Our friend and colleague David Williams remembered a reference to the maize of the Pawnee on reading a recent post and eventually tracked it down.
I found this tidbit about Pawnee corn in the book Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose (1996). The author reports on page 418 that, after the intrepid explorers returned from their trip:
Out in St. Louis, the leading citizens were almost exclusively interested in what Lewis had found with regard to Indians and furs. Back east, his botanical and zoological discoveries excited the members of the American Philosophical Society. They wanted seeds, specimens, descriptions. Jefferson promised Benjamin Smith Barton that Lewis would hurry onto Philadelphia after visiting Washington, bringing with him “much in the lines of botany, & Nat. history.” Jefferson kept for himself, to plant at Monticello, seeds of “Missouri hominy corn,” of Pawnee corn, nine “nuts from Missouri,” and two boxes of unidentified seeds. Over the following years, Jefferson faithfully reported on the Indian corn, which he pronounced excellent.
Although the passages in quotation marks were not specifically attributed to their source by Ambrose, footnoted citations for quoted passages immediately preceding and following this paragraph refer to information reprinted in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd edition, by Donald Jackson (ed.) (1978).
It’d be interesting to delve into those “Letters” to learn more about Jefferson’s “faithful reporting on the Indian corn” that he grew from those seeds, perhaps providing some more specific information about the nature and attributes of that Pawnee corn.
It certainly would. I did some googling and came across this teaser in an article on Jefferson and the plants brought back by Lewis and Clark by Peter Hatch, Director of the Monticello Gardens and Grounds:
“Pani” or Pawnee corn, named for the southern neighbors of the Mandan and Arikara, was planted eight times among the fruit trees in the South Orchard and was Jefferson’s favorite of the Indian corn varieties collected on the journey. A dwarf corn, only 24-inches high, bred for the severity of the short northern Plains growing season, Pani ripened as quickly as six weeks from planting. Jefferson compared it favorably to the short season Quarantine (or “40 day”) corn he received from André Thoüin of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The controversial German botanist, Frederick Pursh, who first published the botanical results of the expedition in his Flora Americae Septentrionalis of 1814, wrote that, “it produced as excellent ears as any sort I know.” A similarly dwarf variety, perhaps identical, Mandan corn, was sold by McMahon in 1815.
Do the Pawnee still have this short, precocious variety? Stay tuned…
Regular readers will be familiar with our skepticism here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog about the genetic erosion meta-narrative. Not with the fact that genetic erosion has in fact occurred, and is continuing to occur, of course. Just with the notion that it has occurred everywhere, for every crop, to the overall tune of “75% over the past century.” There’s now news of a further nail in the coffin of that hoary myth.