LXXXVII 
SUNFLOWER TRAVELS 
I SN’T IT ODD that one may find, in the fields, wild 
sunflowers with little faces barely an inch across and 
then in city back yards come upon their counterparts that 
are nearly a foot from rim to rim! 
The origin of these huge sunflowers was for a long time 
a mystery. For hundreds of years they have been widely 
grown in Europe, where their seeds are highly prized for 
poultry and livestock. From Europe they came to 
America and have been grown through most of the coun¬ 
try as ornamentals. 
What puzzled the botanists was the fact that the sun¬ 
flower is known to be an American plant that did not 
exist in Europe before the settlement of this country. 
Despite this, it seemed that the cultivated sunflower 
came from the old country. 
Then, finally, some earnest student, searching early 
colonial records, got a clue from the accounts of Cham¬ 
plain and Segur, early explorers in the Great Lakes coun¬ 
try. It was three hundred years ago that these men vis¬ 
ited Indian tribes in the region, now a part of Canada, 
to the east of Lake Huron. There they found the natives 
cultivating these huge sunflowers, using their stems for 
fiber, their blooms in making a yellow dye, and their 
seeds as food and in the manufacture of hair oil. Since 
the sunflower was not a native of that region, it was 
thought that these Indians must have brought it from 
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