We Indians did not know what power it was that causes this. We only knew that it was so. We also knew that when a field stands alone, away from other fields, and is planted with white corn, it will grow up in white corn only; there will not be any yellow grains in the ears. And so of any other variety.
Sometimes two women, owning adjoining fields, would make an agreement; they would divide their fields into sections and plant the corresponding sections on opposite sides of the division line alike. Thus in the diagram (figure 18), _A_ and _A´_ may be planted in a variety of yellow corn; _B_ and _B´_ may be planted in beans and squashes; and _C_ and _C´_ may be planted in a variety of white corn; but even this did not make so very much difference; still the corn traveled.
We thought that perhaps the reason of this was that the ground here was soft, or mellowed and broken by cultivation. We thought corn could not travel readily over hard, or unbroken ground; and as you notice in the diagram, although the two patches of yellow corn are separated from the white corn by the two patches of squashes and beans, yet the beans and squashes are in soft, or cultivated ground. We thought corn traveled more easily over soft ground.
However, we really did not know what made corn travel; we just knew that it did.
I think that perhaps at first, there was but one variety of corn, atạ´ki tso´ki, or hard white; and that all other varieties have sprung from it. I know that when we plant hard white seed, ears often develop that show color in the grain. Sometimes ears are produced bearing pink grains toward the beard end of the cob; such ears we call i´puta (top) hi´tsiica (pink); that is, pink top, or light-red top. In color these ears differed in no wise from atạ´ki aku´ hi´tsiica.
Hard white was very generally raised, nearly every family in the tribe having a field of it.
There were two chief dishes chiefly prepared from hard white corn; these I will now describe.
_Mäpi´ Nakapa´._ I put water in a pot, and in this I dropped a section of a string of dried squash, with some beans. Dried squash was always strung on long grass strings; and having, from one of these strings, cut off a piece I tied the ends together, making a wreath, or ring, four or five inches in diameter. It was this ring of dried squash slices that I dropped into the pot. When well boiled, I lifted the squash slices out by the string and dropped them into a wooden bowl, where I mashed them and chopped them fine with a horn spoon. The mashed squash I dropped back into the kettle again, with the beans; the now empty string I threw away.