Chapter IV: Corn (3)

Again I put water in the pot and boiled the corn in it. As the corn was already soft, this boiling did not take long. I now added fats, and beans, and sometimes dried squash, all at the same time; and the pot I replaced on the fire. When the beans and squash were cooked, the mess was ready to eat.

Corn so prepared we call mạdạpo´zi pạ´kici, or boiled-whole-corn rubbed. It is so called because the hulls of the kernels were rubbed off between the palms at the time the corn was washed in water after the lye was poured off.

_General Characteristics of the Varieties_

We Hidatsas thought that our five principal varieties of corn, hard and soft white, hard and soft yellow, and gummy, had characteristics that marked them quite distinctly one from the other.

For one thing, they had each a distinct taste. If at night I were given to eat of hard white corn, or hard yellow or soft yellow, I could at once tell each from any of the others. If I were given mush at night made from these three varieties, each by itself, I could distinguish each variety, not by its smell, but in my mouth by taste.

Meal made by pounding ripe hard white corn became thick and mushy when boiled in a pot.

Tsï´di tapa´, or soft yellow corn, was quite soft to pound when we made meal of it; and the boiled meal, or mush, seemed to contain a good deal of water in it—that is, it seemed thin and gruel-like when we came to eat it.

To pound tsï´di tso´ki, or hard yellow corn, into meal took a long time; but when it had been pounded and the meal boiled into food, it was very good to eat and had an appetizing smell.

Of the nine varieties I have named, the atạ´ki, or soft white, was the earliest maturing. If seeds of all nine varieties were planted at the same time, the soft white would always be the first to ripen in the fall; and the tsï´di tso´ki, or hard yellow, would be the last to ripen.

Although the blue, light red, dark red, pink top, and soft white were all soft or flour corns, yet the soft white was the earliest to ripen. I reckon the soft white, also, to be the softest of all our varieties of corn.

I also rate the hard yellow and hard white as equal in value. Both are equally hard, and can not be pounded up into the fine flour or meal which we get from the soft varieties.

The hard yellow and soft yellow we thought were the best varieties from which to prepare half-boiled dried corn for winter storing. The dark and light reds were also used, and if not quite so good, were but little inferior. Indeed, for half-boiled dried corn, all varieties were used, even the ma´ikadicakĕ, or gummy; but this last we did not think a good variety for this way of putting up corn. Our gummy corn had but one well recognized use; it was good for parching to make corn balls.

_Fodder Yield_

I do not think there was any perceptible difference in the fodder yield of the various races of corn which we Hidatsas cultivated; but the fodder yield was always much heavier in rainy years. In a dry season, the stalks of the corn would be small and weak; and the leaves would be smaller than in seasons of good rainfall.

_Developing New Varieties_

We Hidatsas knew that slightly differing varieties could be produced by planting seeds that varied somewhat from the main stock. A woman named Good Squash used to raise a variety of corn that tasted just like soft white. This corn had large swelling kernels with deep yellow, almost reddish, stripes running down the sides of the grain. We called it Adaka´-dahu-ita ko´xati, or Arikaras’ corn, though it was not Arikara corn at all. Good Squash’s daughter, Hunts Water, lives on this reservation; she may have some of the seed of this variety.

SPORT EARS

_Names and Description_

Quite often ears of corn appear that are marked by some unusual form; and for the more marked of these forms, we had special names. Following are some of them:

_Na’´ta-tawo´xi._ From na’´ta, grain; and tawo´xi, a name applied to youth, or the young, and conveying the idea of small. This is an ear of corn having seventeen or eighteen rows of very small kernels. Our largest ears of corn had usually but fourteen rows of kernels of normal size.

In the old legends of my tribe appear many women bearing this name Na’´ta-tawo´xi.

_Wi´da-Aka´ta._ From wi´da, goose; and aka´ta, roof of the mouth. This is an ear having two rows of corn on either side, with vacant spaces on the cob between the double rows; often, toward the larger end of the ear, the two rows will expand into three. Goodbird has made a drawing of such an ear (figure 19). A wi´da-aka´ta ear, we thought, looks like the roof of the mouth of a goose.

_I´ta-Ca´ca._ Forked face, or cloven face; from i´ta, face. A kind of double ear. Goodbird has made a drawing of one (figure 20).

_Okĕi´jpita._ From o´kĕ, or o´ki, head-ornament, plume; i´jpu, top; and i´ta, fruit. This is a small ear that sometimes appears at the top, on the tassel of the plant.

Okĕi´jpita ears, if large enough, we gathered and put in with the rest of the harvest; but smaller ears of this kind, hardly worth threshing, we gathered and fed to our horses. Sometimes, if the harvesters were in haste, these ears were left in the field on the stalk; a pony was then led into the field to crop the ears.

_I´tica´kupadi._ I´tica´kupadi, or muffled head; so called because the kernels come down and cover the face or bearded end of the cob quite to the point. We thought such an ear looked like a man with his head muffled up in his robe.

Muffled-head ears were more numerous in good crop years than in poor years; and we thought such ears, if otherwise well favored, made good seed corn.