STATE HOKTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 193 



sachusetts, and as that was my old home I took them to showjthem 

 what was most interesting in the vicinity of Boston, in connection 

 with every specialty, and among other places I took them to the gar- 

 den of old Samuel G. Perkins, a brother of Col. Perkins, a man of 

 large fortune, and who has been many years retired from business, 

 devoting himself most zealously to horticulture. We found him'past 

 eighty years old and nearly blind, seated on a camp stool in his gar- 

 den pruning his pear trees, and guiding himself along where to cut 

 by feeling. He could tell a fruit bud from a leaf bud by feeling; and 

 on some of my friends blaming him and expressing their gratification 

 at seeing such self-interest in the cause at such an age, he made a re- 

 mark that has clung to me ever since, and of which I am reminded 

 by what you have just said: 



" Gentlemen, the love of gardening has this advantage over any 

 other taste, that it forces a man to labor as long as he lives; and 

 labor, gentlemen, is the greatest blessing God ever gave to man." 



Col. Stevens was here requested to read a paper prepared by him 

 upon Indian foods: 



WILD FOOD. 



By Col. J. H. Stevens, Minneapolis. 



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 



I am requested to hand down to this generation the varieties of the 

 primitive or wild food incident to this soil and climate from which the 

 Indians used in part to subsist on. 



The lamented Philander Prescott, who was so brutally killed by the 

 Indians on the nineteenth day of August, 1862, informed me in 1849 

 that when he came to the Northwest in 1819 the natives depended 

 much on this wild food. In most instances it was easily gathered, 

 and I found that while among the Indians in an early day, that even a 

 white man would soon become fond of the wild sweet potato and one 

 or two other varieties of the wild tubers the squaws used to serve up 

 to us. 



According to Mr. Prescott the most prominent varieties of wild pro- 

 duct used by the Indians were the mendo or wild sweet potato, yesp- 

 senah or wild prairie turnip, panhe or artichoke, omenechak or wild 

 beans, psen-chin-chah or swamp potato, pesich-ah, towahapa or wild 

 rice. 



The mendo, or wild sweet potato, is found throughout the valleys of 

 the Mississippi, Minnesota, and other streams in the central part of 

 13 



