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Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden

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This 1917 text describes horticultural techniques of the Hidatsa Indian, Buffalo Bird Woman, born about 1839. Her tribe lived on the Missouri River near Fort Berthold in present-day North Dakota, their villages described by Lewis and Clark, Catlin, and Maximilian & Bodmer. Principal crops were corn, squash, beans, and sunflowers; growing, storage, processing, cooking, recipes, and a million other details were painstakingly recorded by author Gilbert L. Wilson. Parentheses in this excerpt are by the author. Here we go:
Iron Kettles. "The first pots, or kettles, of metal that we Hidatsas got were of yellow tin (brass); the French and Crees also traded us kettles made of red tin (copper). As long as we could get our native clay pots, we of my father's family did not use metal pots much, because the metal made the food taste. When I was a little girl, if any of us went to visit another family, and they gave us food cooked in an iron pot, we knew it at once because we could taste and smell the iron in the food. I have said that we began cooking food in an iron kettle in my father's family when I was about eighteen years old; but the great iron kettle that lies in Goodbird's yard was given us by an Arikara woman before I was born."
 
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