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Coronado and members of his famous expedition found it grown 
in abundance by irrigation in New Mexico and Arizona. Many 
early explorers, French, Spanish, English, and Dutch, from Can- 
ada to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic coast to the 
Colorado River of the West, everywhere noted the cultivation of 
corn, and some of them marveled at the prodigious quantities. It 
has been said that the amount of corn of the Iroquois destroyed by 
Denonville in 1687 aggregated a million bushels and that it re- 
quired seven days for the army to cut up the harvest of only four 
villages. Other early writings on the Indians are replete with 
descriptions of vast cornfields everywhere. 
The Corn Cult 
The tribes of the prairies, which subsisted largely by hunting, 
necessarily led an existence not conducive to sedentary life; they 
remained nomads, following the bison throughout a range of hun- 
dreds of miles and using the product of its carcass for every 
imaginable need. Yet even some of these tribes raised corn to 
some extent, following the chase after the crop was garnered and 
stored for winter use. All Indians hunted game to a greater or 
lesser extent; but corn became the great staple of the village- 
dwellers. Indeed so dependent on it were they that they devel- 
oped what may be called a corn cult, with various sacred personages 
embodying the corn principle, such as Mother Corn and Mother 
Earth; and many rites and ceremonies were performed and sacri- 
fices made for the increase of the life-preserving grain. One of 
the most prominent deities of the Aztecs was Centeotl, who seemed 
to embody both the male and the female principle as symbolized 
by corn. In Peru the importance of corn was so fully appreciated 
that it was regarded with reverence and used as a sacred plant in 
many religious rites and ceremonies. 
Nowhere in the United States did corn enter more deeply into 
the culture of the Indians than in the arid land of the Pueblo 
tribes of the Southwest, where existence has ever been a struggle. 
To these people corn was the most important thing in the world; 
hence the desire for rain, by which cultivation was and is alone 
possible whether by irrigation or socalled dry-farming, is the very 
foundation of many of their prayers and ceremonies, and of an 
