BACKWASH OF THE FRONTIER—HALLOWELL 457 
ular was important from the start, taking precedence over the grain 
which the settlers had brought from Europe. It became a primary 
factor in the acculturation of the Englishmen to an American way 
of life. We need think only of corn on the cob, cornbread, Indian 
pudding, hominy, mush, grits, succotash, and corn sirup; of break- 
fast cereals, cornstarch, and popcorn; or of corncob pipes and bour- 
bon, to understand the extent of this Indian contribution to our 
civilization today. 
Tobacco is an equally significant “gift” of the American Indians, 
symbolized by the once-familiar figure of the “wooden Indian” in- 
extricably linked with the tobacco shop in the 19th century. The 
history and use of it in our culture present a number of features in 
cultural borrowing at large. Readaptation to the values of the bor- 
rowing people is well illustrated. The consumption of tobacco was 
completely divorced from the ceremonial context in which it appeared 
among the Indians and became purely secular. 
Peruvian bark, now known as quinine, proved highly sensational 
since it was a specific for malaria. It reached Spain before the 
middle of the 17th century and was soon introduced into the English 
colonies. In Virginia, Governor Berkeley said in 1671 that whereas 
formerly one person in five had died of fever in his first year, now al- 
most no one succumbed. When one considers that in this same century 
Governor Winthrop’s famous remedy for ulcers consisted of “one 
ounce of crabbe’s eyes and four ounces of strong wine vinegar,” the 
general state of colonial medicine can be well appreciated, and the 
reason why Peruvian bark, an Indian herbal, achieved such high fame 
can be easily understood. Indian medicine was likewise given a boost 
when, in 1738, Dr. John Tennent was awarded 100 pounds by the 
Virginia House of Burgesses for curing pleurisy with Seneca rattle- 
snake root. As William Fenton well says, when Western medicine 
met Indian herbalism, the former “was still carrying a heavy burden 
of medieval practices so that the first few physicians in the colonies 
were but several centuries advanced from the Indian shaman who 
selected his herbs thinking of the effect that their appearance might 
contribute to the disease, and guaranteed their efficiency with incan- 
tations and feats of magic. Moreover, the average settler had brought 
from the Old World a knowledge of herbs that in kind was not 
unlike that of the Indian, but as newcomers they were unfamiliar 
with New World plants, and although the level of their own popular 
medicine did not set them above adopting Indian remedies, the Indian 
herbalist whose knowledge was power was not always a ready 
teacher.” ?° In “The Pioneers,” Cooper pictures for us how “Doctor” 
Elnathan Todd managed to steal one of John Mohegan’s remedies. 
270 W. N. Fenton, Contacts between Iroquois herbalism and colonial medicine, Ann. Rep. 
Smithsonian Inst. for 1941, pp. 505-506. 
