Irish who took up corn titles in Kentucky built
the first distillery beyond the mountains. This was in Louis-
ville, in 1783. Kentucky has been making whiskey out of corn
ever since. They say Kentucky colonels are weaned on
Bourbon.

This type of whiskey, made from a mash which is pre-
dominately corn, leads all whiskeys in popularity in the United
States. Only 5 percent of the total whiskey sales in the country
are of Scotch. And 20 percent of those are in and around
New York City. Rye is more generally popular. But America's
consumption of Bourbon is two and a half times that of Rye.

America drinks corn.

The source of the alcohol in whiskey is the starch content
in the grain, whether it be corn, rye, wheat or barley. The
advantage of corn over all other grains is its high percentage
of starch. The more starch extracted, the greater the yield of

298 Singing Valleys

alcohol per bushel of grain mashed. In order to get all the
starch content in solution, the grain must be finely ground.

To make Bourbon whiskey, the ground corn meal is weighed
and dropped by gravity into the mash tub which is partially
filled with warm water. As the meal goes in, an "agitator'7 keeps
stirring it while the temperature is raised slowly to about
212° F. The heat and the stirring process cause the particles of
meal to disintegrate. The granules of starch burst open, releas-
ing the starch so that this can be readily converted into the
fermentable sugars.

Next, the corn mash is cooled somewhat, and a mash of
rye meal which has been separately prepared is added to it
and stirred. The starch in the rye disintegrates more readily
than cornstarch does. Therefore this is accomplished in a
short time and at no increase in temperature.

Third, a mash of barley malt meal in cold water is added.
This brings the temperature of the mash to approximately
145° F. The combination of meals is stirred for thirty minutes
or so, until chemical tests indicate that the diastase in the
malt has converted all the starch into fermentable sugars. After
this, the mash is cooled and pumped into tubs for the ferment-
ing process.

Yeast, water and some of the thin effluent from the stills —
what the old distillers used to call "returns" — are added to the
mash in the fermenters. At the end of the fermenting process,
the beer — the name given to the product at this stage of its
development — is discharged through a valve at the bottom of
the fermenting tub into a reservoir which is connected with
the still.

The beer has an alcoholic content of approximately 4.5 to
5.5 percent by volume. In the still, this alcoholic content is
concentrated into whiskey.

Most distilleries use the continuous still for the production
of Bourbon whiskey. As the name implies, this type of still
receives a continuous feed of beer, and has a continuous dis-
charge of alcoholic distillate and slop.

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 299

Briefly, the pre-heated beer is led into the still near the top,
and flows down over a series of copper plates which are heated
by vapor coming up from below through perforations in the
plates. By the time the beer reaches the slop chamber at the
bottom of the still, all its alcoholic content has been ex-
hausted. The spent beer is discharged, screened and dried, for
sale as cattle feed. Meanwhile the vapors rising from the top-
most plate in the still are led off into a condenser.

In the making of Bourbon whiskey, the spirit removed from
the beer in a continuous still runs from 90 to 100 proof. The
first distillate, or singlings, is then passed through the doubler
and redistilled. During this doubling process the distiller de-
termines the amount of "heads and tails" that are cut off. The
Government requires that nothing above 160 proof be called
whiskey. Usually the whiskey goes to the cistern room at from
115 to 159 proof.

This high-proof spirit is reduced to not less than 100 proof
by the addition of distilled water. It is then put up in new,
charred, white-oak barrels for aging. In its raw condition, when
placed in the barrels, the whiskey is colorless, and has an
unpleasant taste and odor. During the aging the liquor takes
on color, the unpleasant odor and taste disappear, and a new
product is born. These chemical and physical changes occur
slowly, requiring time for their completion.

Under the provisions of the Bottled in Bond Act, whiskey
cannot be bottled in bond and carry the precious green gov-
ernment stamp or the statement on the labels until it has
been in charred oak barrels for a period of at least four years.

Under our present laws, all steps in the process of distilling,
from the weighing of the grain to the final bottling after it
has been aged, are supervised by agents of the U.S. Internal
Revenue Service.

"Corn likker," as made in the Kentucky and Carolina moun-
tains in a pot-still, or even in a soap kettle with a barrel in-
verted over this to condense the vapor from the fermented corn
mash, and drunk within a week is, according to Irving Cobb,

300 Singing Valleys

"an illegitimate orphan of the royal line." White mule is its
appropriate name.

It was corn whiskey — either honorable Bourbon or native
white mule — which filled the Log Cabin bottles that pro-
moted William Henry Harrison's campaign for the presidency.
The cabin, and the whiskey distilled from corn, symbolized the
traditions of the American frontier. Ohio Republicans shouted
their campaign song:

Where, oh, where, was your Buckeye cabin made?

Way down yonder in the sylvan shade.
Where the Buckeye boys wield the plough and spade,

There, oh, there, was our Buckeye cabin made.

The inference was that a vote for Harrison was a vote for
corn whiskey, and plenty of it, for everybody.

One can no more tell the story of the lower reaches of the
Mississippi and leave out "corn likker" than one can write of
France without its vineyards. The French settlers, with their
violent dislike of corn, distilled brandy from peaches and
grapes, and even brewed beer from wild persimmons. In all
the French villages it was the custom to keep the festival of
the patron saint with a local celebration. The Scotch-Irish
Protestants who settled Kentucky and Tennessee, not to be
outdone by their Catholic French neighbors, canonized a
saint of their own. St. Tammany's original was an Indian chief.
But his "Day," on the first of May, was kept as enthusias-
tically as if he had had a place in the church calendar. At
Louisville they held a shooting match, greased pig races, bar-
becues, and dances around a decorated Maypole. Kegs of Bour-
bon and jugs of mountain "white mule" stood about within
easy reach. When it came to dancing "Sugar in the Gourd"
or "The Rattlesnake Shake," the corn juice limbered one up,
and inspired fancy steps that made the Negroes on the edge
of the crowd stare and gasp admiringly.

The river's rambunctious days, when the keel-boat men

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 301

fought and raced each other, when the logs from the Illinois
forests jammed the levees in New Orleans, when Tom Lin-
coln's big, gawky son floated his pirogue down the river for
a look at the French and Spanish folks down on the Gulf, were
wet with corn whiskey. Mike Fink, that legend among the
keel-boat men, was a "corn-likker" hero. So too, in their way,
were the "Tennessee alligators" who followed Andrew Jackson
to New Orleans. Long years afterward, their leader said of
them: "I had a lot of fellows that could fight more ways, and
kill more times than any other fellows on the face of the
earth." Each "alligator" had a canteen on his hip. These were
filled with a colorless liquid. But it was not water. As for
Davy Crockett, who could wink a coon out of a tree, and
who, reputedly, rode a wild razorback all the way from Fayette-
ville to the Gulf,

"Why, thar hain't a man alive could 'a done that, 'thouten
he was plumb full o' corn likker."

One of Jefferson's first acts as President was to bring about
the repeal of the excise. In 1807 an embargo was placed on
the importation of spirits from abroad. The number of stills
in the country greatly increased.

But as roads were cut through the country, and then rail-
roads, as mills and refineries were built which ground com or
turned it into starch, as the towns grew up and turned to the
surrounding farmlands for food, the farmers ceased to distill
their grain. They no longer had to do this to buy tools, clothes
and groceries. Only when the excise was raised again during
the Civil War, and the price of whiskey went up to carry a
federal tax of two dollars per gallon, the farmers in the Back
Woods got out their stills and went to blockading. It was a
high federal tax which made the market for "moonshine."

Another market was created in states which had dry laws
prohibiting sales of spirituous liquors; but not, in those days
before Interstate Commerce was regulated, against the ship-
ment of liquor into those states by express. The mail-order

302 Singing Valleys

whiskey business boomed. More than one man in the com
belt bought corn and rye cheap, and distilled it for sale in
Maine and other dry states. A lot of them got rich on the
profits.

One of these "mail-order distillers" developed a sales tech-
nique to make modern advertising men gasp in amazement.
He had a mailing list of likely prospects in various dry areas
of the country. By experience it was found that ministers,
Church deacons and merchants whose wives were prominent
in W.C.T.U. circles had the least sales resistance. A letter was
sent to each person on the list telling the merits of the firm's
"Number One/' at four dollars the gallon, by express collect.
A plain wrapper was promised. "Impossible to detect from
maple syrup."

A month later, those on the list who had not sent in their
U.S. postal money orders for four dollars received another
letter which extolled "Number Two," at two dollars and a half
the gallon. Actually "Number One" and "Number Two" came
from the same vat. "Number Two" also could be sent in a
plain package.

Thirty days after this broadside, all those who still showed
sales resistance received a letter from Pioneer Gray. A picture
of the pioneer, wearing a sixteen-inch beard and a fringed
buckskin shirt, and leaning on a long-barreled rifle, adorned
the letterhead. Pioneer Gray wrote in a forthright, folksy style.
He reminded his correspondents that his pappy had made
right good corn whiskey, and he continued to uphold the fam-
ily tradition. The products of Pioneer Gray's still sold at one
dollar the gallon.

When the originator of this sales plan died, he left a for-
tune amounting to close to six million dollars, all of it
gathered in by mail.

Some time during the late seventies, an agent of the Internal
Revenue Service reported that there were no fewer than three
thousand stills, of a capacity of from ten to fifty gallons a day,
being operated without a license in the southern mountain

Old Daddy Flicker Likes Corn Likker 303

region. These stills were supplying "blockade" to farmers and
storekeepers in the Piedmont areas on both sides of the
Unakas, the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Immediately the revenue officers began the work of locating
those stills and destroying them.

And a chapter was added to American folk history.

It was their "corn likker" which brought the southern moun-
taineers to the knowledge of the great majority of Americans.
Stories of fights with revenuers, of feuds which set one county
against another, of extraordinary customs and beliefs, came
to light. For forty years and more, these became the basis for
novels, plays and motion pictures. Radio put the "hill-billies"
on the air, and Americans woke up to the fact that they had a
national folk song.

Meanwhile, various religious and educational movements
were started to raise the cultural level of these lost Americans.
Berea College, in Kentucky, was one of the first. There, it
was hoped, the mountain boys and girls would have a better
start in life than their parents had had. In Georgia, Martha
Berry opened her school with the largest campus in the world
— a whole state. The young "corn crackers" slid onto the
schoolroom benches and took up the blue-backed spellers and
learned to read. In the school farms they learned to grow vege-
tables to vary the inevitable mountain diet of "yellow bread
and sow-belly." It was hoped that they would learn to look
with disfavor on "moonshine," which completed the moun-
tain corn trinity.

Prohibition started the mountain stills going again. It cre-
ated new markets for "blockade." Lazy little curls of hickory
smoke rising from a laurel thicket on some remote hillside
were all that told that three or four men had climbed there
with sacks of corn to be distilled. Always, the still had to be set
close to running water. Often it was the run that gave away
the secret. A cow or a pig will drink water that has "slop" in
it. A horse will not. Mounted revenuers had an advantage
over those who rode in Fords.

304 Singing Valleys

Repeal took away the market for "blockade," except in
localities where men have never drunk any other kind of
whiskey. One of them derided the idea that whiskey improved
by ageing. He had tried it once, he said. "I left the jug for all
o' three months. Danged if I could taste any difference."

In parts of the Great Smokies and the Ozarks a man just
naturally makes "corn likker" for his own use, as he salts
down white meat and smokes a few hams. It's a matter of
thrift. He can't eat all the corn he raises. He has to drink
some of it.

At many of the Ozark swing-arounds there's a jug of corn
set out in a convenient corner. The mountain women do not
drink in public, but there is no convention which prevents
their partners from gathering around the jug and its gourd
dipper between the dances. The fiddlers have a jug of their
own. When the dancing is well under way, and the blandish-
ments of Black Betty have had their effect, the dancers are apt
to break into the song which goes with the tune they are
stepping to:

"What blood? What blood on the p'int o' your knife,

Dear son, come tell to me?"
"Hit's the blood o' my old gray horse

That ploughed the corn for me."

That ploughed the corn for me/

"What blood? What blood on the p'int o' your knife,

Dear son, come tell to me?"
"Hit's the blood o' my old Guinea sow

That et the corn for me."

That et the corn for me/

XIX

Yellow Bread

1 SUPPOSE there are any number of men and women today
who, in all the span of their lives, have never eaten food
that has not come out of cardboard boxes, paper bags, or tin
cans from the grocer's shelves. So amazing — or so appalling,
depending on the way you view it — has been the development
of our ideas of food sanitation.

They will not understand this chapter. Indeed, it is scarcely
to be expected that they could, since theirs is a cellophane
consciousness.

Unless, on several occasions at least, you have gathered
your provender in a basket or bag from the earth in which it
grew, unless you. have aided, or at least stood hands-in-pockets
and watched the processes of shucking, paring, drying, salting,
butchering or grinding by which raw victuals are rendered ready
for the cook to practise her alchemy upon, you have eaten all
your meals at least one remove from reality.

Under such circumstances, no one could expect you to
know, blindfolded, whether the ear of sweet corn which you
have buttered and salted and are about to bite into, is StoweH's
Evergreen or Country Gentleman. How can you possibly be
aware whether it was picked an hour before or, wantonly, that
morning and before the sun had struck through the dewy
husks? How can you tell, after the first mouthful, whether
the corn bread is made of milled or water-ground meal? Or if
the crisp, nut-sweet cracklings that enrich the pone come from
a corn-and-mast-fed, or a skimmed-milk-and-swill-fed hog?

And yet these things are important. They figure as largely

305

306 Singing Valleys

in the equipment of the American epicure as an acquaintance
with foreign cheeses and a temperature table for wines.

"That man a gentleman?" Colonel Tad Boylston exploded
indignantly. "Why, dammit, he actually asked for a spoon
and sugar and milk for his grits at breakfast! I don't believe
the fellow ever sat down to a cold, baked ham and hot grits
at eight in the morning in his entire life."

A large, ranch-grown, ranch-smoked ham — boiled, baked,
sugared and delicately cloved — cold enough to fall away from
the carving knife in slices as thin and pink as a rose petal,
graced the breakfast table at the Porchers' ranch near El Paso
when I stayed with them there many years ago. Since that
October I have breakfasted on churros and cafe con Jeche,
(usually goats' milk) in the lichened hill-towns of Estre-
madura. I have started a day on sour black bread, beer and the
small savory sausages of Debrecin in Ruthenian inns. I have
rejoiced in the desert sunrise and the sour-dough biscuits and
salt pork at a Nevada prospector's camp. And on a few occa-
sions I have languidly accepted iced grape fruit, Melba toast
and coffee from a subservient waiter in some high-towered and
proportionately high-priced Ritz-Biltmore. But no breakfast
eaten anywhere rivals those at that ranch beside the lazy Rio
Grande.

The core of the breakfast was the ham and the big Sheffield-
plate dish of hot hominy grits. The last were not the thin
watery pap which passes for hominy on so many menus. Before
being served, the hominy, which had cooked slowly all night
on the back of the range, had been salted, sugared slightly,
enriched with butter and a generous cupful of cream. At the
table you were encouraged to add to it still more of the home-
churned butter. Sweet and smoking hot, it was the perfect
accompaniment to the cool and tangy flavor of the baked
ham.

Fruit, on that great ranch with its orchards and serried vine-
yards, was a matter of course. And of course there was coffee.
But also, there were two tall, chased silver flagons filled with

Yellow Bread 307

fresh buttermilk. The flagons, the work of some seventeenth-
century English silversmith, had come out to the Carolinas in
the high-decked galley that brought the first of the Porchers.
After the Civil War they made the journey with Madam
Porcher and her husband in a covered wagon to the Texas
country. That was when the Apaches were stealing cattle and
scalping women. Madam had brought along, too, her own book
of recipes, and her standards of how South Carolinians, even
in exile, should live and breakfast.

Boiled hominy used to be sold in the streets of our eastern
cities as polenta — which is no more than corn-meal mush — is
sold in Italy. The hominy-makers' cry,

Hominy-man is on his way
To sell his good hominy.

was set to a chant which rose deliciously at the end of the
second line. Dutch Molly's voice was hoarse from Swedish
beer and sleeping out on foggy nights. But Clio, the young
quadroon daughter of a runaway slave, who sold hot hominy
in the streets of New York, captured the imagination and
the musical ear of Stephen Foster. He tried to get her, and
her song, down in verses and chords. "There's a wild, wooing
tone in her voice that I cannot catch," he lamented. So Clio,
the hominy-seller, joins the girls over the bonnet-shop who
used to peek through the windows at young John Keats, and
who eluded all his efforts to imprison them in a sonnet.

If you are one of the squeamish breakfasters who start the
day on lemon juice, hot water and a raw carrot grated, then
try hominy at lunch or dinner. Try hominy fritters made this
way:

Beat the yolks of two eggs, and beat these into two cups of
cold boiled hominy. Add half a cup of flour sifted with two
teaspoons of baking powder and one teaspoon of salt. Add
three quarters of a cup of milk. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg

308 Singing Valleys

whites. Drop this stiff batter by spoonfuls into deep boiling
lard and fry a rich brown.

Made by this rule, the fritters can be served with a meat
or egg dish. Or you can sweeten the batter and serve them for
dessert with a wine or fruit sauce.

About the time the Hunters' Moon is riding the sky, the
men I know go duck-shooting in the marsh, or down through
Canopus Hollow after pheasants. They come home from
these sorties late in the dusk; wet, weary in the joints and
incredibly hungry. On such nights, by common consent, there
is hominy pudding. This is made of boiled grits, milk, butter,
salt, pepper and eggs; the yolks and whites beaten and added
separately. The pudding is baked for an hour in a moderate
oven. Sometimes we add grated cheese and paprika to it. But
with grilled pork chops, hot, spiced apple sauce and a wooden
bowl of mixed endive, escarolle and chicory salad — well, it
makes up for those birds that got away.

Hominy muffins are good, too. But unless these are made
by a skilled hand they are apt to sit on the stomach as heavily
as an importunate creditor. And cold hominy mush, cut in
squares, rolled in flour and fried a rich brown, served with
maple syrup is good eating, whether there is fried chicken to
go along with it or not.

You can fry corn-meal mush in the same way. And very
good this is, too, with either maple or corn syrup. Or with
thick, dark, New Orleans molasses.

Perhaps you have to have your roots in American soil for
two generations at least to savor this sort of eating. The French
women who came out to Louisiana in the days of the Bubble
complained bitterly at having to eat corn meal. A letter from
the Governor to Paris says,

The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an
article of food; but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for
this food a dogged aversion, which has not been subdued. They

Yellow Bread 309

inveigh bitterly against His Grace, the Bishop of Quebec who,
they say, has enticed them away from home under pretext of
sending them to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise.

Men have always liked corn and the dishes made from it.
In the dining rooms of their university clubs the hot corn
sticks and muffins are always first choice. Women restaura-
teurs, like Ella Barbour, Jane Davies, Miss Kirby and Miss
Allen — to mention only a few of those who are doing a thriv-
ing business feeding New Yorkers — and Mary Love, whose
tea room in Columbus, Ohio, draws nearly as many of the
politicians as the Capitol, never fail to have hot corn bread of
some sort for their men customers. It's the men who make a
restaurant pay.

The secret of good corn-meal mush — and, believe me, it
can be very good — lies in having water-ground meal to start
with. Don't let the grocer's clerk persuade you that the kind
he sells done up in cartons and put out by some breakfast-
food manufacturer is just as good. It isn't. Probably the clerk
is an Irishman, and no Irishman has the proper feeling for
corn meal. They import it into Eire, but they feed it to the
pigs and the fowls and feed themselves on soda-bread. The
fact that Irish bacon and Irish eggs fetch high prices in the
world's markets, and Irish labor a poor price, apparently has
not taught the peoples of the twenty-six counties anything
about nutrition.

Water-ground meal is, as the name implies, corn meal
which has been ground by stones turned by water power. It
matters not at all whether the agency for gathering the power
is a wheel in the brook or turbines. Either way, water power is
slow and rhythmic. The slow turning of the tedder does not
overheat the meal; the millers' refining processes do. And over-
heated meal has lost its flavor. It loses something else by the
refining process; this is the germ which contains the fat and
most of the mineral values as well as a good part of the sweet
taste. The refiners extract the germ from which they make

310 Singing Valleys

gluten feeds for cattle and the even more valuable corn oil.
What is left, after the indigestible hulls have been bolted out
of the meal, they do up in packages with pretty pictures on
them and sell to the public for Indian meal. On their books
this is just a by-product of the lucrative gluten and corn-oil
business.

But when you eat suppawn or bread made from water-
ground meal, you are getting all that the corn has to give in
the way of food and mineral and fat values. The only thing
that has been taken from the natural grain is the chaff of
the hulls.

It is true that water-ground meal does not keep as well as
meal from which the germ has been removed. This is one
reason why many of the grocers do not stock it. In pioneer
days the housewife sent a sack of corn to the mill and used it
up before sending another seventy pounds or so to be ground.
Even so, when the sack was getting low, careful housekeepers
usually poured the meal into big sheet-iron pans, and set these
in the warm oven. Presently, any corn worms which had devel-
oped, or were on the point of hatching, would wriggle to the
surface of the pan and over the sides to quick death on the
bottom of the oven. The meal would be turned over and over
with a long-handled spoon until it showed no more inclination
to squirm. Then it was made into mush or yellow bread. And
next day one of the boys rode another sack of corn over to
the mill.

Good suppawn needs long, slow cooking. Preferably in an
iron pot in which there is no chance of scorching. If you are
condemned to a modern kitchen of the operating-theater
model, all porcelain tiles and chromium, and fitted with Bun-
sen burners and electric gadgets, at least use a heavy aluminum
double boiler to cook mush. And forget the gas bill.

The hasty pudding of old-fashioned New England was noth-
ing more than suppawn, sweetened with molasses and spices,
and occasionally with Spanish raisins. Milk improved it; cream
glorified it. The young gentlemen of Harvard College were

Yellow Bread 311

devotees of hasty pudding. Shortly after the Revolution, and
when New England was losing a large proportion of her man-
power to the Ohio and Illinois country, Harvard undergradu-
ates started a new club called "Hasty Pudding." At first, the
activities centered around dinner at a certain Cambridge inn
on "hasty pudding night." Later the club went in for the
dramatic arts; truly, an evidence of our corn-fed culture.

Nowadays, I believe, the dining-room stewards at Harvard
feature an Indian pudding. This is how they make it: Over
three tablespoons of corn meal they pour three and one-half
cups of scalding milk. This is stirred well and sweetened with
one-third of a cup of molasses, and cooked until it thickens.
Constant stirring is necessary to keep it smooth and to pre-
vent burning. "Remove from the fire," the directions con-
tinue; "add one cup of cold milk, half a cup of sugar, two
tablespoons of butter and one-half teaspoon each of salt,
powdered cinnamon and powdered ginger. Pour the pudding
into a buttered, earthen-ware dish, and bake in a moderate
oven at least three hours."

I have been told that this is the Harvard undergraduates'
favorite dessert. And, lest our oldest seat of learning be accused
of an unseemly democracy, there is still a nice social distinction
between those who pour milk over their Indian pudding and
those who can go to cream. There's a rumor that the young
nabobs on the Gold Coast top theirs off with vanilla ice
cream!

Our first American poet sang the praises of early days in
New England when

. . . the dainty Indian maize

Was et with clam-shelles out of wooden trays.

Doubtless he was referring to suppawn. But in the days when
corn was pounded in stone mortars and bolted through a
basket sieve, the corn porridge was a coarse and gritty sub-
stance. The Indian method of preparing maize was to steep
it in hot water for half a day, then to pound the moist grain

312 Singing Valleys

into meal. This was sifted, and the large grains which did not
go through the pores of the sieve went back into the mortar
for another pounding. From this meal the Indian woman
made her nookik and appones. Sometimes wild berries were
mixed with the dough before baking. Peter Kalm wrote en-
thusiastically of the flavor of this Indian berry-bread.

Boiled with water, the meal became suppawn. If the squaw
happened to have some salt, she seasoned the suppawn with
it. Lacking salt, she made do with hickory ash.

To me, corn meal mush means very hot days in summer,
sweet with the smell of sun-baked grass, and noisy with
locusts. While Geordie took the tired horse around to the
stable and harnessed another for the afternoon round of calls,
my father would sit down at the mahogany table with me
beside him. At his place would be a tray with a deep dish of
cold corn meal mush and a tall, brown Bennington-ware jug
filled with fresh buttermilk. My father always ate his mush
and buttermilk from a blue bowl which had a picture of
Kenilworth Castle on the bottom. When the last spoonful
had disappeared, there under a thin milk film would be the
turrets old in story.

"Look," my father would say, "right there, under that
crumb of corn, is where Robert Dudley stood and said how-
d'ye-do to Queen Elizabeth. And this not an hour after he
had ... What do you think?"

"I don't know," I would say. Knowing well enough, but
finding it too awful to put into words, and too delicious to
miss hearing him tell it to me all over again.

So the romance and the tragedy of fair Amy Robsart were
brought to me in a bowl of suppawn.

Corn batter-cakes are a breakfast standby in many parts of
the South. To make these, you start with two cups of cooked
corn meal mush. Add to this three-quarters of a cup of white
flour, two eggs well beaten, one teaspoon of salt and sufficient
cold milk to form a thin batter. Pour this from a pitcher onto
a greased, hot griddle, and bake brown on both sides. Try

Yellow Bread 313

them, some day, with rich chicken gravy. And pork — "white
meat" gravy — well made and served with hot batter-cakes,
grits or pones is not to be sniffed at.

Corn, grits and salt pork are the food of the Piedmont area
where pellagra ravages so many lives. But neither corn nor
pork causes pellagra. The disease is brought about not by what
the poor southern whites eat, but by what they don't eat. It is
their sins of omission which have laid them low.

When the story of the pellagra sufferers in this country
broke over the world at large, there was a great hue and cry
against corn. The accusation of causing pellagra was brought
against our national cereal. All over the country people, who
all their lives had eaten corn, suddenly became afraid of it.
Being good business men, the wheat flour millers and the
manufacturers of wheat foods did not miss this opportunity
to push their products.

The people who raised the loudest outcry apparently over-
looked the fact that during the two centuries in which Amer-
icans were conquering the wilderness, fighting the Indians,
French and English, building towns, roads, universities, cities
and a Great Tradition, the cereal which figured largest in their
diet was corn. The men who signed the Declaration of Inde-
pendence ate corn. I never heard that one of them had pellagra.
The Powhatan knew no cereal but maize. He lived to be over
eighty; and though enormously fat, was also possessed of a
physical vigor which filled the young English settlers with pro-
found respect.

The early American corn-eaters ate, with the corn, wild
game, wild fruits, in which this country abounded, and vege-
tables of many sorts. They drank milk, and quantities of home-
brewed beer. John Cotton said that milk and ministers were
the only things cheap in New England. Cider cost only a few
shillings a barrel. John Adams advocated temperance reform;
but to the end of his life — on the same July fourth on which
Jefferson died — he drank a large tankard of hard cider every
morning when he first got out of bed.

314 Singing Valleys

Too, these stalwart forefathers of ours lived before civiliza-
tion had advanced to the point of setting a drug store on
every corner to sell bicarbonate of soda to Americans whose
diet of refined cereals is already low in vitamins B and G.

What the Piedmont peoples need is not less corn but more
milk. Less saleratus, and more foods rich in these vitamins
which sodium bicarbonate destroys. Cows and truck gardens
would do a lot to lift the health rate. So would two dozen
tomato plants in every yard. One eminent dietician has figured
that "three cents' worth of milk or yeast in the daily diet would
wipe pellagra from the face of the earth."

So don't blame corn.

In the deep South they call it "yaller bread." And this may
mean a raised loaf in which corn meal is mixed with rye and
wholewheat flours, pones, dodgers, thick corn bread with a
buttery brown crust, or the kind that is poured thin on a
griddle or a dripping pan in the oven and baked in a crisp,
crunchy sheet. Whichever way you make it, it has its points.

Nothing so distinguishes the Northern from the Southern
woman as the way each approaches woman's most pressing
problem. The Northern girl sets out to get her man by com-
peting with him, or with some other girl where he can have
an unobstructed view of her success. The Southern girl wastes
no time on competition. She plays charm. Nor is her charm
limited to a flower in the hair, languishing smiles and marsh-
mallow coquetry. While diverting her quarry's attention with
these, she brings up an overpowering flank attack. She feeds
him. Not as science and the Northern girl — who has been to
a college where they believed in vitamins — say he should be
nourished. But as every male, deep down in his secret, greedy,
infantile soul has longed to be fed.

Of the ten million or so American women who extraverted
their appetites for romance by following the Windsor love
affair, probably only those born south of the Mason-Dixon line
gave full credit to the stories of southern dishes which the

Yellow Bread 315

erstwhile Mrs. Simpson used to serve to her royal admirer. In
New York they laid it all to clothes by Molyneux and cos-
mopolitan sophistication. Down South they shrewdly sus-
pected yellow bread.

There are as many recipes for the making of corn breads
as there are F.F.V/s in the Tidewater. Every family has one;
and every family's is "the best." Some call for buttermilk;
others advance the claims of clabber. Some ask for a little
wheat flour; others protest that this spoils the flavor of the
corn. In fact, they argue about making corn bread the way
New Englanders argue about crullers and doughnuts.

As in all debates of this sort, there is only one right way.
And that is

MY WAY TO MAKE CORN BREAD

To two cups of corn meal add one teaspoon of salt, and one
teaspoon of soda. Add two cups of sour milk and stir well. Then
add two eggs, well beaten. And one-fourth of a cup of butter,
melted. Bake this in a well-greased and warmed sheet-iron pan in a
fairly hot oven for half an hour.

You need buttermilk for pones. Some prefer clabber. But
whether you use one or the other, whether you roll the dough
in moistened corn husks and bake these in the embers, or
drop it onto a skillet, or bake the pones in the oven, you
should eat them hot with plenty of sweet butter. And for a
drink, buttermilk.

Soon after I had begun the writing of this book I was
traveling by train from Washington toward Pittsburgh. My
seat-mate was a young man with a friendly smile and a pleas-
ant Tennessee drawl. Somewhere between Harpers Ferry and
Cumberland, and midway between Munich and Gone With
the Wind, I made the discovery that though by vocation he
was a government clerk, by avocation he was a cook. Like all
the men I have known who have this gift, he spoke endear-
ingly of the materials and mechanics of his art.

"Well, ma'am, to make right good pones, it's like this.

316 Singing Valleys

You get you some co'n meal. White's the best. A bitty salt.
And 'bout a dime's worth of soda. Not what you kin buy with
a dime; what you kin put onto one of 'em. Mi* that up good
with some nice fresh-churned buttermilk till you got a batter.
Take and drop that outen a spoon onto your hot spider, and
clap the cover down onto it. Leave 'em to bake maybe half
an hour, till they're sweet and brown. You jest cain't help
likin' them pones, ma'am."

Pones made that way, with cracklings mixed through the
batter before baking, are as good food as any epicure could
sigh for. They are best after a day out of doors fishing or
shooting. And for a lunch under a sweet-smelling locust tree
in haying-time, you can't beat them, either.

Hoecake, I have read, gets its name from the Indian nookik.
It is merely corn meal, salted and mixed with scalding water
or milk. The batter should be left to stand for at least an hour
before spreading it thinly on a pan, or on the greased blade of
the field hoe, and baking it over the open fire.

When Abraham Lincoln recalled his childhood, he remem-
bered that the Sundays of those years in Kentucky and Indiana
were marked by wheat cakes. On all other days the Lincolns
ate corn-dodgers.

One point in favor of the dodger is that it can be baked, or
steamed in a pot like a dumpling. It all depends on what else
you have to eat. Dodgers are made of one cup of meal, salted;
two tablespoons of melted shortening, and sufficient cold
water to form a dough which can be rolled between the palms
into sticks four inches long and the thickness of a hoe handle.
Bake these in the oven or on a greased skillet. Or drop them
on top of a pot full of boiling pokeberry shoots or turnip
greens, flavored with a ham knuckle or pig's jowl. Let them
steam twenty minutes or so, and then eat them with the pot-
likker.

In parts of New England, they make corn dumplings like
this and drop them on top of a pan of stewing sweetened

Yellow Bread 317

fruit: apples, blueberries, cranberries or beach plums. One of
these fruit stews served with corn dumplings and rich cream
is called a "grunt." The name is no mystery.

Pones, dodgers and hoecake are cabin foods. But every
quality child born in the South has stolen away from the Big
House to eat these in the servants' cabins, and to wonder
why he didn't have them on his mother's table.

Spoon bread is a quality dish, however. Really, this is not a
bread, but a souffle of eggs, butter, milk and corn meal. Let
those who turn up their eyes in ecstasy at mention of a cheese
souffle as this is served at the Tour d'Argent, try Miss Mary
Maconochie's Southern spoon bread. It is made from a rule
she brought from one of those big, square quiet houses that
border Court House Square in Frederick, Maryland. She made
it for me, and we ate it in the walled garden behind a house
on East Sixtieth Street in New York on an evening when the
full moon rose over Queensboro Bridge and when the radio
blared the news of Germany's march on Poland. But the spoon
bread triumphed over the heat and the city and the interna-
tional situation. It is one of the few things in the world that
can do that.

This is how Miss Maconochie makes it: First she pours a
quart of milk into a double boiler and brings this to a boil.
In this she melts an "egg" of butter. Then she pours the
boiling milk slowly over two cups of white water-ground corn
meal to which has been added one teaspoon of salt.

After this it is time to take the bowl and sit down by the
kitchen window and stir, and stir and stir. Fifteen minutes of
stirring isn't too much, according to Maryland standards.

The yolks of two eggs, well beaten, are then put into the
batter, and lastly, the stiffly beaten whites. The batter is
poured into a buttered and warmed earthenware dish and
clapped instantly into a hot oven, to bake "a good thirty
minutes."

Like all souffles, spoon bread must be eaten the minute it

318 Singing Valleys

comes from the oven. So invite only guests who have a record
for promptness.

All the best corn dishes do not come from the South. Up in
Rhode Island, the women of Wickford, and "round Newport
way," have a knack with Indian meal. Over in Peacedale they
make a raised bread similar to the bakers' Penny Household
Loaves of early days. This calls for equal parts of corn, rye
and wheat. It is leavened with yeast, sweetened with molasses,
and baked in loaves which come out of the oven dark, crusty
and fragrant.

Boston brown bread has equal parts of corn, rye and
graham flours. But this is steamed, and not kneaded and
baked.

As a matter of fact, corn meal does not knead easily or
well. Therefore it is more usual to make it into a cake, not a
loaf. But during the war which made Scarlett O'Hara, women
in the Southern states learned to do things with corn meal
which they never did in times when there was wheat flour for
raised loaves. Down in Maryland they made a yellow bread
which was so good that some of them have gone on making
it ever since Barbara Frietchie hung out her flag.

It is made by stirring four cups of corn meal into an equal
quantity of boiling water. As this thickens, add one tablespoon
of salt, and then set the mush aside to cool. To this should be
added one cup of luke-warm water in which a yeast cake has
been dissolved, and three cups of white flour. Knead, and allow
to rise overnight in a covered bowl set in a warm corner of the
kitchen. For breakfast, cut off some of the dough, pat into
biscuits and bake. The rest makes a loaf.

Compressed yeast is one of today's luxuries. Our great-
grandmothers used to send our grandmothers to the baker's
for five cents worth of "risings," or else they made their own
by mixing corn meal with some sour milk and letting this
ferment overnight. This is true sour-dough.

Yellow Bread 319

Without this for a "starter," my great-grandmother Halsey
believed no one could make proper buckwheat cakes. She had
learned her griddle-cake lore from her grandmother, who sent
her husband off to fight the British at Monmouth with a stack
of fresh buckwheats buttoned inside his homespun "bounty
coat."

The first English settlers in New Jersey learned about buck-
wheat from the Swedes who were settled in the Delaware
valley. Soon the dark, slightly sour griddle cakes made of this
flour were to the middle colonies what pones and yellow
bread were to the South, and johnny cake to Roger Williams'
settlers.

"I can't remember but one morning in my whole life,"
Great Great-uncle Sam would announce whenever there were
new faces at the breakfast table, and choosing the moment
when the colored "girl," who bore the name of Missouri
Frances Josephine Hazeltine Booker, appeared from the kit-
chen with the first stack of smoking cakes, "when I didn't
hanker for buckwheat cakes. . . ."

"Sam," great-grandmother would set the big silver coffee-
pot down on its tile with finality. "You're not going to tell
that story all over again."

Her brother would cock an eye at her.

"Why, Julia Ann, what's the matter with that story? It's
true, every word of it. Besides, I don't believe Miss . . ." —
with an inquiring look at the visitor. "Now, that was a real
interesting thing that happened to me. You'd like to hear
about it, wouldn't you?"

Outmaneuvered at her own table, Julia Ann would sigh and
take up the coffee-pot again. Uncle Sam went on, happily.

"When I was a young feller my brother Schuyler and I used
to go up to Sullivan County every so often to buy horses. They
raised good ones up that way. Of course there weren't any
steam cars in those days. We drove. Three days it took from
where we lived outside of Morris town. Nights, we put up at
farmhouses. There was one house I always liked going to. Nice,

320 Singing Valleys

friendly folks; and the woman was a good cook. She made
about the best buckwheat cakes I ever ate anywhere."

While reflecting on the goodness of those distant cakes
Uncle Sam absentmindedly slid the entire stack from the
plate Missouri Frances offered onto his own plate. With his
knife he deftly separated the cakes, slid butter in between,
patted the pile tenderly to squeeze the lumps of butter until
it ran out at the sides, and looked about for the syrup jug.

"Yes, I always looked forward to getting to that house and
the breakfast she would give us. Especially when it was winter-
time. Well, one morning — frosty it was, I remember — I hustled
into my clothes to get down to the kitchen where 'twould be
nice and warm, with breakfast getting ready and smelling
good, and all that.

"Just as I pulled open the door there was the woman stand-
ing by the cookstove, and there was the big jug of batter where
it always stood to one side of the hearth. And what did she
do but lean down and yank a big black cat out of the jug.
'There, drat ye/ she said." Dramatically, Uncle Sam went
through the hand motions of one holding up an animal by
the scruff of the neck and milking the other hand down its
back and tail.

" 'That's the third time you've been in that batter/

"Funny." Uncle Sam smiled benignly at the guest's expres-
sion of horror. "You know, I just didn't seem to relish any
buckwheats that morning. First and only morning in my life,
though, that I didn't."

True johnnycakes, as they make them in Rhode Island, are
baked, like buckwheats, on a soapstone griddle. This lets them
cook more slowly than they can on a spider. And they should
cook for some time because the milk with which the batter
is made may be warm, but must not be scalding.

To one cup of white, water-ground corn meal — real Rhode
Islanders won't use any other kind, and usually they insist
that this shall come from a certain mill in their city of Ports-

Yellow Bread 321

mouth — add one-half teaspoon of salt. Thin to a batter with
cold or luke-warm milk. The batter should be so thin that it
drops from the blade of a knife like heavy gruel. Bake the
cakes on a soapstone griddle, turning to brown both sides.

When Roger Williams' settlers had to go on business to
Providence, Boston or New London, they carried a dozen or
so of these "journey" and hence "johnny" cakes to sustain
them on the road.

The further one delves into our native American culinary
lore, the more uses for corn does one discover. Apparently
the grain challenged the imaginations of every foreign group
which came to these shores, and each group answered the
challenge in its own way. Hence the corn fritters, chowders,
puddings, pies and even pickles — besides an endless variety of
breads.

Mark Twain, surrounded by the minestrone, veal au mar-
sala, boiled chestnuts, Bel Paese and Parmesan cheeses of
Italy, took out a pencil and made a list of American dishes he
was going to demand the first minute he set foot on American
soil. Five of them were made of corn: pone, hominy, hoecake,
green corn on the cob, and green corn out from the cob and
dressed with butter and pepper. Doubtless the only reason the
list did not run on to succotash, Indian pudding, batter cakes
and chicken and corn pie was that homesickness overcame
him.

XX

Sweet Corn Ripe

A; YOU read the title of this chapter it is likely that you
will think of these words as you have seen them many
times, printed crookedly on a shingle, and nailed to a fence or
a tree by a roadside farm.

Every year, along about the first of August, about one
million such signs go up on all the roads in at least forty out
of our forty-eight states. Simultaneously, some thirty million
American mouths begin to water. There is no doubt about
sweet corn being America's favorite vegetable. The dieticians
have worked hard to make us value the vitamins in the tomato
and the chemical properties of the carrot. They sold us acres
of spinach on the iron it was supposed to contain. But no
Dr. Hauser was needed to sell America sweet corn. Even those
American men who during ten months of the year will ac-
knowledge no vegetable but the potato look forward to August
and September and devote those months to the solid enjoy-
ment of corn on the cob.

What the sweet-corn season does to the sale of butter I
have no way of knowing. But medical men who are interested
in the production and reduction of human avoirdupois know
very well that no one in this country loses weight during
the months of Golden Bantam. There isn't sufficient will-
power or vanity in the American temperament to enable even
an overweight motion-picture star with a contract hanging
in the balance to say "No" to temptation when it is pre-
sented in the form of two or three of those short, golden,
eight-rowed ears, with plenty of butter to spread along the
rows as one gnaws. Or to leave it at two or three, either.

322

Sweet Corn Ripe 323

Unconsciously one says "Golden Bantam" when sweet corn
is mentioned. This goes to prove how a new variety of a
widely popular vegetable can capture a whole nation of con-
noisseurs. For Americans were up on corn long before W.
Atlee Burpee offered the first "Golden Bantam" on the mar-
ket. That was in 1902. Then, and for some years to come,
Americans thought of yellow corn as "chicken feed." Sweet
corn, they thought, should be pearly white. Yellow corn was
tough. True, the yellow corn they had known was tough.
It was field corn which has a large starch content in the kernels.
Sweet corn differs from the dents and flints in its low content
of starch and its high sugar content. But the color of the ker-
nels has nothing to do with the proportions of what is inside
them.

The variety "Black Mexican," which has some black kernels
scattered through the rows, was known long before the crea-
tion of Golden Bantam. But Black Mexican was regarded as
a novelty, not as a leader. The popular sweet corns were
"StowelFs Evergreen;" "Country Gentleman" with its small,
translucent kernels which wander crookedly along the cob
like a countryman finding his way home from a bibulous mar-
ket day; "Metropolitan," an early variety; and "Peep o' Day."
The canners called for "Evergreen" and "Country Gentle-
man." They too said that people wouldn't eat a yellow corn.
They had something to find out.

During the Civil War years a boy was born in a red brick
farmhouse not many miles northwest of Boston. His name
was Luther Burbank. Many years later a distinguished Dutch
botanist was to say of him that he was "a gardener touched
with genius." Luther Burbank was slow to admit to the genius
part of the characterization; but he never was in any doubt
about the truth of the first half. From the first April when
he toddled after his mother as she went about her flower
garden, his career was determined.

Before 1875, young Burbank on his farm near Fitchburg,
Massachusetts, was experimenting with growing sweet corn

324 Singing Valleys

that would be ready for market ten days or one week before
the other farmers had roasting ears to sell. Before-season vege-
tables were worth money. Luther Burbank worked out a
scheme of starting his sweet corn in flats filled with fresh
stable manure and leaf mold. When the seeds had ger-
minated, and the roots were three or four inches long and
the green shoots about one inch, he dropped them into the
drills in the garden, and covered them over with half an inch
of earth. Other farmers said you couldn't grow corn that
way. But young Burbank's corn grew. Moreover, he did not
have to pay particular attention to which way the germinated
seed fell into the drill. The corn could take care of itself.
Those seeds just wriggled around under ground, got their
roots under them and their shoots on top and started to grow.
Many of them were up and out of the ground within twenty-
four hours of the planting. Luther Burbank was able to snap
off hundreds of ears, load them on a spring wagon and drive
them to the market in Fitchburg two weeks before his neigh-
bors had corn to sell. In this way he could get fifty cents per
dozen for the ears. Two weeks later sweet corn would sell at
twenty-five cents per dozen ears.

It was in his effort to develop a variety of sweet corn which
would stand earlier planting than most of the sweet corns
could and which would mature quickly that started Luther
Burbank thinking about a yellow variety. He made several ex-
periments, but these were interrupted by his moving to Cali-
fornia in 1875.

Meanwhile, back in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a man
named William Chambers was thinking along the same lines.
Chambers was one of those amateur gardeners who are al-
ways trying experiments. "Green messing" his women folks
called his puttering around the garden. They were impatient
of his experiments, such as grafting a peach cion onto an apple
to see what Nature would make of such a marriage. "Trying to
improve on what God, in the first chapter of Genesis, said
was already perfect."

Sweet Corn Ripe 325

One of the things Chambers tried to improve was sweet
corn. He had good land on which to make his trials. It was
historic corn land. The Mohawks had planted corn in those
fields running down to the Connecticut River before the
Massachusetts colonists established their frontier forts along
the valley. The settlers in Deerfield and Greenfield and Wis-
dom had raised corn and sent it and furs to Boston in trade
for salt fish. They made a rhyme about it:

Conway for beauty, Deerfield for pride,

If it hadn't been for codfish, Wisdom would have died.

Bill Chambers liked to think about those earlier corn plant-
ers as he puttered about his own garden. For years he selected
special ears for seeds, he cut off tassels of some plants in order
that only specially selected stamens should pollinize the
crop. He bagged certain ears and pollinized them himself, by
hand, then covered them carefully again in order to be abso-
lutely sure of the lineage of the corn those ears would produce.
What he got out of all these clumsy experiments was a breed
of sweet corn that was quick to mature, yellow in color and
even sweeter than the leading varieties of sweet corn.

The neighbors to whom he gave some of the ears to taste
came back and asked for seed. Bill Chambers shook his head.
He steadfastly refused to give away or sell a single seed.

When he died, Bill Chambers did not have much to leave,
at least not as the world reckoned values. But up in the attic
of his house there was a paper bag labeled "My corn seed."
There are few gold mines that have yielded the fortune that
was in that paper sack.

The executor of Chambers' estate took the corn and planted
it in his garden. When the ears were ripe he invited a seeds-
man he knew to come to dinner. The main dish was a yellow
sweet corn. The seedsman laughed a little when he saw it.
But after the first mouthful he put down the cob and looked
hard at his host. "Where did you get it?" and "Do you know
what you've got?" and "How much will you take for it?"

326 Singing Valleys

were the questions he demanded. It was that seedsman who
took the corn to W. Atlee Burpee, the Philadelphia seedsman
who was always interested in creating and in launching new
varieties of plants. Burpee bought two quarts of Chambers'
yellow corn and the right to give it to the world, under the
name he chose — Golden Bantam.

I hope the citizens of Greenfield, Massachusetts, will some
day put up a statue to Bill Chambers, who created Golden
Bantam, just as I hope some seedsman some day will name a
variety of sweet corn for Captain Richard Bagnall who carried
the seeds of the first variety from the Indian village in western
New York to Plymouth and grew it in his garden there. Men
who do things like that should be remembered. Even aside
from the financial value of their contributions — and Golden
Bantam has made millions of dollars for growers, and is in a
way to make many millions more — there is the contribution
to the nation's good eating. Food needs to be much more
than all the dietitians give it credit for. If all that man needed
to keep him in a state of physical well being were so many
calories of such and such proteins, carbohydrates and fats, he
could take three pills three times a day and put all the chefs
and restaurateurs out of business. But the point is, he does
need something more than just a chemical least common mul-
tiple. He needs the sensory enjoyment of good food well pre-
pared. A great deal of the art of life is developed at dinner
tables. And more than half of the famous epigrams of the
world have come to birth in that stimulating atmosphere
that follows naturally the placing on the table of a dish that
is as appetizing as it looks. A man needs to enjoy what he eats
for it to nourish him. His senses must be satisfied, or else
they will develop a revenging neurosis. Frequently when I am
talked to by food cranks who want me to grind up my salad
and drink it, and who boast that they start the day with lemon
juice, grated raw carrot, and an egg yolk in olive oil, I am re-
minded of the old conundrum, "Which came first; the hen or
the egg?" Which came first with these food reformers, I

Sweet Corn Ripe 327

wonder; their eating habits or their dietary troubles? For all
of them have the latter. And none of them looks to be par-
ticularly well fed. Too, there's more than a hint of neu-
roticism in their advocacy of minced-up, raw foods.

But then, I take my stand with those who frankly enjoy
eating good food, and who are up to enjoying sweet corn for
breakfast several times a week during its season.

Not sweet corn which has been picked the day, or several
days before. Corn which has been off the parent stem more
than an hour or two has lost its caste as a breakfast treat.
What I write now is addressed to those who are lucky enough
to have their own vegetable gardens, or who, at least, aspire
to be in that fortunate position some day.

The recipe for cooking sweet corn on the cob starts like the
old rule for making hare soup: "First catch your hare. . . ."
First draw some fresh cold water into a large pot and put it on
to boil. Then go forth into your own garden and choose some
ripened ears of corn. The silk at the ends of the ears will be
dry and brown and break off easily in your hand. But the
husks will be green and moist. Bring in the ears and when
the water is boiling rapidly, pull off the husks and filaments
of silk and drop the ears into the pot. Cover and boil, un-
salted, for three minutes.

It is not epicurean fanaticism which insists that sweet com
begins to lose its flavor immediately after it has been picked.
There is a scientific reason back of the statement. The tender-
ness of the corn is due to the low quantity of starch in the
kernels. The flavor is due to the large amount of sugar. While
the ears are on the stalk, the enzymatic activity is constantly
converting the sugar in the kernels to starch; but also, at the
same time, new sugar is constantly coming into the ears from
the leaves. When you pull the ear, you do not stop the enzy-
matic transformation of sugar into starch. But you do cut off
the compensating supply of new sugar. The longer the corn
stands, after pulling, the tougher, the starchier, and the less
flavorful must it become.

328 Singing Valleys

Sweet corn is a product of New England. And the best
sweet corn is still grown in those six states. Maine and New
Hampshire lead off. But Rhode Island corn is famous too,
though being a small state she cannot compete with the
others in quantity production. At Westport Point, which is
one tip of Rhode Island shore looking toward Point Judith,
there was a sea captain's widow named Mrs. Manchester who
took summer boarders.

Once a week Mrs. Manchester gave her boarders a boiled
dinner — boiled lobsters, boiled bluefish, boiled new potatoes,
and boiled corn; followed by a boiled pudding of white, water-
ground corn meal and blueberries, with more stewed blue-
berries poured over the helpings.

After doing justice to this meal the boarders tottered down
to the wharf and spent the afternoon in discussion whether
it was the lobsters which gave value to the corn and the pota-
toes, or the other way round. I believe that Mrs. Manchester,
who had cooked and served the dinner, frequently spent the
rest of the day husking and scraping a bushel or two of sweet
corn preparatory to drying it for winter use. All the gumption
had not been diluted out of the New England blood in her
day.

You have to go to New England, too, for good succotash.
And succotash, when it is good, can be very good, indeed.
It is not, as some people seem to think, an economical way
of using the left-over ears of boiled corn. Succotash should be
made of fresh corn, scored from the cobs and put into a pot
with some small pieces of salt pork and a very little rich milk.
When this is bubbling, add an equal quantity of young lima
beans and some salt and pepper. When the beans are tender
the succotash is ready for a generous lump of butter and to be
served. This method of preparing succotash is to be advised
before the original, Indian recipe which was to boil the corn
and beans together in a pot with a plump young puppy and a
handful of hickory ash for seasoning.

If New England is the natural habitat of the succotash,

Sweet Corn Ripe 329

you have to go south, at least as far south as Maryland, to find
good corn fritters. Southern cooks are unsparing with butter
and eggs, something no Yankee cook can ever quite bring
herself to be. At Sunday night suppers on the Eastern Shore
they serve something called corn oysters. This is how they are
made:

CORN OYSTERS

Take one dozen ears of sweet corn and cut through the kernels
lengthwise with a sharp knife. Then cut the corn from the cobs.
To one pint of this corn add one cup of sifted flour, half a cup of
butter, three eggs well beaten and two teaspoons of salt and two
of black pepper. Drop this batter into very hot deep fat and fry
crisp and brown.

No true American feels that there is anything amiss in
eating green corn from the cob. Rather, he feels that there is a
fine, democratic principle involved in always eating his sweet
corn that way. There's something pretty finicky about the sil-
ver corncob holders that sometimes appear among a bride's
wedding presents, but not, I fancy, on her table. Any Amer-
ican worthy to eat our national vegetable should be strong-
handed to the point of being able to hold a hot corncob in his
own fingers. Cutting the corn from the cob onto one's plate
is a method that belongs to the two childhoods. Anyone who
feels that corn on the cob is not a dinner-party dish should
serve corn pudding.

CORN PUDDING

Score and cut the corn from the cobs as described in the recipe
for making corn oysters. To one quart of cut corn add one table-
spoon of sugar, one of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Beat
up two eggs with three-quarters of a cup of rich milk and beat this
into the corn mixture. Pour into a buttered deep dish and bake
fifteen minutes in a hot oven.

Of course one can use canned corn to make these dishes
when fresh corn is out of season. But it is not so good. The

330 Singing Valleys

long cooking and extremely high temperatures required in the
canning process destroy some of the corn flavor and toughen
the kernels. Just the same, among the canned vegetables,
tomatoes lead in popularity, with peas and corn running neck
and neck for second place. The varieties most in use for can-
ning are Evergreen and Country Gentleman, though there is
a steadily growing demand for canned Golden Bantam. Farm-
ers "down East" are raising the yellow sweet corns for the can-
neries and making good profits at it.

There seems to be a nice justice in Nature. New England
lost her sons to the corn belt. New England propagated the
first sweet corn, and New England produced the most popular
variety of sweet corn ever marketed. In recent years New Eng-
land farmers have received higher prices for their sweet corn
than the corn belt farmers got for theirs. True, it cost them
more to raise the crop. They had to manure the fields heavily.
But the manure and the labor won them a profit on land that
would otherwise be profitless. Maine, with fewer than fifteen
thousand acres of sweet corn under cultivation in 1935, har-
vested fifty thousand tons, in the ear. This was as many as
New York farmers raised on twenty-one thousand acres, and
almost as many as Ohio got from a twenty-six-thousand acre-
age. Too, that Maine-grown sweet corn was worth $16.50 per
ton. This price was $6 more than sweet corn brought in New
York, and twice what the Ohio farmers got for theirs.

America's annual sweet-corn crop which goes to the can-
neries and commercial markets runs to over eight hundred
thousand tons. How much more is eaten where it is raised
there is no way of knowing. With such a market for the vege-
table it is no wonder that the scientists who experimented
with hybridizing field corns should have turned their attention
to the creation of hybrid sweet corns too.

The best hybrid sweet corns are the result of a single cross.
That is, they are made from two inbred lines of the same
variety. That is the story behind the hybrid "Golden Cross"
which has been bred from crossing two inbred strains of

Sweet Corn Ripe 331

Golden Bantam. This method of hybridizing seems to
strengthen the good points in the strain and to produce seed
which resists drought and excessive hot weather better than
the original variety did.

The tender sweet corn cannot be planted in the spring as
early as one plants the field corns. Once planted, it must suf-
fer no setbacks of cold and damp. But the crop matures many
weeks before the field corns can be harvested. The ears are
ready for pulling eighteen days after the silk appears at the
ends of the immature ears. For canning purposes the growers
let the corn wait another two or three days before taking it to
the factories.

Even in the corn belt, where the prices for sweet corn are
less than they are in New England, an acre of sweet corn will
bring the farmer about the same amount in dollars as that
acre planted in field corn would yield. But the sweet-corn crop
is ready money, whereas he may have to wait months before
he can get a good price for his field corn. Too, sweet corn
does not exhaust the fertility of the soil as the other corns do.
There seems to have been a scientific reason behind the Mexi-
cans' feeling that after the ears had been formed the corn
needed refreshment and more food to bring the grain to per-
fection. We know that it is in this period that the corn makes
its greatest demands upon the chemical properties in the soil.
Sweet corn, which is harvested before the kernels complete
their development as seed, is therefore less demanding of the
earth.

In the World War, there was an American flyer whose
plane was brought down in flames and who escaped with his
life but not without terrible facial injuries. He was in a base
hospital for many months after the Armistice was signed. His
physician and nurses knew that his slow recovery was due to
the fact that he felt that a man as injured as he was had noth-
ing to live for. In France, among thousands of wounded and
disfigured men, he might pass almost unnoticed. But not in
Kansas.

332 Singing Valleys

Finally, a relative of his managed to get transportation to
Europe and came to the hospital. All that he could say about
the eagerness of those at home to welcome the young man
back apparently did not rouse the injured man from his
apathy. But the wife of the relative had an idea. She sent a
cable to America and asked for one dozen ears of sweet corn.
They were sent over on the fastest ship in the refrigerating
room. When they were delivered at her hotel, the American
woman asked the manager to let her use the kitchen for half
an hour. There, with the French cooks watching curiously,
she boiled the corn. A taxi was waiting to take her and the
covered dish straight to the hospital.

She fed that corn, buttered, salted and peppered, to the
man lying in the bed. After the third mouthful his face began
to work like a child's, getting ready to cry.

"I didn't know till now that what's the matter with me is
that I'm just damn homesick."

That man is a corn farmer now, somewhere in Missouri.
The ravages war makes are still on his face. But there is some-
thing else there, too. That is contentment. Very often, I think
— for he is a thoughtful sort of person — as he looks over his
acres of standing corn, he remembers those twelve ears of
sweet corn which literally saved his life by making him want
to see again and feel under his feet that land that could grow
them.

XXI

Enemies in the Field

THOSE who live on the land develop a terrible patience.
You can see it in their hands. Even when they are dead,
like Sandburg's "Illinois Farmer," their hands continue to
remember the tools they have held, and the acres they have
plowed.

Too, time in industry and time on the farm lie in different
dimensions. The factory worker's success or failure is recorded
every seven days in his pay envelope. The manufacturer reads
the market reports and the world news each morning and
speeds up or slows down production to keep pace with times
good or bad. When demands for goods pour in he has only
to turn to the employment agencies for hands to fill the orders.
When business slumps, he can turn men off; or he can use
his lathe and manpower in the manufacture of some other
commodity with which the market is not glutted. Part of his
capital is his ability to change.

The business man, too, operates on a flexible system which,
ideally, permits him to vary his policy from month to month.
Thus he cautiously feels out each new step as he advances.
He can retreat from loss as agilely as a timid bather from
chilling water.

But the farmer cannot speed up eighty acres of corn to catch
an upswing in the market. He cannot put on an extra shift to
bring harvest one day nearer. He cannot plow up his corn and
plant sugar beets on news of a revolution in Cuba. Since he
must operate on a three- or four-crop rotation system, he can-
not balance his books at the end of a fiscal year. He is com-
mitted to carry on the existing system for several years at least.

333

334 Singing Valleys

It is not obstinacy which makes the farmer continue to
raise crops on which he is losing money. Nor is it ignorance
of economics, or stupidity. Though city dwellers are all too
prone to accuse him of all these sins. It is because he is caught
in a system. Any new experiment he makes requires several
years to prove itself; and with climate a continual variant, no
new venture can be proved with a single trial. Any mistake or
rash judgment involves several years of loss.

It is this which makes the man on the land a conservative.
He might be more of a gambler, and readier to make changes
with apparently changing conditions were he the sole com-
mander of his fields. But he is not. Besides the ebb and flow
of economic tides which wash the shores of industry and
business, the farmer has to take into account wind, rains, bliz-
zards, floods, droughts, frosts, heat, cyclones, dust storms,
grasshoppers, gypsy moths, chinch bugs, corn-borers, blight,
rot and smut. All and any one of these may enter into his
bookkeeping every year. No matter how he tends his fences
he cannot insure his fields against them. All these deliver the
farmer from any possible egotism. He knows that success or
failure does not rest with him alone. On the farm, God is
always the silent partner. The articulate half of the partnership
may expostulate or rebel, but the covenant still binds. It is
irrevocable.

There was a man who planted thirty acres of corn. A week
after the hills sprouted, the heavens opened and the rains
washed new corn and top-soil into the creek. The next spring
the man plowed and planted that thirty acres to corn again.
The young crop throve through May and June. Then came
the heat, and six weeks of drought. The corn burned in the
ground before it could tassel.

That winter the man and his wife were on the town. When
another April came, the farmer got out the plow and started a
first furrow across the thirty-acre field. His wife came out to
the fence rail.

Enemies in the Field 335

"Len, you're not going to plant that field all over again?"

"That's what I aim to do."

She went back to the house, baffled. All day she watched
him and the lengthening furrows. But neither that day, nor
the next, nor at any time while the plowing went on did she
venture any more remonstrances. She knew it was no use.
Only on the day she saw him get out the sacks of seed corn,
she drew down the blinds in the kitchen and refused to look
out at all.

Spring touched the land tenderly. The maple buds swelled.
The wild cherries and dogwood blossomed. Soft rain fell at
night, and the sun broke through the mists with morning.
Catbirds nested in the lilacs by the farmhouse door. The
rhubarb leaped out of its barrel. The woman knew, though
her eyes would not look that way, that the thirty-acre lot would
be green with young corn.

Then came three days of unseasonable heat. The lilac leaves
drooped, and the dogwood dropped its petals. The cattle were
uneasy in the pasture. Toward sunset on the third day a mass
of copper-colored clouds gathered on the horizon. A leaden
stillness weighted the earth. Two hours later the cyclone
burst. You could hear the waters running in the hills before
the rain swept down the valley.

All night it rained. The storm beat venomously on the
earth. All night the man and the woman lay side by side,
sleepless; yet silent. What was there to say?

In the morning the woman stood at the kitchen door and
looked through the driving rain at the raddled fields. Her
husband came and stood beside her. Then it was, at last, she
turned to him.

In his face shone a savage joy. He lifted his fist and shook
it at the sky.

"Yah! Fooled you that time, God. I didn't plant her after
all."

Men said of the corn belt, "God made this country for

336 Singing Valleys

com." Sometimes they changed it to "God made corn for this
country/' It didn't matter which way you put it. It was true
both ways.

Here were one hundred and forty million acres, more than
half of which was in plow-land. Forty-five million acres of this
in corn. This represents 65 percent of all the corn grown in
the country.

Three factors necessary to corn-growing meet in the corn
belt. These are a deep, rich, well-drained soil, abundant rain-
fall and hot summer nights. All plants derive their nourish-
ment from two sources, the air and the soil. The first supplies
oxygen and carbon dioxide which the plant takes in through
leaves and stalk. Meanwhile the roots feel around through the
soil in search of the ten chemical elements which are vitally
necessary to every plant's growth. These are nitrogen, phos-
phorus, potassium, calcium, sulphur, magnesium, sodium,
iron, chlorine and silicon. The first three of these are most
in demand, but each one of the ten elements is essential to
the development of some part of the plant. Nor can any
excess of any one element make up for the deficiency of an-
other. There is a wide difference in the amount of each that
is required by each plant. To plant potatoes, for instance, in a
soil which is rich in nitrogen and phosphoric acid, but low
in potassium, is to court famine. Nitrogen, potassium and
calcium are needed to form the larger part of the corn's tissues.
The last does valuable work in hardening the stalk to with-
stand drought. Calcium is a characteristic constituent of the
limestone soils of the corn belt.

The clovers, vetches and peas which are gross nitrogen feed-
ers have developed the ability to draw nitrogen from the air as
well as from the soil. Beads of the chemical are stored on the
plants' roots. This makes them valuable as "green manure" to
enrich the fields for corn to follow the next year. The corn is
greedy. When young it requires plenty of easily available food.

Research in soil and plant chemistry is a relatively new
science. Its findings and warnings are still new voices to many

Enemies in the Field 337

farmers. Over-cropping, which exhausted New England's fields
within a century and a half, was practiced by many farmers in
the corn belt up to the time the A.A.A. went into action.
There were men who simply refused to believe that the soil
which had grown corn twenty feet high for their fathers could
ever be spent. Nor could they understand that even top-
dressing the soil with manure would not give it all the chemi-
cal values it needed for complete fertility. Manure, they
argued, made rich soil. Rich soil would grow rich crops. If the
harvest failed, it could not be the fault of the soil. Rather,
God or the government was to blame.

A lot of hard times on the farm have been laid to the Re-
publicans or the Democrats, or to sin, which were really
directly attributable to farmers raising the same crop on the
same acreage year after year. In the agricultural colleges they
taught the values of crop rotation and green manuring. The
County Agents lectured on soil analysis and the chemical
properties necessary to vegetable growth. The younger men
listened and paid heed to these things. A few of them had
been to the state agricultural schools and were aware that
science had a place in agriculture. But the older generation of
dirt farmers spat their disgust for book-farming.

"Bought wit's better'n taught wit. . . . You can't teach
your grandmother to suck eggs. . . . What these young fellers
need to find out is that farming ain't done outa books. It's
done with sweat. Fact is, some years are good, and some are
bad. There's always been chinch bugs and hoppergrasses, and
there always will be. A man has got to take 'em, and make the
best of 'em. That's bein' a man. Just let these college farmers
take a-holt of plow handles instead of a book and see what
that'll larn 'em. . . ."

There was no use telling these die-hards that Chinese farm-
ers have kept their soil at the same state of productivity for
four thousand years. "Shucks! As if there was anything a
Chinee could teach an American!"

There is a terrible bravery about the battle ignorance puts

338 Singing Valleys

up against enlightenment. It works so hard. As though it
thought that by the grimness of its labor, and its stoicism
under suffering, it could push back the dawn.

So while one farmer accepted the fact that a plant took
something out of the earth to make it grow, and that that
something was not restored to the soil by one winter's bliz-
zards or the April rains, and that even rotted cow manure did
not contain all the food elements the corn needed, his neigh-
bor went right on planting his corn in the same ground year
after year. When the harvests fell off, he blamed the seed corn;
or a late frost; or a dry spell in July. When smut blackened
the ears, he laid it to too much rain. When the corn-root worm
and the corn-ear worm infested his fields, he lamented that
the frontier had closed and that there was no more cheap land
lying farther west that he could move on to, as his father and
grandfather had moved.

A depression in agriculture had already set in during the
seventies. After the war years, prices fell. Surplus crops
mounted. The burden of debt settled on the farmers in the
corn belt who had helped to feed the Union. In the twenty
years between 1880 and the opening of the new century,
tenancy in this country rose 10 percent. In that period, though
American agriculture extended its horizons, it was in reality
being operated at a small profit or at none at all. What sus-
tained the individual farmer was the constant rise in land
values. Land which he had bought at $1.25 the acre, with
thirty years in which to pay it, he sold at $25.00 the acre to
newcomers from Europe, eager to settle on American farms.
If he did not sell, the high value of his land enabled him to
convert his floating debts into mortgages. The natural result
was that mortgage indebtedness became heavier every year.
Every year a large and still larger share of the farmer's crops
went to pay interest charges, and taxes which went up steadily
with the increased valuation of the land.

After the Revolution, Daniel Shays had led Massachusetts
farmers against the bankers whose power had stretched out

Enemies in the Field 339

from the towns to seize the tillable lands. The same situation
began to repeat itself in the corn belt. But there was no Daniel
Shays. Instead, there were the Patrons of Husbandry, the
National Grange. Organized in 1867, along with several other
farmers associations, the Grange was at first merely a fraternal
organization. The depression of the seventies put it into poli-
tics. It quickly became a dominant factor in Illinois and Iowa
— the leading corn-growing states. The Grange protested
against the railroads' grabbing of lands, demanded state agri-
cultural colleges, compulsory education, weather bureaus, na-
tional regulation of weights and measures, and commercial
treaties to open world markets for American farm produce.
The export of American corn to Europe reached its peak in
1899-1900 with the shipment of two hundred and thirteen
million bushels.

During those years the cities in the corn belt which had
grown up as markets for the shipment of farm produce entered
on an era of industrialization. The character of the towns
changed. Their suburbs reached out and engulfed lands where
formerly cattle had grazed, or farmers had planted corn and
wheat. The owners of those farms sold them and retired to
front-porch existences in the villages. Or they responded to the
lure of Florida orange groves and prune ranches in the Santa
Clara Valley. For the first time the progress of America altered
its historic pattern. Men fled before advancing civilization, not
to a harsh frontier, but to the promise of tropical ease.

The history of this country may be written in the terms of
the migration of peoples, first from the old countries of
Europe to wider opportunities here; later from the Atlantic
seaboard westward, and still westward. Massachusetts poured
into Ohio and the Illinois country. Virginia and the Carolinas
sprawled over the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee,
and later into Indiana. Illinois and Indiana ventured into Iowa
and the Dakotas. Kansas and Colorado struck out across the
plains and over the divide to California.

This migration, the most dramatic since the Arabs overran

340 Singing Valleys

central and southern Europe, has so filled the foreground of
our history that we are scarcely conscious of another move-
ment which has been going on steadily for the past century
and a half. This is the flow from the farm to the city, and back
to the farm again. It started, in the east, during the first rush
of industrial and mercantile growth after the Revolution.
Young men born in the Back Woods became drovers, and
herded cattle to the cities for sale. There many of them re-
mained, to become apprentices in shops and in counting-
houses; and later pursy merchants, bankers and promoters of
land schemes in the new west. While some of the returned
soldiers left New England for the Black Wilderness with
Rufus Putnam, others followed the path of Franklin to the
growing towns. Always, when there was a slump in farm
values, the fields sent their crop of young men to the paved
streets.

The ebb from the farms, which increased steadily after the
Civil War years, went on for a half century up to our entry
into the World War. In Illinois, corn acreage diminished an-
nually. Meanwhile towns sprang up and cities swelled to
startling proportions. The farmers who remained on their land
had markets aplenty, and close at hand, for their corn, pork
and lard. It might seem that this would have ensured the
farming class widespread prosperity. It did create wealth for
many; but as it greatly increased the taxes and land valuations
it also laid a burden of debt on the fields.

The growth of the towns brought something else to the
farms. This was discontent. The disparity between life on the
farm and life in the towns, where there were gas — later elec-
tricity— city water, plumbing, opportunities for education and
amusement and social life, was too striking not to have its
effect on the farmers' sons and daughters. Farmers7 wives, who
had scrimped and saved all their lives, made butter and raised
poultry for the only money they ever handled, urged their
daughters to marry men with wages or salaries, men who could
give their wives homes with a bathroom and a kitchen sink.

Enemies in the Field 341

And something to look at, out the window, besides endless
cornfields.

The factories called the farmers' sons. Young men who had
been born on the land gave up the sky above their heads to
stand in one spot for eight hours, five and a half days a week,
and make one carefully regulated motion over and over again.
When a siren blew, they filed out to return to homes squeezed
shoulder to shoulder along a shadeless street. And to suppers
out of cans, heated up on gas stoves, by wives who knew all
about Mary Pickford and nothing at all about salting pork
or putting down eggs. Life was so much easier for them than
it had been for their parents or grandparents, who had bought
the acres from the government or from the railroads, that they
should have been happy. But they weren't. For one thing,
this mechanized existence gave them no opportunity to make
use of the adaptability which is the most valuable part of the
American heritage. Through a number of generations on the
American soil this hereditary characteristic was in process of
development in the race of pioneers. On the farms, as on the
frontier, opportunities for its expression were constant. Sud-
denly, within a single generation, the need for this quality was
cut down. The push-button era gave a man with a genius for
making shift no outlet for his gift. "The exercise of the
adaptive function," to quote the author of Man the Unknown,
"appears to be indispensable to the optimum development
of man." A life laid out by efficiency and industrial engineers,
with no droughts or blizzards in it, is a sorry sort of existence
for sod-busters' sons.

The booming of guns over Belgium started the tide of mi-
gration in America back to the farms. Farming which paid
dividends became a desirable occupation. Men raising food
were exempted from war service. Under the stimulus of war
and world markets for farm produce, men plowed up aban-
doned fields which had been left to the Canadian thistle, but-
terfly weed and the wild rabbits. Lands which had been turned

342 Singing Valleys

over to the grazing of cattle were furrowed to make wheat
fields and cornfields.

The story of the war boom and its effect on American corn-
growers has been told in another chapter. Its interest for us
here lies in what it reveals of the farmers' changed attitude
toward scientific farming. The men who had left the farms
for the towns and for jobs in mills and machine shops had
learned something during their stay there. They had learned
that science can teach a man how to lighten his labor, and
how to increase his chances of success. They brought this
altered point of view back to the land with them when they
returned. Few of them now derided book-taught farming.
They sent for the bulletins published by the Department of
Agriculture and the State Experiment Stations. They sent
their sons to state colleges. And their daughters. They began
to look on farming as a business, as well as a way of life.

Crop rotation and the testing of seed corn became the rule,
not the exception, in the corn belt. In Franklin County, In-
diana, farmers built a plant for making rag-doll tests. It was
only one of hundreds of co-operative ventures tried in agri-
culture. Meanwhile, carloads of grain moved along all the rail-
roads to the Atlantic ports. The ships went out laden to the
gunwales. Bread for Belgium, for France, for starving Ar-
menians. Bread for whoever would take it. True, a fleet of
ships loaded with wheat which Americans had saved by eating
cornbread as a patriotic duty, lay in the Thames while Eng-
land wondered what to do with the cargo. Then someone had
the bright idea of carting the wheat to the breweries to be
turned into British ale.

Not only did science teach the farmer how to save his soil
and improve the quality of his seed corn, it taught him how
to fight the pests of grasshoppers and chinch bugs, corn-ear
and corn-root worms, rots and smut which attacked the crop.
Actually, corn suffers less from enemies of this sort than any
other grain crop. In the early days squirrels cost the farmers
heavily. Many a boy learned to be a good shot by being sta-

Enemies in the Field 343

tioned in the corn with his father's rifle against hordes of gray
squirrels. Squirrel meat made good stew; and squirrel skins,
dried on the barn door, were worth a dime apiece when the
fur-buyers came through the country in the spring. Gray
squirrels put more than one farmer's son through college.

Science taught the farmer to give his fields clean cultivation
right up to the fences as protection against pests. It taught
him to burn the rubbish and stubble; to plow in the fall in
order to kill the grubs of cut-worms; to spread poison bait for
grasshoppers which came, every so often, in a dark cloud out
of the west, and would eat up a farm in a day. Above all, it
urged him to rotate the crops as a means of prevention against
diseases and to breed corn which was smut-resistant. When
the European corn-borer made its appearance here, in broom
corn imported from Italy or Hungary, the farmers turned
naturally to the Department of Agriculture for help and ad-
vice. Abraham Lincoln's dream of a federal government so
organized that it could serve the man on the land was coming
true.

During the forty years between 1855 and 1895, the time
required to produce one bushel of corn was cut from four
hours and thirty-four minutes, to forty-one minutes. The
steel plow which superseded Jethro Wood's invention in cast
iron had had a lot to do with that. Now the manufacturers
were offering farmers motor plows, mechanical corn-pickers
and corn-huskers; all guaranteed to cut still further the time
required to raise a crop. Here was science again, holding out
the promise of leisure to the man on the land.

Henry Ford demonstrated that by employing factory meth-
ods and harnessing tractors, seven days' work in a season were
sufficient to sow, cultivate and reap a harvest.

Farmers who had been convinced of the benefits of science
in the realm of chemistry and botany were open to conviction
by salesmen, and their sons who would rather drive a $2200
motor truck than a four-mule team, that motor power on the
farm ensured bigger profits. Didn't cutting down the hours of

344 Singing Valleys

labor per hundred acres make possible the plowing and plant-
ing of greatly increased acreage? Bigger farms, plus scientific
methods, meant bigger crops; and by all the known laws of
economics, bigger profits.

The argument won. The century which began with the
invention of the cast-iron plow closed with one million, two
hundred and fifty thousand tractors at work on American
farms.

What happened to the laws of economics? Was it the
series of droughts which scorched the crop lands for several
successive years? The drought of 1934 was the worst in this
country's history. One out of every seven farmers in America
went on relief. Neither scientific farming nor motor power on
the farm could hold off the enemy. Was it the series of floods
which washed the alluvial soil down the rivers to the Gulf?
Motor power won't stop the waters. Was it the turning of
vast areas into dust bowls? Dr. Hugh Bennett, chief of the
Soil Conservation Service, told the House Labor Committee:
"We are losing every day, as a result of erosion, the equiva-
lent of two hundred forty-acre farms." Was it the passing of
the country banker, and the increased control of rural by
urban banks? The decade 1921-1931 was one of unprecedented
mortality among banks. The final year of that period saw more
than two thousand failures. Mortality was highest in the mid-
west and south — in the corn-growing area — and in centers
of under ten thousand population. These failures, and the
mergers with larger banks which took place in great number
during the period, were owing in very few cases to departure
from normal banking practice. They reflected the decline in
land values, and in the prices of farm produce. The Wall
Street crash sent its effects out through the country because
of the heavy losses by important patrons of local banks.

Business suffered from bank failures; but the farmers suf-
fered even more, for the reason that in the small centers bank-
ing is almost a personal service. The urban control of rural
banks, which is a trend of the times, can result in real hard-

Enemies in the Field 345

ship to farmers because of the new management's lack of
information in regard to agriculture, and because of the delay
involved in securing action on farm loans. In one village, seven
of the best farmers, each owning from two hundred and forty
to three hundred and sixty acres of unencumbered land, were
refused loans of from $400 to $800 for seed and fertilizer in
the spring of 1931.

These are the enemies of the cornfields. Not the thieving
crows, or the ear-worm or the borer. Not the smut; though
the black fungoid growth ruins millions of ears each season.
Recent experiments have revealed that corn smut is edible.
It may even, in time, so the hopeful say, compete with mush-
rooms as a table delicacy! No, the enemies are drought, ig-
norance, waste of natural resources, faulty economics. Every
year these take heavy toll of our harvest. Their conquest is an
immediate challenge to American adaptability and to Amer-
ican imagination.

XXII

Tomorrow 's Harvest

IF YOU plant one acre of good cornland with hybrid corn,
with any luck in the world you may expect to gather a
harvest of sixty bushels. This, at the present market price for
corn, is worth approximately $36.

But there are any number of other ways of valuing a bushel
of shelled corn than in dollars and cents. For instance, it is
worth any one of the following:

43 Ibs. corn meal

5 gals, corn liquor

10 Ibs. pork

30 Ibs. starch

40 Ibs. corn syrup

1^2 Ibs. com oil

25 Ibs. dextrose

Moreover, the cobs from which the corn has been shelled
have a value to the smokers of corncob pipes. In south central
Missouri the farmers grow a large-eared variety of corn, the
cobs of which are worth as much as ordinary corn brings on
the ear. The Missouri corncob pipe industry amounts annually
to some $500,000.

Corn silk, out of which generations of American youth have
surreptitiously rolled their first cigarettes to puff them valiantly
behind the barn (there were only the cows to see how sick
you were) is used in filters. The pith of the cornstalks packs
the coffer-dams of our battleships. Americans have been born
and have died on corn-husk mattresses. Many a Negro and
"poor white" child has loved a corn-husk doll. Those children

346

Tomorrow's Harvest 347

may grow up to wear rayon clothing made out of cornstalks,
husks, straw and screenings which are now the waste at the
grain elevators. Nearly a century ago a Czech inventor pat-
ented a process for making paper out of the stalks of zea mays.
The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was eager to find more and
wider uses for the American corn the peasants along the
Danube grew so prolifically. Cornstalk paper is of excellent
quality. There have been a number of attempts made in this
country to manufacture it and put it on sale. These have
failed, not because of the product, but because wood pulp is so
cheap that we seem to prefer wasting our forests, thereby
creating floods and droughts and losing thousands of acres of
arable land annually, to growing our books and magazines on
the farm.

Besides all these, and the cornstalk wallboard which insu-
lates our houses and absorbs some of the noise we create, the
manufacture of the seven commodities listed results in a num-
ber of valuable by-products in the way of plastics, stock feed,
and carbon dioxide. The last is a left-over from the distilling
of corn liquor. It is recovered, compressed, and sold as "dry
ice." Meanwhile in South Dakota and in Kansas, distilleries
have been opened for the making of argol, a new commercial
alcohol whose source is sorghum, potatoes, corn and other
grains. Argol is used to step up gasoline. It promises a future
when motor power on the farm may be grown where it is used.

But it is as food that corn has its widest use. Its rich store
of carbohydrate makes it the greatest energy-producing food
the earth yields. It may be that the secret of the rise of Amer-
ican civilization lies in the endosperm of the American corn.

It required energy to conquer a continent and give birth to
a nation. It took energy to clear the forests, to penetrate the
Back Woods, to cross the Alleghenies, to explore thousands
of miles of inland rivers, to fight savages, to raise cities on the
prairie. That energy came from corn. Those poor Spaniards,
whom Peter Martyr pitied because they were forced to sub-
sist for five days at a time on nothing but parched corn, were

348 Singing Valleys

better fed for the task they were engaged upon than if they
had stuffed themselves with beef, chile, and baccalao.

A supply of carbohydrate is essential to the diet. It is na-
ture's insurance against fatigue and exhaustion from prolonged
physical effort. More than 65 percent of the total calories we
require to maintain life are supplied by the oxidation of
carbohydrate. The surplus of this energy food is stored as fat,
giving the body a corn-fed contour; which brings us back to
the premise that Nature seems to have made corn for a people
she expected to do things.

Corn is low in protein. Also it lacks several of the important
amino acids. But the oil in its germ is the richest known source
of vitamin F lineolic acid — equivalent to linoleic acid. This
vitamin, which is also found in lard, in eggs and in linseed
oil, is essential for cell respiration, secretion of insulin and the
proper development of the skin and hair. It is a precious
constituent of breast milk, which is lacking in cow's milk.
Hence the value of corn oil as a food for some infants.

Glucose, which is corn syrup, and dextrose are used in medi-
cine to supply immediate energy to the body. It is the dextrose
in orange juice and in all other ripe fruits which makes these
foods refreshing when you are tired. Dextrose, being pre-
digested sugar, is available to the blood stream at once. This
gives it its medicinal value. A five-pound baby boy was de-
livered by a Caesarean operation eight minutes after his
mother had died. After administration of oxygen, the child
was fed dextrose solution through a medicine dropper for
twenty-four hours. At the end of that time he was ready to take
breast milk. Ten days later he was put on a formula of cow's
milk and corn oil.

This young American literally owes his life to corn.

In view of these facts it would seem that there is little
likelihood that this country will ever cease to grow corn. The
grain has not only supplied us with our national history, it
promises our future. That we are aware of this, even though
subconsciously, was shown by the nationwide alarm when the

Tomorrow's Harvest 349

Agricultural Adjustment Administration began to pay the
farmers not to plant their corn acres. Men and women who
had lived all their lives in the cities were horrified at this
interference with the business of the earth. They feared
Coatlicue's revenge. It is true that man frequently cheats his
neighbor with impunity. He does not get off so easily when
he attempts to cheat Nature. Nature has a feminine way of
going on with her business of creation and procreation sub-
limely regardless of whether man decrees that it is legal or
illegal for her to do so.

When Peyton Locker was a small boy on the farm in
Virginia, he wanted a horse of his own. He said so to his
mother. Gentle and religious, she had a horror of what a horse
could carry a man to. Horses took young men from home to
sow wild oats.

"What about a dog?" she suggested. "Didn't I hear Cousin
Lulie Buchanan saying the other day that somebody had given
Cousin Joe another bird dog? And that she'd just have to
put her foot down? Why don't you go over to Burnside and
see Cousin Joe about it?"

The dog which had occasioned that gesture of Cousin
Lulie's foot was a beautiful Llewellyan setter bitch. Peyton
took her to his heart and named her Sally after his favorite
cousin. His mother, rocking on the veranda, sighed relievedly.
A dog wasn't like a horse. A dog was safe.

Sally's pups, when they came, were as beautiful as she. Pey-
ton swapped two of them for a Poland China shoat which he
put into the pen with his father's pigs and watched it fatten
with silent satisfaction. Corn was plentiful.

His father said, "That hog of yours will be about right to
butcher in January."

"I don't aim to butcher her this year," his son replied. "I
aim to keep her till she farrows."

His father agreed there was sense in this. The hog was bred,
and ultimately produced a litter of nine piglets. Every day

35° Singing Valleys

Peyton, with Sally at his heels, went down to the hog-lot and
spent half an hour throwing corn to his herd.

"Go on, you pigs/' he muttered. "Eat. Go on and eat. . . ."

That fall Peyton swapped five of his pigs with Sam Baxter
for a mule that was blind in one eye. His father approved the
deal. He said, "If you'll plow and plant five acres of corn next
year you can have the crop."

Later he told his wife, "I don't know but that boy will
make a farmer yet."

The boy kept his share of the bargain. He and the blind
mule conquered the stubborn soil. The corn they planted
grew. Meanwhile Sally nursed her third litter of pups under
the big locust by the well-house, and a second generation of
Poland China pigs rooted for beechnuts, and did their best
to squeeze under the fence to get into the corn.

On a day in Indian summer Peyton harnessed the blind
mule to a spring wagon, loaded on the corn from his five
acres, six Poland Chinas and two setter pups, and drove into
town. When he came home he was walking. He led by a rope
a colt whose grandsire was said to have almost won the
Kentucky Derby.

After all, Mrs. Locker told herself after feeling the colt's
soft, nuzzling nose, a colt wasn't the same as a horse.

Every year the County Fair was held in Charlottesville,
twenty miles away. Peyton and Cousin Joe's boy Wynne had
permission to go. They drove the colt, now a two-year-old, and
stayed the nights with Second-Cousin Mamie Potts whose
home was in Charlottesville. Together they had five dollars
to spend.

The greatest yearly event in the county was the Free-To-All-
Entries Race which was held regularly on the last day of the
Fair. The horses came from all parts of the county, and were
of every size, age, class and rate of speed. The prize was a
purse of two hundred and fifty dollars.

When the entry booth opened that morning, the first

Tomorrow's Harvest 351

horse owner in line was Peyton. The colt, Stardust, was en-
tered. The odds against her were forty to one.

Of course, by all the laws of morality, it should not have
happened that way at all. But Nature, I repeat, is not inter-
ested in morality or in laws. Her business is production. It
may be she smiled when the bay two-year-old, driven by a
twelve-year-old boy, won the Free-For-All by three seconds.

Peyton and Wynne were very quiet on the drive home.
Peyton hid his half of the winnings and the prize money in
the barn. It seemed wiser not to say anything about what had
happened in Charlottesville. Anyway, not until Thursday,
when the county newspaper would be out with a full account
of the Fair.

But it was only Monday when a strange man drove up to
the house and told the house servant he had come to see
Mr. Locker.

"It's about that bay two-year-old of his that won the race
over to Charlottesville last week."

Mr. Locker and his son spent a long time together in the
office. There was no need to close the door. Mrs. Locker was
upstairs, in tears. On the office desk was the roll of bills
Peyton had brought from the haymow. His father said slowly,
"Three hundred dollars'll go a long way toward paying for
you at V.M.I. It seems like you're not cut out for a farming
life. But I don't know how you'll ever make this up to your
mother."

Peyton was wondering about that, too. During the five
days before he was to start for V.M.I, he was "on bounds,"
forbidden to leave the veranda. From his perch there he
could hear his mother talking to Cousin Lulie Buchanan. "I
don't know. Lulie, I did my best with the boy. But some-
where I must have made a mistake. I don't know just what
it was . . ."

Three years of partnership with Nature had taught Peyton
many things. He spoke quietly over his shoulder, "The only
mistake you made, Mamma, was the kind of dog Sally is. If

352 Singing Valleys

you hadn't wanted things to happen, you hadn't ought to
have got me a bitch/'

It is true, you cannot stop Nature. You can only co-operate
with her. Even that is a privilege which sometimes costs a
man dear. For Nature knows no laws but her own. You can
explore those laws, as Mendel and the geneticists have done.
You can invoke them, which is the way of the corn-makers.
You can submit to them. The last is perhaps the wisest course
for the many.

For man has not yet learned more than a fraction of what
Nature has to teach. The problems which confront the corn-
growers today; the problem of changing farm values; the prob-
lem presented by the disparity between standards of living in
the towns and on the land; the problem expressed in that
equation which reveals that whenever food is plentiful and
cheap at its source, the cost of transporting it to the con-
sumer goes up, are advance notices of the lessons Nature is
about to teach us. Actually, the freight rates of American rail-
roads make corn shipped from the corn belt to New York
more costly than Argentine corn shipped to the same port
from Buenos Aires. '»

The only progress man ever makes is at the point of dis-
comfort. Nature knows this, for it is one of her laws, too.

As our civilization has unfolded to the point where few of
us can use, and none of us requires, all of the energy which
corn as a food has to give, the push and squeeze of circum-
stances are forcing us to turn our American cornfed genius
for adaptability toward finding new outlets for the life which
is stored in the golden kernels of the American grain.

It may be said that we are beginning at last to digest our
corn with our brains.

Bibliography

BOOKS

Adams, James Truslow, The March of Democracy

Beard, Charles and Mary, The Rise of American Civilization

Beard, Miriam, History of the Business Man

Bennett, Richard, History of Corn Milling

Beston, Henry, American Memory

Bradford, William, History of the Plymouth Plantation

Briffault, Robert, The Mothers

Brinton, Daniel G., The Myths of the New World

Brooks, Van Wyck, The Flowering of New England

Bruce, Philip Alexander, Economic History of Virginia in the Sev-
enteenth Century

Burlingame, Roger, March of the Iron Men

Burnaby, Andrew, Travels Through the Middle Settlements in
North America in the Years 1759 and 1760

Byrd, William, History of the Dividing Line

Carrier, Lyman, The Beginnings of Agriculture in America

Chase, Stuart, Mexico, a Study of Two Americas

de Landa, Diego, Yucatan, Before and After the Conquest

Evans, Oliver, The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide

Fiske, John, The Discovery of America

Fiske, John, Old Virginia and Her Neighbours

Harding, Esther, Woman's Mysteries

Hariot, Thomas, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land
in Virginia

Hendrick, Ulysses Prentiss, History of Agriculture in the State of
New York

Hewitt, Edgar L., Ancient Life in the American Southwest

Hewitt, Edgar L., Ancient Life in Mexico and Central America

Hildreth, Samuel Prescott, Pioneer History: being an account of
the first examinations of the Ohio Valley

Hone, Philip, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1780-1851

353

354 Singing Valleys

Jung, C. G., Psychology of the Unconscious

Kendrick, Benjamin B., and Henken, Louis M., The United States
Since 1865

Kroeber, Alfred Louis, Archaic Culture Horizons in the Valley of
Mexico

Kugelmass, I. N., Nutrition in Pediatric Practice

Nourse, Edwin G., Davis, Joseph S., and Black, John D., Three
Years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration

Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Journey in the Back Country

Parrington, Vernon, Main Currents in American Thought

Prescott, William, The Conquest of Mexico

Prescott, William, The Conquest of Peru

Preuss, Konrad Theodor, Die Mexikanische Bilderhandschrift

Roosevelt, Theodore, Winning of the West

Sears, Paul B., This Is Our World

Seler, Eduard, "Mexican and Central American Hieroglyphic
Writing." Address delivered before International Congress of
Americanists, N. Y., 1902

Smith, John, The General History of Virginia

Spence, Lewis, The Magic and Mysteries of Mexico

Spinden, Herbert J., Ancient Civilization of Mexico

Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History

Van Doren, Carl, Ben/amin Franklin

Wallace, Henry A., and Bressman, Earl N., Corn and Corn Grow-
ing

Watson, Elkanah, Men and Times of the Revolution

Weatherwax, Paul, The Story of the Maize Plant

Weeden, William B., Economic and Social History of New Eng-
land

Winsor, Justin, Narrative and Critical History of America

Woestermeyer, Ina Faye, The Westward Movement

Wright, Richardson, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America

PAMPHLETS

Iowa State College of Agriculture, Extension Circular #234, "The

Story of Hybrid Corn"
Ohio State University and U. S. Department of Agriculture, Ohio

4-H Circular, "Corn Growing"
Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin #574 by Mangels-

Bibliography 355

dorf, P. J., and Reeves, R. G., "Origin of Indian Corn and its
Relatives"

U. S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin, "Corn and Hog Statis-
tics"

U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin #1548, "The
European Corn Borer"

U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin #1714, "Corn
Culture"

U. S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin #1744; "The
What and How of Hybrid Corn"

U. S. Department of Agriculture Yearbook, Separate #1574, "Corn
Improvement"

Woods, William Whitfield, "Hearing on Corn and Hog Produc-
tion." Statement before Congress, Sept., 1935. Published by
the American Institute of Meat Packers, Chicago, 111.

MAGAZINES

Botanical Review, The, Vol. 1, 1935: Rhodes, M. M., and McClin-

tock, Barbara, "Citogenetics of Maize"
Fortune Magazine, November, 1938, "Corn Products"
Journals of Society of American Folklore
National Geographic Magazine, November, 1936, "Yucatan, Home

of the Gifted Maya"

Index

A.A.A., 147, 162 et seq., 217, 233,

349

Adams, Henry, 268
Adams, John, 116, 130, 293, 313
Adams, John Quincy, 131
Adams, Samuel, 114
Albany, 119, 137, 139
Alcott, Bronson, 69, 82
Algonquins, 265, 266
Alleghenies, 42, 87, 101, 120, 123,

130, 134, 246, 287, 347
American Bottom, 111, 225
Anahuac Valley, 31, 36
Appomattox, Queen of, 55
Arms, John Taylor, 174
Aztecs, 11, 21, 32 et seq., 42, 166,

257, 279

Bacabs, 26, 257 et seq., 280

Bagnall, Captain Richard, 221, 326

Barlow, Joel, 281

Bartram, John, 217

Beal, W. J., 228

Benducci, Chevalier, 239

Bennett, Dr. Hugh, 344

Benton, Thomas, 255

Berea College, 303

Berkeley, Sir William, 80, 245

Berry, Martha, 303

Biddes, John, 205

Bishop Hill, Illinois, 226

Blennerhasset, Margaret, 133

Bonnot's Mill, Missouri, 186

Boone, Daniel, 103, 107, 226

Boston, Mass., 86, 89, 114, 115, 121,

130, 137, 171

Bradford, William, 64, 68, 74
Brendan, Saint, 31
Brewster, Richard, 76
British, 111, 114, 127, 150, 173, 288
Buckwheat cakes, 69, 95, 319 et seq.

Burbank, Luther, 323 et seq.

Burpee, W. Atlee, 323

Burr, Aaron, 134

Byrd, Col. William, 97, 102, 249, 290

Calvert, Leonard, 92, 95 et seq., 108
Camerarius, 213
Campbell, Thomas, 159
Carolinas, 56, 102, 107, 173, 184,

185, 199, 299, 307
Cartaret, Philip, 98
Carter, Robert, 44
Castaneda, 42
Cavendish, Thomas, 45, 47
Cayugas, 266

Chambers, William, 324 et seq.
Cherokees, 30, 102, 107, no
Chicago, Illinois, 139 et seq., 145,

147, 242, 251, 265
Chichen Itza, n, 23, 35
Chicomenecoatl, 40, 262 et seq.
Chief Cornstalk, in, 145
Chippewas, 265
Cincinnati, 124, 148, 219, 251
Cinteotl, 13, 19, 32, 39, 42, 212, 264
Clap, Roger, 72
Clarage, Edward, 224
Clark, George Rogers, 102, 186, 246
Clay, Henry, 109, 135, 136, 137, 149,

243, 246

Coatlicue, 13, 19, 32, 39, 41, 83, 146,

166, 262, 268, 349
Cobb, Joseph, 249
Columbia, S. C., 174
Columbus, Chistopher, 9, 10, n, 41,

240

Columbus, Ohio, 225, 309
Coolidge, Calvin, 160
Connecticut, 87, 124, 148, 171, 216,

244, 248

Connecticut River, 42, 148, 199

357

358

Cooper, J. Fenimore, 119
Cooshcoosh, 110
Copan, 12, 21, 35
Coronado, 5, 12, 42
Cortes, 10, 36 et seq.
Crockett, Davy, 301
Crows, 8
Creeks, 8, 35
Cutler, Rev. Mannasseh, 120

Dale, Sir Thomas, 75, 76

Danube River, n, 207

Dare, Virginia, 45

Dedrick, Prof. B. W., 170

Deerfield, Mass., 123, 146

Delaware, Lord, 59

Delaware River, 11, 123

de Vries, 231

Dickens, Charles, 136, 249

Drake, Sir Francis, 8, 44, 47, 68

Draper, Mary, 115

Drayton, Michael, 49, 50, 52

Dunmore, Lord, 103

Dutch, 11 60,73,77,90,93,95,

Dutch Molly, 172, 307

Eastchester, New York, 175
Egypt, 20, 165 et seq., 204
Eliot, Jared, 214 et seq.
Eliot, Rev. John, 214
Ericson, Leif, 30, 31
Erie Canal, 137, 149, 248
Estremadura, 10, 148
Evans, Oliver, 189

Farmer, A. W., 116

Fearon, Henry Bradshaw, 135

Ford, Henry, 343

Index

Gregg, Josiah, 225

Grenville, Sir Richard, 8, 45, 46

Guatemala, 14, 20 et seq., 237, 239

Hakluyt, 44, 46, 49

Hariot, Thomas, 45, 47 et seq., 54

et seq., 66

Harrison, William Henry, 108, 300
Harvard College, 245, 248, 288, 310,

311

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 84, 249
Henderson, Richard, 107
Henry, Patrick, 102, 115
Hiawatha, 270 et seq.
Higginson, Rev. Francis, 83, 245, 267
Hoard, Governor W. D., 200
Hone, Philip, 149
Hopis, 279

Hopkins, Gordon, 223 et seq.
Howells, William Dean, 254
Hudson River, 11, 12, 42, 93, 108,

134, 135, 172
Hull, Jethro, 67

Illinois, 104, 225, 246, 248, 339, 340

Incas, 8, 33 et seq., 265, 288

Indiana, 339, 342

Iowa, 139, 157, 339

Iroquois, 8, 11, 30, 42, 92, 195, 265,

266, 277
Itzpapleotl, 31

Jackson, Andrew, 301
James I, 8, 48, 76

Jamestown, 52, 57, 68, 75 et seq., 98,
195, 288

Franklin, Benjamin, 106, 119, 126, Jefferson, Thomas, 102, 128, 129, 130,
216, 218, 248, 340 159> !87> 225, 294, 301

French, 101, 110 et seq., 127 et seq., jenkins, Merle T., 232
204> 3°8 Jennerstown, Pa., 174

Gallatin, Albert, 295 Johnnycake, 69, 87, 95, 320 et seq.

Genessee Valley, 92, 119, 137, 146,
248

Ghanan, 18, 21, 23

Girard, Stephen, 123

Gist, Christopher, 120

Gordoqui, 126

Greeley, Colorado, 143, 145

Greeley, Horace, 141, 143, 188

Kanawha, 106, 137
Kaskaskia, 106, 111
Kennebec River, 8, 60, 88
Kentucky, 103 et seq., 110, 120 et

seq., 135, 168, 245, 246, 287, 297,

299

Index

359

Kingsford, Thomas, 205
Kukulkan, 19, 23, 28, 30, 37

Lane, Ralph, 45, 46, 63

deLanda, Bishop Diego, 13, 24, 26

La Farge, Oliver, 239

Law, John, no

Lee, Mother Ann, 219

Legrange, Bouillion, 208

Le Moyne, 55

Lenni Lenape, 94

Leo, John, n

Lincoln, Abraham, 103 et seq., 122,

136, 225, 244, 254, 316, 343
Lincoln family, 103 et seq.
Linnaeus, 12 et seq., 217
Louisiana, 109 et seq., 129 et seq., 134
Louisville, Kentucky, 123, 297, 300
Ludington, Col. Henry, 175
Ludington, Sybil, 175
Ludwick, Christopher, 178 et seq.

Madoc, 31
Maine, 49, 88, 330
Mangelsdorf, P. G., 240 et seq.
Marietta, Ohio, 120, 131, 133, 148
Marshall, John, 109, 130, 138
Martineau, Harriet, 135, 249
Maryland, 82, 96, 101, 116, 318
Massachusetts, 60 et seq., 66 et seq.,

73, 82 et seq., 114, 124, 170, 290
Mather, Cotton, 83, 213, 214
Maya, n, 14, 15, 20, 36, 66, 165

et seq., 194, 257, 259, 279
Mayapan, 38

McCormick, Cyrus, 188, 190
McCullom, Dr. E. V., 197
Meeker, Nathan Cook, 142 et seq.
Mendel, Johann, 229 et seq., 240, 352
Merrimac River, 42
Metate stone, 27, 165 et seq.
Michigan, University of, 247
Millbach, Lebanon County, Pa., 149
Minneapolis, 139, 141
Minnesota, 191
Minuit, Peter, 94, 108
Mitchell, Dr. John, 107
Mississippi River, 4, 29, 42, 101, 106,

109, in, 126, 139, 156, 161
Mississippi Valley, 42, no, in, 122,

249

Missouri, 346

Missouri River, 29, 42, 104, 225

Mohawks, 8, 91, 266

Monongahela River, 4, 106

Monongahela rye, 293

Monrod, J. H., 200

Montezuma, The, 5, 38 et seq., 41

Moravians, 105, 148, 220

Morgan, Morgan, 106

Mother Earth, 13, 17, 18, 27, 146,

267

Mount William Sydney, 249
Mountville, N. Y., 187
Muskingum River, 121, 124, 185

Nahuas, 31, 36

Napoleon, 129, 207

Narragansetts, 88

Natchez, 265, 277

Navajos, 257

New Orleans, 108, no, 125 et seq.,

130, 136 et seq., 149
Newport, Captain, 49, 52, 57 et seq.
New York, 116, 125, 130, 137, 147
Norwegians, 138, 243

Oglesby, Governor (Illinois), 242
Ohio, 29, 121, 124, 190, 330
Ohio Company, 106, 121, 135, 185
Ohio River, 29, 101, 137
Ohio Valley, 120
Okefenokee Swamp, 29, 35
Olmstead, Frederick, 249
Orangeburg, S. C., 170
Ozarks, 195, 304

Palatines, 154, 174

Palenque, 12, 35

Pennsylvania, 105, 123, 154, 199, 287,

296

Pepperidge Farm, 183
Percy, George, 52, 80
Peru, 10, 19, 27, 33, 279, 288
Philadelphia, 105, 115, 117, 123, 125,

130, 137, 179, 182
Pittsburgh, 123, 137, 293
Pizarro, 10, 12, 148
Plumed Serpent, 18, 23, 252
Plymouth, Mass., 64, 68 et seq., 77,

79, 118, 146, 166, 187, 195

360 Index

Pocahontas, 57 et seq., 78

Ponce de Leon, 148

Pones, 69, 95, 78, 108, 315 et seq.

Popenoe, Dr. Wilson, 239

Popol Vuh, 256 et seq.

Potomac River, 42, 95

Powhatan, 52, 55 et seq., 78, 278

Pratz, de, 110

Printz, Governor Johann, 94

Putnam, Israel, 115, 119

Putnam, Rufus, 119, 143, 185, 340

>uetzalcoatl, 37
juiches, 237, 256
Herbert, 227

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 12, 43, 44, 46, 59

Reid, Robert, 223 et seq.

Riley, James Whitcomb, 253

Roanoke, 46, 170

Robertson, James, 108

Rolfe, John, 76

Roosevelt, Nicholas, 136

Roosevelt, Theodore, 131

Rose Mill, 174, 183

Rusk, Uncle Jerry, 227

Salem, 89, 114, 289
Sandburg, Carl, 252 et seq., 283, 333
Scioto Valley, Ohio, in, 124
Scotch Irish (in U. S. A.), 105, 107,

220, 292, 297, 300
Seminoles, 31

Seven Cities of Cibola, 110
Senecas, 42, 266
Sevier, John, 108
Shakers, 219, 221
Shakespeare, 8, 49, 77
Shawnees, 111
Shays, Daniel, 294, 338
Shenandoah Valley, 101 et seq., 128,

Shull, G. H., 231 et seq.

Sioux, 8, 126 et seq., 144, 226, 268

Smith, John, 25, 50 et seq., 60 et seq.,

75, 90, 95, 101, 148, 198, 267, 278
Smith, Madam Martha, 86
Somerset County, Pa., 174 et seq.
Spain, 9, 43, 100, 126 et seq., 129,

204

Spelman, Henry, 76, 78, 281
Spottswood, Sir Alexander, 100 et seq.

Squanto, 25, 62 et seq., 67 et seq.,

88, 118, 166
Stover, Jacob, 103
Strachey, 67, 76
Studlcy, Thomas, 53
Sullivan, General John, 118
Summy, Benjamin Ray, 151 et seq.,

161

Sumner, Charles, 109
Susquehanna River, 119, 125
Susquehannocks, 94
Suwanee River, 29, 35
Swedes (in U. S. A.), 12, 93, 94 et

seq., 108, 138, 172, 243

Tehuantepec, 15

Temple, Captain Harvey, 138

Terry, Eli, 187

Thoroughgood, Adam, 80

Tison, Thomas, 44

Tlazoteotl, 264 et seq.

Toltecs, 32

Transylvania Seminary, 246

Turks, 11, 51

Twain, Mark, 252, 321

Uaxatun, 20

Ulster, 105, 107, 138, 190, 285 et seq.,
291

Valley Forge, 117, 182

Valley, the Great, 101 et seq., 112,

121, 137, 146
Van Meter, John, 102
Van Wyck's mill, 183, 184
Virginia, 45 et seq., 66, 68, 75 et seq.,

83 et seq., 96, 100 et seq., 110, 120

Wabash River, 111, 116
Wallace, Henry A., 161, 233
Washington, George, 115, 117, 118,

120, 121, 179, 182, 293, 294, 297
Watauga River, 108
Whitaker, Rev. Alexander, 83
White, John, 45, 47 et seq., 55
White, Rev. Andrew, 96
Wilderness Trace, 103, 107, 137, 146
Wilkinson, Jemima, 220
William and Mary College, 245, 246
Williamsburg, Virginia, 100, 102, 115,

246

Williams, Roger, 85, 264, 341
Wingfield, Captain Edward, 48,
Winthrop, Governor John, 89,

198

Wisconsin, 140, 200
Wood, Grant, 255
Wood, Jethro, 188, 343
Woods, William Whitfield, 162

Xmucane, 259 et seq.

56

172

Index 361

Xquiq, 237, 260 et seq.

Yale College, 215, 245, 247
Yeardley, Sir George, 171
York River, 57, 78
Yorke, Sgt. Alvin, 107
Youghiogheny River, 106, 185
Yucatan, 12, 14, 20, 23 et seq., 28, 57

Zuni, 37, 42, 265 et seq., 279

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