Camping and woodcraft - Scoutmastercg.com

CHAPTER XCONCENTRATED FOODSThe first European settlers in this country wereignorant of the ways of the wilderness. Some ofthem had been old campaigners in civilized lands,but they did not know the resources of Americanforests, nor how to utilize them. The consequencewas that many starved in a land of plenty. Thesurvivors learned to pocket their pride and learnfrom the natives, who, however contemptible theym.ight seem in other respects, were past mastersof the art of going "light but right." An almostnaked savage could start out alone and cross fromthe Atlantic to the Mississippi, without buying orbegging from anybody, and without robbing, unlessfrom other motives than hunger. This was notmerely due to the abundance of game. There werelarge tracts of the wilderness where game was scarce,or where it was unsafe to hunt. The Indian knewthe edible plants of the forest, and how to extractgood food from roots that were rank or poisonous intheir natural state; but he could not depend whollyupon such fortuitous findings. His mainstay onlong journeys was a small bag of parched and pulverizedmaize, a spoonful of which, stirred in water,and swallowed at a draught, sufficed him for a mealwhen nature's storehouse failed.Pinole.—All of our early chroniclers praised thisparched meal as the most nourishing food known.In New England it went by the name of "nocake,"a corruption of the Indian word nookik. WilliamWood, who, in 1634, wrote the first topographicalaccount of the Massachusetts colony, says of nocake1^,0I