The Pecan
A HISTORY OF AMERICA’S NATIVE NUT
BY JAMES MCWILLIAMS
University of Texas Press
AUSTIN
Copyright © 2013 by the University of Texas Press
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First edition, 2013
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McWilliams, James E.
The pecan : a history of America’s native nut / by James McWilliams. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-292-74916-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Pecan. 2. Pecan industry. I. Title.
SB401.P4M39 2013
634'.52—dc23
2013002834
DOI:10.7560/749160
ISBN 978-0-292-75390-7 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-75391-4 (individual e-book)
pp. ii and 156: U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705.
For Marvin Harris, with gratitude
Question: Please settle a dispute. We can’t agree on the pronunciation of pecan.
Answer: First choice: p-KAHN. Second choice, heard usually in the Northern and Eastern states, pee-KAN.
FRANK COLBY, LOS ANGELES TIMES, MARCH 25, 1950
The pecan is a nut originally 100 percent American, which has been allowed to remain 95 percent American. Most of the tasty new foods Europeans discovered in America eventually made their way around the world, some quickly, some slowly, but the United States has been left in almost complete possession of the pecan.
WAVERLY ROOT, LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 19, 1978
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Cracking the Nut
CHAPTER 1
The Native Americans’ Nut
CHAPTER 2
“Pekan Nuttrees”: Europeans Encounter the Pecan
CHAPTER 3
“. . . the Forest into an Orchard”: Passive Cultivation on the Texas Frontier
CHAPTER 4
Antoine’s Graft: The Birth of the Improved Pecan, 1822–1900
CHAPTER 5
“To Make These Little Trees”: The Culture of Pecan Improvement, 1900–1925
CHAPTER 6
“Pecans for the World”: The Pecan Goes Industrial, 1920–1945
CHAPTER 7
“In Almost Any Recipe . . . Pecans May Be Used”: American Consumers Embrace the Pecan, 1940–1960
CHAPTER 8
“China Wants Our Nuts”: The Pecan Goes Global
EPILOGUE
The Future of Pecans
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Index
PREFACE
I decided to write about the pecan tree for purely personal reasons. I have no professional training in trees or nuts. I’m not a scientist. My botany knowledge derives mainly from popular writing and amateurish reading of textbooks. I’m even relatively new to the field of environmental history, the discipline that I sometimes call home. So, the inevitable question: why write a book on the history of pecans?
A wild pecan tree grows directly through the middle of my back deck in Austin, Texas. It presents itself to the world every day, proudly and without fail. The deck is built around it. The crown of the stately fifty-foot tree hovers above my office like a tilted umbrella. When it’s masting—producing nuts—it peppers my metal roof with relentless pings, and crows, as if tipped off in advance, arrive en masse to crack into them. One afternoon, while sitting in my office reading Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne for a class I was teaching, with pecans peppering my roof, I had a sobering thought: I didn’t know a damn thing about this tree. I’m generally fascinated by the natural world. Nonetheless, here was a specimen that I saw every day, heard hitting my roof about every other fall, and more than occasionally used as a food source. As far as my own knowledge was concerned, though, it may as well have been a boulder. In some basic sense, this seemed wrong.
Gilbert White, the author I was reading, would never have tolerated such ignorance. White was an English botanist and naturalist who spent much of the 1760s and 1770s observing the finest details of his own backyard. The natural world of the southern English town where he was born and raised, Selborne, served as his lifelong laboratory, the biodiverse context of his boundless curiosity. White dissected the habits and history of every plant, animal, stream, and pond in the vicinity. No detail escaped his razor-sharp attention and no description seemed to evade his pen. He reveled in the strange beauty of the natural mysteries around him, mysteries that were, for most people, hidden in plain sight. He brought those mysteries out of hiding with childlike enthusiasm, telling his stories with subtle humor and honesty. With humility, he was just looking. The results, without in any way intending to be, were dazzling.
Of course, Selborne had no pecan trees, and let it now be said, I’m no Gilbert White. Indeed, not only did White never mention pecans, but it is likely the man never even saw one, wedded as he was to his windswept homeland. Nevertheless, his book, which celebrates deliberateness and patience in every paragraph, lent me inspiration. There’s much to learn from White’s distilled enthusiasm for the natural history of his own backyard. The Natural History of Selborne reminds us that the most timeless stories, and the most sublime discoveries, are often the ones lurking just beyond our narrowly trained frame of reference. This realization is what grabbed me and got me thinking, studying, and, alas, writing about the pecan tree. These writings—”scribblings” they would once have been called—initially took form as a file on my laptop called “Pecan Notes.” After about a month of keeping these notes I had somehow, by whatever intuitive calculus leads to such a conclusion, determined that I was, somehow or other, writing a book.
As a writer with an almost obsessive interest in contemporary agricultural issues, I found the pecan intriguing for other reasons as well. Essentially, it came to fascinate me as a tree indigenous to the United States that in a remarkably short span of time (by agricultural standards) went from being primarily wild to being primarily domesticated. The nut that European settlers found in the seventeenth century, much less the nut that Native Americans found more than ten thousand years ago, is not the nut we know today. Human intervention has been diverse, involving everyone from hunter-gatherer opportunists to twenty-first-century agronomists. Collectively, the intervention has radically altered pecans to the point that the majority of them around today owe their existence to human “improvement.”
Through this improvement, the pecan became one of the very few plants native to North America to evolve into a significant agricultural crop. The transition from wild to cultivated is ultimately what interests me—not, I should add, writing a comprehensive history of the pecan (which this book is decidedly not). This transformation from the wild to the sown is the driving theme of my book. It is a topic that bears directly upon nothing less important than the human quest to eat food. As I worked on tracing this narrative, it gradually hit me that to grasp this basic history of the pecan tree was to grasp a story that, in essence, was a fertile microcosm of the complex and productive—and sometimes power-hungry and dysfunctional—relationship that humans maintain with the plant kingdom. And in that, I soon learned, there was drama.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would neve
r have written this book were it not for the infectious passion for pecan trees demonstrated by my friend and Texas A&M entomologist Dr. Marvin Harris. I’ve dedicated this book, warts and all, to him because of his rare compassion for me, a historian trying to understand plant biology. Equally pivotal in nurturing this idea to life was Casey Kittrell, my editor at the University of Texas Press, who lent ceaseless encouragement (and micro-brew-drinking companionship) as this book slowly became a book. Further critical support came from my friend Carolle R. Morini, tireless archivist at the Boston Athenæum. The ongoing professional and moral support provided by my smartest friend in the world, Scott Gabriel Knowles, a historian of technology at Drexel University, was invaluable. Most important, as always, is my family, who, amazingly, astoundingly, flawlessly, passionately, somehow tolerate my unpredictable and all-too-isolating endeavors with humor, love, and understanding. Family, you are my taproot.
A Miami chief named Pacane, drawn by Henry Hamilton sometime between 1776 and 1778. The name suggests the central place of the pecan in Native American material culture and personal identity. Henry Hamilton drawings of North American scenes and Native Americans: Guide. Houghton Library, Harvard College Library.
INTORDUCTION
Cracking the Nut
Here is an intriguing hypothesis: nuts may have made our prehuman ancestors smarter. Smarter because the nut forms in a shell and our hominid forebears had to think a bit about how to extract it. Thought led to innovation. Innovation to nutrition. Nutrition to greater intelligence. That’s the idea, anyway. Granted, finding a stone flat enough to shatter a nut doesn’t really qualify as unique cognition—apes do it all the time. But not unlike the way a seagull, after multiple attempts, finally figures out how high to soar before dropping the clam, it required trial and error. Smash the nut too fiercely, whack it in the wrong spot with the wrong rock, and shell shards splinter into the meat. Get it just right, though, with the right rock on the right seam with the right pressure, and you’ve just opened a new chapter in culinary history. When the first nut was cracked, the history of eating, it seems fair to say, changed significantly.1
We have no idea when or where it happened. No idea whatsoever who the first opposable-thumbed hominid was who successfully liberated a nut from its shell. However, it stands to reason that whenever it took place, life changed for the better. Prehuman and human history is marked by major transformations: the harnessing of fire, the domestication of wheat, irrigation, animal breeding, refrigeration, genetic modification, the advent of the Twinkie. Rarely included among these prehistoric and historic milestones is the simple act of cracking open a nut. This fundamental historical act, I submit, deserves its due. The cracked nut may not have profoundly altered the course of human events, but it played an important role in shaping material and economic life for hundreds of millions of people for hundreds and thousands of years.2
Of course, nuts didn’t evolve shells to improve the minds of our prehistoric ancestry. On the contrary, a nut is a fruit with a single seed that’s indehiscent—it does not open upon reaching maturity. Its hard exterior protects the seed (which is technically a one-seeded dry fruit) from the elements. The fact that we managed to break the nut’s barrier and, over thousands of years, enjoy its fruit and, over the last hundred years, dictate the genetic course of its development doesn’t mean that nuts lost and humans won. Nature, which is defined by unintended consequences, really doesn’t follow that kind of logic. Plus, nature is ultimately too elusive and too powerful to assume a subservient role to a recent arrival such as the human, no matter how impressive his brain or how advanced his technologies.
When humans and plants enter into a relationship, a level of humility is forced upon us as we become integrated into unfamiliar natural processes. A mutually beneficial balance, never perfect, is the only way to ensure that the relationship—much less the plant itself—enjoys some semblance of longevity. For most of history, humans have responsibly propagated nuts. Nuts, in return, have generously, if more passively, improved the health of humans. They have thrived. We have thrived. How long this balance will persist into the future is, as we will see in the last chapter of this story, very much an open question, one we should probably be thinking about more seriously than we do.3
Pecan trees (Carya illinoinensis) have lent themselves especially well to a delicate symbiosis with humans. Pecans belong to the family Juglandaceae, the pollen of which first appeared in the late Cretaceous period, about 135 million years ago. About 80 million years later the phylum Hicoreae sprouted across loosely connected landscapes that would eventually cleave into North America, Asia, and Europe. Sixteen million years later the genus Carya, which encompasses all hickories (including the pecan), came into being. This genus died out in Europe by the Pleistocene period (2 million years ago) but took deep root in limited geographical ranges across Asia and North America. The pecan has become, according to one authority, “the largest, fastest-growing, best-known, most valuable, and one of the longest-lived of all the hickories.”4
It was in North America alone, however, that the pecan found a climate amicable enough to inspire permanence. Wet, loamy, alluvial soil that reached from northern Illinois (hence its scientific name) to the Gulf Coast, and from central Texas to (possibly) a small patch of central Alabama, nurtured the pecan’s exclusive development in North America. As the Stuart Pecan Company would brag in 1893, “We [Americans] have rightfully a monopoly upon the nut.” This was exactly the case. The pecan thrives especially well along the turgid Mississippi and its arterial network of toffee-colored tributaries. As a botanical specimen, the pecan tree is supremely hardy—“a seasoned, professional athlete in a room of earnest but average sportsmen,” as one team of botanists put it. It evolved a remarkable set of adaptive qualities that served it immensely well before the cooperative support of human cultivation. As a “climax tree species”—that is, as a species that does not care much for shade—the pecan successfully elbowed out potential competitors for the privilege of darting skyward and basking in direct sunlight. “The Pecan,” declares a modern guide to American trees, “is intolerant of competition.”5
The tree’s robust root system is equally aggressive. It plunges to the water table and fans out far enough horizontally to absorb a consistent supply of surface moisture. These roots develop well before the tree shoots upward. “It is nothing unusual,” wrote the famous plant breeder Luther Burbank, “to find pecan seedlings an inch high with roots from four to six feet in length.” In this sense, its strength remains hidden from view. Nutrient uptake in the pecan root network happens most efficiently at the humus-surface layer, a critical sliver of soil where nutrients are especially dense. The pecan’s evolution in regions that experience both the occasional ice storm and static heat waves has led the tree to select genes for modest drought and freeze tolerance. All things considered, the pecan possesses an enviable set of genetic and physical attributes. Significantly, these attributes work best in a narrow locality—namely, but not exclusively, the American South. It is the state tree of not only Texas but Mississippi and Arkansas as well.6
The pecan tree’s promiscuity has helped its cause immeasurably. Wild pecans are social. They cluster densely in groves and pollinate from tree to tree, rather than within a single specimen. This happens because an individual tree’s male and female flowers tend to bloom weeks apart. It lacks, according to one geographer, “self-pollinating mechanisms.” This mismatch enhances the genetic diversity that provides the basis for the tree’s dominant presence throughout riverine forests. No modern plant geneticist equipped with the most sophisticated tools could have designed a better complement to the tree’s native, if relatively confined, habitat. Much of this adaptability, oddly enough, has to do with the tree’s inability to mate with itself.7
If the native pecan covers a continuous swath from Mexico to Illinois, the densest pecan groves took shape in the alluvial ridges (just beyond the normal flood range) along the rich tributaries
of Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana. It was here that they were able to best compete for light and space in precisely the right soil among other native plants—a competition that made the wild pecan one of the tallest indigenous trees west of the Mississippi River, sometimes growing to 180 feet. It was also here that the soil drained but remained moist—a finicky prerequisite for extensive pecan roots. River bottom locations experienced less-dramatic temperature fluctuations, another favorable quality for pecan growth. Once the trees took root, a number of animal species that thrived along rivers began to consume and disperse seeds in all directions. Such species included wood ducks, wild turkeys, quail, crows, foxes, and squirrels. As these animals chose nuts that were easier to crack into, they became the first passive breeders, selecting for thinner-shelled pecans.8
For all these reasons, pecan trees were thriving in southern North America when Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait, or perhaps entered by boat farther down the Pacific coast, from Asia into North America. These intrepid nomads—America’s first immigrants—spanned the hemisphere in search of woolly beasts, eventually fracturing into thousands of distinct cultures of hunter-gatherers. In time, several groups reached the Mississippi River Valley, where they created cultures under grove after grove of towering pecan trees—trees that should have been nowhere else but exactly where they were. Understanding precisely how Native Americans worked the pecan tree into their myriad cultural expressions constitutes the first episode in the larger story of humanity’s ongoing relationship with America’s most economically significant indigenous tree.9
CHAPTER 1
The Native Americans’ Nut
The beasts that lured the Native Americans to North America eventually died out. This was the result of a warming trend that started about 16,000 years ago. Indians responded by forming more-stable, semi-nomadic cultures. Momentous agricultural changes ensued, and with the receding of the Tioga glaciers, Indians of the Lower Mississippi region started to pay serious attention to readily available plant food, including the pecan. They began their relationship with the pecan tree by haphazardly harvesting pecans as part of their periodic hunting-gathering ventures. As pecans became increasingly popular, Indians intensified the harvest by swatting canopies with tall sticks and reaping showers of rewards—a technique that Anglo planters later adopted and carried well into the twentieth century. Although Indians would never establish pecan orchards per se—as they did with small plots of corn, beans, and squash—some evidence suggests that they purposefully spread pecan seeds to extend the range of what was becoming an essential ingredient in their evolving diet. In this respect, Native Americans were the tree’s first human domesticators. (Although they would have had nothing on nonhuman fauna that had been spreading the pecan for more than 28 million years!)1
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