AGRICULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES. 445 



Captain John Smith, who visited Virginia in 1609, says: "The 

 greatest labor they take is in planting their corn, for the coun- 

 try is naturally overgrown with wood. To prepare the ground 

 they bruise the bark of trees near the roots, then do they scorch 

 the roots with fire that they grow no more." This custom of 

 theirs, it probably was, that suggested to our ancestors the pro- 

 cess of belting or girdling, which killed the larger trees by cut- 

 ting through the sap-wood, caused the fall of spray and lesser 

 branches, and thereby admitted the sun and air to the crop culti- 

 vated in their intervals a practice which, as compared with 

 the method of clearing off the entire growth, enables the settler 

 of new lands to increase the area of virgin soil under culture in 

 more than geometrical ratio ; which has kept pace with our ever 

 advancing frontier, and which, more than any other, has enabled 

 the white race " to enter in and possess the good land that lay 

 before them." 



The land being cleared and a field once thus prepared was 

 used for many successive years the squaws would make prep- 

 arations for planting, early each spring. First burning the dead 

 wood on the ground, and often bringing dry branches to burn, 

 that they might obtain their fertilizing ashes, they would then 

 cultivate, or rather root up the surface, with the flat shoulder- 

 blades of the moose, or with crooked pieces of wood. They 

 would then mark the future hills by making small holes (about 

 four feet apart), with rude wooden hoes or clam-shells ; put into 

 each one an alewife from some adjoining stream, or a horse-shoe 

 crab from the sea-shore ; and on this stimulant drop and cover 

 a half-dozen grains of corn. The land thus planted was guarded 

 against the depredations of the birds, and as the corn grew the 

 earth was laboriously scraped up around the stalks with clam- 

 shells, until the hills were two feet high. To us.e the words of 

 Smith, "They hill it like a hop-field." While the stalk and 

 leaves were yet green, the ears were plucked. The next year's 

 seed was selected from those stalks which produced the most 

 ears, and was triced up in their wigwams. The remainder of 

 the crop was carried in back-baskets to stagings, where it was 

 dried in the husk, on stagings, over smouldering fires ; then 

 husked, shelled, packed in large birch-bark boxes, and buried in 

 the ground, below the action of the frost. " O-mo-nee " was 



