st supply to replenish the scanty larder was fish, but
the English made surprisingly bungling work over fishing, and soon the
most unfailing and valuable supply was the native Indian corn, or
"Guinny wheat," or "Turkie wheat," as it was called by the colonists.

Famine and pestilence had left eastern Massachusetts comparatively bare
of inhabitants at the time of the settlement of Plymouth; and the vacant
cornfields of the dead Indian cultivators were taken and planted by the
weak and emaciated Plymouth men, who never could have cleared new
fields. From the teeming sea, in the April run of fish, was found the
needed fertilizer. Says Governor Bradford:--

"In April of the first year they began to plant their corne, in
which service Squanto stood them in great stead, showing them both
ye manner how to set it, and after, how to dress and tend it."

From this planting sprang not only the most useful food, but the first
and most pregnant industry of the colonists.

The first fields and crops were communal, and the result was disastrous.
The third year, at the sight of the paralyzed settlement, Governor
Bradford wisely decided, as did Governor Dale of Virginia, that "they
should set corne every man for his owne particuler, furnishing a portion
for public officers, fishermen, etc., who could not work, and in that
regard trust to themselves." Thus personal energy succeeded to communal
inertia; Bradford wrote that women and children cheerfully worked in the
fields to raise corn which should be their very own.

A field of corn on the coast of Massachusetts or Narragansett or by the
rivers of Virginia, growing long before any white man had ever been seen
on these shores, was precisely like the same field planted three hundred
years later by our American farmers. There was the same planting in
hills, the same number of stalks in the hill, with pumpkin-vines running
among the hills, and beans climbing the stalks. The hills of the Indians
were a trifle nearer together than those of our own day are usually set,
for the native soil was more fertile.

The Indians taught the colonists much more than the planting and raising
of corn; they showed also how to grind the corn and cook it in many
palatable ways. The various foods which we use to-day made from Indian
corn are all cooked just as the Indians cooked them at the time of the
settlement of the country; and they are still called with Indian names,
such as hominy, po