THE PROBLEM OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 57 



children. Captain John Smith, who visited Virginia in 1609, says: 

 "The greatest labor they take is in planting their corn, for the country 

 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 process of belting or girdling, 

 which killed the larger trees by cutting through the sap-wood, caused 

 the fall of spray and lesser branches, and thereby admitted the sun 

 and air to the crop cultivated 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 preparations 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 horseshoe crab from the seashore; 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 use 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 over smouldering fires, then- 

 husked, shelled, packed in large birchbark boxes, and buried in the 

 ground, below the action of the frost. "With their corn," says 

 Smith, "they plant also peas they call assentamus, which are the same 

 they call in Italy fagiolia. Their beans they much esteem for dain- 

 ties." "In May, also, among their corn they plant pumpeons, and 

 a fruit like unto a musk-melon, but less and worse." These addi- 

 tional crops not only keep the groun4 around the roots of the growing 



