96 USES OF PLANTS BY INDIANS [ETH. ANN. 33 
to their own use. The Pawnee formerly inhabited the larger part 
of Nebraska with villages on the Loup, the Platte, and the Republi- 
can Rivers. In 1875 they were removed to Oklahoma, where they 
now reside. Mr. James R. Murie, of that tribe, in a letter of Febru- 
ary 15, 1913, referring to F’alcata, a specimen of which had been sent 
him, said: 
We call them atikuwraru ... The Pawnees ate them. In winter time the 
women robbed rats’ [sic] nests and got big piles of them. Nowadays when 
the old women see lima beans they say they look like atikwraru in Nebraska. 
Women of the Dakota Nation say that they not only obtained the 
large ground beans of this species, garnered by the voles, or “ wood 
mice,” but that they also gathered the small beans produced in large 
quantity on the upper branches of the same vine from petaliferous 
blossoms. These smaller beans are about the size of lentils. The 
large beans, produced from cleistogamous blossoms on_ leafless 
branches spreading prostrate on the ground under the cover of the 
upper branches, are about the size of lima beans, and grow at a depth 
of an inch or two under the ground in the manner of peanuts. 
A most interesting item in connection with this food plant is the 
statement of the women of the Dakota Nation that they did not take 
the ground beans from the stores of the little animals which gathered 
them without giving some food commodity in return. They said it 
was their custom to carry a bag of corn with them when they went 
to look for the stores of beans gathered by the animals, and when 
they took out any beans they put in place of them an equal quantity 
of corn. They say that sometimes instead of corn they put some 
other form of food acceptable to the animals in place of the beans 
which they took away. They said it would be wicked to steal from 
the animals, but they thought that a fair exchange was not robbery. 
Father De Smet, the indefatigable Christian missionary to the 
tribes of the upper Missouri, makes the following observation: 
The earth pea and bean are also delicious and nourishing roots [sic], found 
commonly in low and alluvial lands. The above-named roots form a con- 
siderable portion of the sustenance of these Indians during winter. They 
seek them in the places where the mice and other little animals, in particular 
the ground-squirrel, have piled them in heaps. * 
Puasrouus vunearis L. Garden Bean. 
O'mnicha (Dakota). 
Hinbthinge (Omaha-Ponca). 
FHoni*k (Winnebago). 
Atit (Pawnee). 
The garden bean in all its many types and varieties is one of the 
gifts of the Western Hemisphere to the world. The earliest ex- 
1De Smet, Life and Travels, vol. 11, p. 655. 
