278 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



eighty volumes, made up cliiefly of letters and reports 

 by French missionaries among the Indians of Canada, 

 the Great Lakes region, and the upper Mississippi valley. 

 The period embraced about 150 years, dating from 1630. 

 Starvation was one of the common matters discussed by 

 those missionaries who lived with the Indians and shared 

 their sufferings; yet hardly ever was bark referred to as 

 an article of diet, though the 

 famine might be appalling, and 

 though almost every possible 

 food resource was tried by the 

 starving people in seasons of 

 sore distress. 



One of the few allusions to 

 bark eating in all the volumi- 

 nous correspondence of the 

 Jesuits in America is here 

 quoted, in translation from the 

 French. It occurs in a letter 

 written by Louys Andre in 

 1670, from the vicinity of Lake 

 Nippissing, Ontario. In vol- 

 ume 55, page 135, he writes: 



"All of these poor people 

 have for some time been suffer- 

 ing from a famine, and I found 

 them reduced to a fir tree diet. 

 I never would have believed 

 that the inner bark of that tree 

 could serve as food, but the 

 savages told me that they liked 

 it. I know not whether it 

 would always be so, but I do 

 know very well that, when 

 hunger forced me to seek some 

 sort of food to keep me from 

 dying, I could not swallow fir 

 bark. I did, indeed, eat some 

 bark of another tree, and 

 hunger made me find therein 

 the taste of bread and the sub- 

 stantial quality of fish." 



The precise tree species here 

 spoken of is not certain, the 

 French word "sapin" has been 

 translated "fir tree." It was 



probably the balsam fir {Abies balsamea), but possibly 

 the hemlock {Tsuga canadensis) was meant. 



The soft inner bark and the adjacent layer of jelly- 

 like new wood of many trees are not offensive to the 

 taste and possess some food value, but this material is 

 procurable only in late spring and early summer, for it is 

 at that season that active growth is taking place. Later 

 in the season this new material hardens into wood and 

 is then difficult to chew and is apt to be offensive to the 

 taste. At the time of year when this growing inner bark 

 is at its best, there are other foods in the forest, and 

 hunger can be appeased by them. If this growing layer 

 of wood and bark were available in winter, when nearly 

 all other eatable things are lacking, it would no doubt 



The 



have been eaten much oftener by the Indians and other 

 hunters. It is often eaten at the present time, not from 

 necessity but from choice. That is true particularly of 

 the bark of the sweet birch in eastern forests and of the 

 yellow pine in the forests of the western country. 



The writer of this once happened upon a camp of Mono 

 Indians on the headwaters of Finegold River among the 



Sierra Nevadas, and found 

 them feasting in great hilarity 

 upon the inner bark of the 

 western yellow pine {Pitws 

 l^ondcrosa) which they had 

 peeled from the trunks of the 

 neighboring trees. That was 

 in the spring when the young 

 bark was forming. I sampled 

 the uncooked bark and the taste 

 was not bad; but no trial was 

 made of the boiled product, 

 because the culinary practice of 

 the Indians was not appetizing. 

 Those people were not driven 

 to bark-eating by famine, but 

 were doing it because they liked 

 the taste. A deer they had 

 killed that morning was hang- 

 ing unskinned on the limb of a 

 tree in camp. It may be men- 

 tioned incidentally that one of 

 the Indians who seemed to find 

 special pleasure in the pine bark 

 soup took pains to tell me that 

 he could "sing" in Latin, and 

 to prove it he recited an extract 

 from Virgil's Aeneid in the 

 original tongue. He said he 

 could "sing the whole busi- 

 ness." Possibly he might have 

 done so, for he seemed to get 

 along nicely with the dozen or 

 so lines, which he chanted for 

 the edification of the visitor. 

 I was told that he had been 

 educated for a Catholic priest, 

 but he had failed to make good, 

 chiefly because of an appetite 

 for liquids stronger than pine bark soup. 



The use of yellow pine bark by Indians seems to have 

 been of long standing, and was not and is not confined 

 to any locality or region. The habit has had a wide geo- 

 grapical range. It was mentioned in the journals of 

 Lewis and Clark during their expedition across the conti- 

 tent in 1804-1806. In speaking of a locality near the head 

 of the Missouri River in what is now western Montana 

 the journals say : 



"We saw where the natives had peeled the bark of 



the pine trees about the same season (spring). This the 



Indian woman with us informed us that they do to obtain 



the sap and the soft part of the wood and bark for food." 



The custom of eating this pine's bark was referred to 



SLIPPERY ELM IS WELL LIKI'.D 



thick, soft inner bark will allay hunger, but it is be- 

 lieved to have very low food value for human beings, 

 though the lives of horses may be sustained by it. 

 Children chew the bark for the same reason that induces 

 them to chew gum. 



