Pushing the Limits

 

Geographical facts tend (I find) to lodge quite firmly in one's mind after one teaches them to students. I've taught Native American history for nearly 25 years now, and in my lectures have usually stated that the northern growing limit of maize is the latitude of southern Ontario. This supposed geographic fact, I would go on to say, gave the Wendat nation, who originated in southwestern Ontario, a considerable commercial advantage: they could produce a large surplus of corn, then trade it to northern neighbors who could not grow the crop. I probably read this in grad school, in a book or article by an early American historian, and kept it in memory for the next two decades.

Ojibwa village, Sault Ste. Marie, 1846 - via Wikimedia Commons

 

It's now pretty clear that I was wrong about that. Monographs by Cary Miller (Ogimaag, 2010) and Brenda Child (Holding Our World Together, 2012) observed that the Minnesota Ojibwas could grow maize in raised-bed fields, at a latitude above that of the Wendat homeland. I didn't understand the mechanics of this form of cultivation, and assumed it was probably conducted on a small scale. Clearly I was wrong about this. A new LIDAR study of the Sixty Islands site near Michigan's Upper Peninsula, conducted by Madeleine McLeester, has revealed that the Menominees and their predecessors were raising corn on a large scale from approximately 1000 to 1600 CE. The techniques they used to farm in this marginal environment included field drainage, intensive use of compost, and the aforementioned raised beds, which kept a temperature a few degrees higher than that of the underlying topsoil. These sophisticated horticultural practices allowed the region's farmers to raise corn on a very large scale - approximately 300 hectares, in the case of Sixty Islands.

 

In future courses I plan to share these findings (as well as the earlier work of Child and Miller) with students. I'll add that when they want to raise a valuable crop, human beings often find a way to push the apparent natural limits on its cultivation. This was true of Menominee and Ojibwa women during the Little Ice Age; it was also the case with Euro-American farmers in Vincennes in the late 1700s. I've mentioned to students, and to any other hapless person I could trap in a conversational cul-de-sac, that the northern limit of cotton cultivation in the United States is just below the latitude of Cairo, Illinois; I've seen cotton fields in the Missouri "Bootheel" and Kentucky's Jackson Purchase district, but not any further north. During the first American cotton boom, however, white settlers in southern Indiana were happy to experiment with the crop, even though it requires 180 frost-free days to grow and one cannot be assured of them north of the Ohio River. Constantin Volney observed that white farmers in Vincennes raised cotton and tobacco, and suggested that the local climate was warm enough for both crops - the Wabash River moderated local temperatures in early spring and late fall (Harlow Lindley, ed., Indiana As Seen by Early Travelers [Indianapolis, 1916], 18-19). I suspect, though, that the Vincennes habitants could not reliably raise a large crop of the desirable fiber, and it eventually became cheaper to specialize in wheat or tobacco and buy cotton textiles elsewhere.

And When There Was No Crawdad to Be Found

The annals of the poor may be short and simple, but they need not remain so. The methodologies of social history, pioneered by the French Annalistes in the mid-twentieth century, have uncovered considerable details about the lives of rural peasants, urban workers, and other people who left few formal written records. Other professional disciplines can also add to our knowledge of the marginalized. Archaeologists and genetic specialists in Milan, for example, have spent the last decade and a half studying a unique historical archive: a crypt beneath the city’s old hospital for the poor, the Ca’Grande.

From 1637 to 1697, the hospital staff deposited the corpses of those who had died in their care - tens of thousands of people - in brick vaults beneath a nearby church. The depositors hoped the human remains would decay quickly. They hoped in vain. The city sewer lines ran near the vaults, creating a cold, humid atmosphere that inhibited decomposition. The bodies liquified, saponified, or putrified, creating a smell so intense that the hospital managers finally sealed the vaults.

 

Horsetail grass. Any port in a storm.

A few centuries later, modern forensic researchers realized that the Ca’Grande patients’ remains could reveal a great deal about their personal lives, particularly their dietary and medical histories. Since 2010 they have exhumed and analyzed about one-tenth of the bones and teeth in the vaults. The patients’ skeletons reveal that many of them were afflicted with tuberculosis and syphilis. Their dental plaque, meanwhile, reveals widespread malnourishment. Most ate a diet comprised entirely of grain; some ate horsetail grass, a northern-Italian famine food. Some were apparently willing to eat potatoes, a new import from South America that many other Europeans avoided. That many potato-eaters wound up dying (of other causes) in hospital would not have recommended the crop to their neighbors.

Particular surprises came from analysis of brain tissue clinging to some of the skulls. Some of the tissue contained a variety of opioids, end products of the opium that some patients took for pain relief. In a few cases the researchers found telltale evidence of consumption of another South American import: coca leaf. Scholars had no previous evidence of coca or cocaine consumption in Europe prior to the late nineteenth century, so this was quite a find. If this mild stimulant was in use in Milan, moreover, other workmen probably consumed it in other southern European cities. Writers of historical fiction who want to create a seventeenth-century analogue of Sherlock Holmes take note: if you place your fictional detective in the right city, you don’t have to deprive him of his favorite seven percent solution.