NOTES ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE PECAN IN 



AMERICA. 



By Rodney H. Tele, 

 Physiologist, U. S. Department of Agriculture. 



While engaged in studying certain features of the early days of 

 American botanical activity I have found many references to the 

 history of what is perhaps America's most important contribution 

 to the world's stock of edible nuts, the pecan ; and since the sources 

 in some cases are unpublished manuscripts and in others old or rare 

 works not easy of access, I have here brought together the accumula- 

 tion of somewhat scattered notes. They are bound together by the 

 fact that they shed light on the early history of this important native 

 tree, and in some cases on the interesting part played by one of our 

 great statesmen in gaining and disseminating information concerning 

 it. No claim to completeness is made for this somewhat desultory 

 study. 



DISCOVERY BY THE SPANIARDS. 1 



There seems to be no reason to doubt that the natives living along 

 the lower courses of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers and their 

 tributaries, as well as those occupying eastern and central Texas, 

 draining into the Gulf of Mexico, knew and esteemed the pecan as 

 an acceptable article of food long before the white man visited the 

 continent. The discovery by the whites, therefore, merely made the 

 existence and characteristics of the plant matters of record for our 

 race and therefore of so-called history. Among the accounts writ- 

 ten by explorers traversing the regions to which the pecan is indige- 

 nous, the earliest seen which mentions this tree was the narrative 

 of Cabega de Vaca. That unlucky Spaniard, between 1528 and 1543, 

 with the Indians who had enslaved him, traversed the coastal strip 

 of Texas from Galveston Island to the Guadalupe River and beyond. 

 In the story of his wanderings which extended far to the west and 

 south occur the following sentences: 



Two days after Lope de Oviedo left, the Indians * * * came to the 

 place of which we had been told, to eat walnuts. These are ground with a 

 kind of small grain, and this is the subsistence of the people two months in 



1 For valuable suggestions concerning early Spanish explorers I am indebted to Prof. 

 Herbert E. Bolton, of the University of California, Berkeley, Cal., and to Dr. James A. 

 Robertson, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, District of Columbia. 



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