Note 87 — THE WAMPANOAGS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY An Ethnohistorical Study

Ibid. Early observers were impressed with the agricultural skill of the Indians and characterized them as being mainly dependent for their livelihood upon the corn they grew. Speaking from a present-day vantage point, with considerably more information at hand about the practices of primitive horticulturalists, one must be more cautious about drawing such a conclusion. In regard to the amount of corn produced, Williams says: “The woman of the family will commonly raise two or three heaps of twelve, fifteene, or twentie bushells a heap ... and if she have the helpe of her children or friends, much more.” (p. 124). Presumably the size of the fields on which this was grown averaged out to about an acre per family. The Pilgrims were able to get corn from the Indians in order to survive their initial hardships. Later they tell of obtaining rather large amounts of corn from the Indians along the coast to take north to trade (Willoughby, pp. 297-98). However, before assuming that agriculture was the major food source for the Wampanoags, it should be remembered that these Indians and their neighbors were best known to the early chroniclers in their coastal farming settlements. When they were living in the forest during hunting season and in the winter villages they were probably seldom seen by the Europeans. Therefore, the foreigner’s view of Indian dietary habits may not contain the entire story. The habitual use of acorns and ground nuts as starvation foods indicates that their control of agricultural food supplies was not as yet always dependable. Probably horticulture had come to largely supplant a pattern of summer gathering of vegetable foods and to be ordinarily more productive than the former practice. But without the addition of animal foods, the crops alone probably would not normally have provided enough food to sustain the Indians.