Myths of North America

[Ninurta]

Mound building tribes are interesting. In the area I am from originally the native tribes also built mounds but they were built mostly from oystershell, an abundant material in the Gulf Coast and adjoining areas. Some of the mounds are extremely long. They weren't discovered until several years ago after a drought brought river and bayou levels down to reveal previously covered areas. Arrowheads and pottery fragments are found in huge quantities in all of the areas around water in the region.

Those were likely some of the same tribes that DeSoto fought on his path of carnage across the southeast US around 1540. He was witnessing - and fighting - the end of the Mound Builder culture. 

20 years later, Juan Pardo saw the final death throes of it in NC, east TN, and Southwestern VA. Both DeSoto and some of Pardo's men engaged some of the Indians around here in combat, which I believe was a catalyst in causing them to evacuate from this area when they discovered through the grape vine that yet more white men had landed and started a colony at Jamestown. VA. 

6 or 7 years after Pardo's men were all wiped out except one, in NC, the Spanish sent a Jesuit Mission to colonize York River, across the peninsula from Jamestown (this was about 30 years before Jamestown was founded by the English), but it was wiped out as well by the local Indians, all but one boy. As retaliation for that massacre, Pedro Menendez Aviles sailed up York River, captured several of the Indians there, and hung them from the yardarms as he sailed away. That was the end of the Spanish attempts to colonize Virginia, opening the door for the English settlement 30 years later.

The Mound Builder cultures along the Mississippi River, Ohio River, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and some of their tributaries, transformed into the Cherokee, Yuchi, Muskogee, Choctaw, Chicasaw, and several other tribes. It was the Mound Builders who first introduced cultivation of corn into North America, and it's cultivation spread along their trade routes. 

Before that, before corn, the primary grain crop in North America was goosefoot seeds - what is now called "Quinoa" after it's South American variety. The seeds have been found in caves and rock shelters in Eastern KY, and in  the excavations of Daugherty's Cave, about 3 miles or so from where I was raised. It was still being raised as a legacy crop by the Indians in VA and NC when the first whites settled there. It was eaten as greens and the seeds boiled as porridge, like quinoa. Another property of that plant is that it leeches salt up from the soil, Because of that, the Indians on the east coast, and probably elsewhere, used to gather it, dry it, and burn it, leaving salt behind as one of the mineral components of the ash, which ashes they used to season food.

Goosefoot is now considered a weed, a nuisance plant that grows along roadsides and is no longer used for anything by most folks. Scientists call it Chenopodium, but us hillbillies call it goosefoot or lamb's quarters. Yeah, you can eat it. it's in the spinach family, but more nutritious.

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