A group of soft pines, with fewer needles than five in a bundle, grows on
the Western mountain slopes. Small trees they are, which have to struggle
hard against the winds and storms, and with the scant moisture of the
desert air and soil for a bare living. They are very interesting because
of the fact that they have nuts, rich, sweet, and nutritious, under the
scales of their cones, and these nuts are important items in the food of
many Indian tribes of the West.
The first is the four-leaved nut pine that grows on the barren mountain
slopes of Southern and Lower California. It is a desert tree, rarely
reaching forty feet in height, and this only in the most favourable
situations. The foliage is pale sage green. No other pine has four leaves
in a bundle. Its nut-like seeds are rich in oil, starch, and sugar.
Without them the Indians of Lower California would probably starve. In
Riverside County the tree is common at 5,000 feet above sea level. It has
a regular pyramidal head, when young, becoming low, round-topped and
irregular when very old.
Another piñon, but this one with a bushy, broad top, and often
considerably taller, grows with the four-leaved pine on the mountains of
Lower California, and northward along the canyons and mountain slopes of
Arizona. The short leaves are dark green, and there are but two or three
in a bundle. The seeds are plump, and rounded, or angular. The upper side
is brown, the lower side black, and each has a pale brown wing.
A third nut pine, or piñon, two- or three-leaved, grows on the eastern
foot hills of the outer ranges of the Rocky Mountains, on both sides of
the system. Forests of it are found on the high plains of Colorado and
Arizona. It sometimes grows large enough to be used for lumber. The nuts
are half an inch long, and have thin, brittle shells. They are gathered
by Indians and Mexicans, and may often be bought in the markets of
Colorado and New Mexico.
The one-leaved nut pine seems to belong with the spruces and firs, and
other single-leaved evergreens, but there are frequently two leaves in
the bundle, and there is a little scaly sheath at the base. The
grey-green leaves often hang on for ten or twelve years. The winged nuts
are over half an inch long. The wood furnished fuel and charcoal to the
smelters in the mining regions, and the Indians of Nevada and California
harvest the nut crop.
Every autumn when we are going for chestnuts and hickory nuts in our
Eastern woods, we may think of the Indian families who leave their homes
in the lowlands, and climb the mountain slopes to gather their nuts which
are their staff of life. If we should miss our nutting excursion, it
would make no vital difference in our lives during the coming winter. Our
nuts are not a serious part of the provisions of the household. But with
the Indians, to miss the nut pine harvest, means to have no bread for the
winter that is coming.
Mr. John Muir, who has often lived among these stunted upland forests,
and seen the Indians gathering the nuts and using them later as food,
tells us many interesting things. The trees of the one-leaved nut pine
are low, like old apple trees, and full of cones. The Indians get long
poles, and beat the cones off the trees, then roast them on hot stones,
until the scales open. Then they shake out the nuts, and gather them in
baskets and bags to carry home. These nuts are eaten raw or parched on
hot stones. These are the easiest and simplest ways. But the best and
most palatable form in which they are prepared costs much more time and
labour. The nuts are parched, then ground or pounded into meal. This is
stirred up with water, into a kind of mush, which is formed into cakes
and baked. This is, in general, the way in which all pine nuts are made
into bread.
The time of the nut harvest is, for the Indians, the merriest time of the
year. If the crop is heavy, the spirits of the party are light. A single
family, if it is fairly industrious, can gather fifty or sixty bushels of
these rich, thin-shelled nuts in a single autumn month; and with this
quantity to carry home, can go down the mountains, tired but happy,
knowing that their bread for the winter, and plenty of it, is assured.