The Pecan

by James McWilliams

  The word “pecan” derives from an Algonquin word meaning, loosely translated, “a nut too hard to crack by hand.” Once gathered, the nut was indeed difficult to extract—but not that difficult. The reward, in essence, was worth the labor. What really mattered to the Indians was the fact that native pecans had comparatively thin shells—thanks, as we have seen, to the squirrels and crows that harvested them. Pecan meat was not going to fall from its casing without effort, but in a preindustrial age, it was more than readily accessible to anyone who had a rock and a hard, flat surface. The Mississippian cultures naturally embraced the pecan as enthusiastically as they did any other food source that qualified as low-hanging fruit. The Indian diet was already impressively diverse, consisting of more than 1,100 species of plants. The pecan became one of the most important, and in hundreds of cultures it was incorporated as a staple food. A further benefit, of course, was that pecan meat wasn’t bitter. The wild pecan has, most agree, a delicious buttery flavor.2

  The pecan served the Indians well. It is with some justice (and not a little irony) that today’s most popular cultivars are named after Native American peoples: Pawnee, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Mohawk, Choctaw, and Wichita, to name only a few. The pecan is a supremely healthy nut. A hundred grams of wild pecans (about two handfuls) pack a nutritional punch: 718 calories, 9.7 grams of protein, 2.4 grams of fiber, 74 grams of fat, and significant doses of critical micronutrients such as iron, potassium, magnesium, beta-carotene, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and ascorbic acid. Pecans help maintain healthy lipid levels while providing a powerful array of antioxidants. These healthful qualities were critical for calorically (and sometimes nutritionally) challenged hunter-gatherers. Consider the linolenic and stearic acids in the pecan, as well as its monosaturated oil, and it’s no wonder that the Indians shook the trees every fall, gathering up superfood along the region’s extensive riverbanks. As Indians were quick to discern, this was cheap, healthy sustenance obtained with scant expenditure of labor.3

  In the pre-Columbian era, the pecan tree came to fit seamlessly into evolving Native American foraging strategies. Pecan nuts quickly became a tasty food that Indians living from Texas to Arkansas to Louisiana eagerly consumed alongside their cultivated beans, corn, melons, and squash. The nuts nicely complemented their broader menu of foraged items, including crab apples, persimmons, sassafras, wild millet, pond lilies, huckleberries, plums, and papaws. Occasional doses of bear, possum, deer, and swamp rabbit rounded out the constantly shifting, inherently flexible Native American menu. Indians primarily ate pecans whole—in many ways this was the food’s greatest allure. They also pounded them into a powder, applied the pecan dust to corn gruel and bread, worked pecan meal into bison meat, and even boiled nuts to ease the extraction of meat. Others may have fermented pecan powder into an alcoholic beverage called powcohicora. Perhaps not incidentally, there’s currently a brewery in Mississippi that uses pecan meal in lieu of hops.4

  Pecans influenced more than the Native American diet. The Indians’ decision to consume pecan nuts as a steady component of their overall diet had a direct influence on Native American mobility as well. One thing about the pecan tree that made it especially influential—if quirky—was that it does not produce nuts every year.5 If you have a pecan tree in your yard, you have likely noticed that it is “alternate bearing.” This is certainly the case with the pecan tree that rockets through my back deck in Austin. The nuts fall in abundance every two to four years. It is hard to say why pecans exhibit this trait. Early botanists once thought alternate masting meant that the tree was tired and needed rest. This is probably wrong. Nonetheless, it should be said that, even today, as the extension agency at Louisiana State University puts it, “the exact cause of alternate bearing continues to elude researchers.” One interesting hypothesis is that pecans mast inconsistently as a strategy designed to outsmart insects. By denying mast to voracious pecan weevils on a reliable schedule (to cite just one pest that attacks the pecan), the tree is able to reduce insect populations during “off” years before shifting into high gear and producing nuts when the insect populations are down and unable to recover fast enough to exact real damage. It could also be that the carbohydrates needed to build a nut as dense and nutritious as the pecan simply take more time to develop. Photosynthesis, in essence, might very well need more time to engineer seeds with an oil content as high as 74 percent. Whatever the reason, this botanical oddity not only influenced those who depended on it as integral to their sustenance, but defines the pecan tree, even the cultivated varieties, to this day.6

  In any case, it seems that inconsistent masting partially influenced the course of Indians’ nomadic movements. One grove would mast one year, while another grove, situated in a distant river flat in another region, would mast the next. Indians must have thought this to be odd. Deer would travel the same general route every season. Corn, beans, and squash would annually cluster over each other in the same beds. Fish would return to spawn in the same soft eddies. Berries would fatten on the same vines and bushes as they always had done. Pecans, however, defied the seasonal cycles of predictable abundance and scarcity, masting in a less reliable and uniform manner, following vague patterns rather than precise schedules. For a people deeply attuned to seasonal predictability, this aspect of the pecan tree must have been at least a little disorienting.7

  Fortunately, when masting was abundant it was conspicuously so. It is thus no surprise that the archaeological evidence suggests that Indians adjusted their lives to the pecan’s odd timing, enjoying its meat enough to adapt their perennial migrations—however casual they may have been—to these haphazard masting schedules. Piecing together any sort of exact map of movement is impossible. There’s evidence, however, of south Texas Indians traveling up to 120 kilometers to reap the offerings of especially productive groves. The pecan trees, to an extent, told them where to go. Indians, fully sold on the nut’s worth, followed. Many groups of Indians—including the Comanche, Caddo, and Kickapoo—may even have settled where they did as a direct result of proximity to a variety of well-known and highly productive pecan groves.8

  In time, a nascent pecan trade developed among the Indians. When the Mescalero Apaches drove bison herds from Colorado to the Concho River in Texas each winter, they were reliably met by Mississippians hauling baskets of pecans for exchange. The Anaqua Indians, who lived in coastal Texas, traveled to the Colorado River every winter, where they set up camp for about six months. On their journey, the Anaqua gathered pecans and traded them with other Indian cultures as they traveled. From New Mexico came Mescalero Indians, who established winter camps along the San Saba, Pedernales, and Llano Rivers. Settling temporarily in these pecan-abundant regions, the Mescalero hauled pecans back to New Mexico, trading them with Indians scattered throughout west Texas. The Jumano Indians maintained thriving villages in both the Jumano Mountains of New Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley, with satellite settlements in the upper Colorado and Concho Valleys. The Jumanos were thus constantly crisscrossing the region, distributing pecans from pecan-rich to pecan-poor areas, sharing the natural wealth.9

  This trade easily and profitably segued into exchange with non-Indian groups. When Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered Indians hawking pecans from the upper Colorado River to the lower Rio Grande Valley. Diverse native cultures crossed paths repeatedly in the extended and worked-over flats of rivers and streams, and the means of exchange during these interactions typically involved pecans. In the 1680s, one Jumano Indian told a Spaniard about “Las Nueces”—a river where “there are nuts in such abundance . . . that they constitute the maintenance of many nations who enjoy friendship and barter and exchange” together. Trying to redeem souls in the Caddo region of east Texas, Fray Isidoro de Espinosa watched Indians “gather quantities of thick shelled nuts to last a whole year.” The Caddos strung the nut meats on long cords and stored them in leather sacs to draw upon throughout the winter and spring as edible snacks and valued commo
dities for trade. The pecan was, in a sense, both legal tender and lingua franca.10

  Although the Indians never created anything even remotely resembling commercial orchards, there is every reason to believe that they roughly cultivated pecans to foster this indigenous but increasingly active commerce throughout the weblike riverine network of the Mississippi River Valley. None of these efforts should distract us from the fact that when it came to pecans, pre-contact Indians along the Mississippi and its tributaries were essentially opportunistic gatherers, always overshadowed in their cultivation efforts by squirrels and crows. Even if Indians weren’t active cultivators of pecans, though, the nuts nonetheless encouraged them to harvest in a timely and efficient manner. When it comes to pre-contact cultures, we generally lack details about how Indians might have precisely streamlined harvesting methods to improve the efficacy of collection. They left us few scraps of evidence, none of them written. We can be fairly certain, though, that the pressure to harvest with alacrity was high, and that Indians responded with a timeliness and ingenuity characteristic of their overall approach to harvesting food.

  Among the motivating factors for harvesting with diligence were numerous species from across the animal kingdom. A prominent motivation to gather nuts at the opportune time would have been the abundant squirrel population (as well as other small mammals). When pecans ripen they release an odor. This smell would have wafted across the forest floor and into squirrel dens, triggering squirrels to forage for what was essentially the region’s densest natural food. Anyone who has observed squirrels at work knows that they can, with remarkable self-possession, clear a dense spread of fallen nuts with vacuum-like dedication. There’s a reason why they’re called the “pecan tree’s feet.” Without competition from humans, a few dozen gray squirrels living within a kilometer of a single pecan tree can consume or bury every nut the tree produces (two hundred to six hundred) in a matter of six weeks. It was therefore critically important that Indians arrive either just before or immediately after the pecans began to mast. If they lagged, squirrels were sure to make a significant dent in the pecan supply. (As one Texas pecan grower explains on his website: “Eat Pecans! 10,000,000 squirrels can’t be wrong.”)11

  Some firsthand accounts bearing on squirrels and pecans suggest that squirrels would even have denuded pecan trees while the nuts were still on the tree, still encased in their fourvalved green husks, thereby effectively outdoing the Indians. This hypothesis, however, is a dubious one. A recollection by Roy Bedichek, the great Texas naturalist, goes some way toward casting doubt on the claim. Observing the “ravages” of the rock squirrel upon a pecan forest, he wrote, “Impatient for this favorite food, he gnaws the green outer covering down to the shell of the nut itself, where the bitter juice bites his thievish tongue, and then throws the nut down.” Over the course of five minutes, Bedichek watched forty-six nuts hit the ground as a result of this capricious sampling. One could argue that not only were squirrels a poor competitor for pecans in the tree, but they actually made it easier for the Indians—if they arrived at the right moment—to obtain the partially husked nuts. By littering them across the forest floor, the squirrels reduced the time Indians had to spend beating the tree with large sticks and searching the crowded forest floor for dividends.12

  Another wild animal Indians had to watch was the crow. These keenly intelligent, tool-wielding birds either pluck pecan nuts from the branches or harvest them from the ground. Their method of cracking the shell is worth noting. According to an early-twentieth-century zoologist (who far outdid Bedichek by spending months observing a single flock of American crows cavort about a pecan orchard): “They [the crows] would alight on posts, hold the pecans with their feet and peck at them until the shells split, or until they pecked a hole through them.” When a hole was bored, “they inserted the bill and beat the pecan against the post.” This diligent scientist went on to observe that this process worked best for longer nuts, a fact that the crows were evidently able to appreciate and, in no time, exploit. (When pavement came about, crows quickly learned to fly up and drop the nuts upon it, too. As noted, the “black denizen of forest and field” is not a stupid bird.)13

  Crows were thus not to be ignored. All Indians could hope for when it came to crows was that the birds found other foods to eat when they encountered pecan groves. They will, ornithologists commonly observe, eat a wide array of foods (stomach dissections of crows have yielded more than 650 different kinds of plant and animal products). But as with the pecan, we shouldn’t rush to the conclusion that competitors didn’t deliver unintended advantages. The crows were also of help to the Indians. Their ceaselessly grating cackles may have intensified when it was time for pecans to be harvested. Native Americans, attuned as they could be to the subtlest of nature’s intonations, tended to act upon such announcements.

  While squirrels and crows may have been immediate competitors with Indians for a local stash of wild pecans, in the long term their presence proved to be exceptionally beneficial to pecan proliferation. These animals, as it turns out, were ultimately critical in extending the pecan tree’s range, certainly much more than any two-legged creature could systematically accomplish. The pecan nut closely co-evolved with these animals over many millions of years. A larger nut was more attractive to animals that were able to move it from one location to another. As a reward for their services, mammals would eat some nuts but not all of them. Squirrels in particular would often bury nuts far and wide, rarely making it back to retrieve the entirety of what they planted. Crows would carry nuts and frequently drop them in new locations, from which point the squirrels would scurry over and bury them. These relatively hidden but seminal events were undoubtedly good news for the longevity of the pecan tree.

  The perpetual dance between animal and plant is often called mutualism. Before the emergence of this mutualism, eras and eras ago, the pecan tree needed the wind to move its “winged nutlets” from one region to another. Pecan trees, in other words, did not always have big, edible seeds. As squirrels became squirrels, and crows became crows, winged nutlets became wingless nuts. The mutualism that co-evolved remains evident to anyone who, like Bedichek or Gilbert White, spends quality time observing the many melodramas that unfold under a tree. Not to get too far ahead of the story, but when one observes how commercial pecan orchards work today, it becomes perfectly clear that the farmer’s goal, when you get right down to it, is to exchange mutualism for botanical dominance. In a sense, the Indians established the starting point from which this ambitious and potentially devastating process of domination would proceed. Before humans, though, it was all about the wind, birds, squirrels, and, of course, the vagaries of evolutionary change.14

  When it came to pecan access, Indians also benefited from ecological factors beyond their control, much less recognition—factors that we can appreciate only from the perch of the present. A potential predator of pecan nuts—one that (as we will later see) would threaten to devastate cultivated pecan orchards throughout the Southeast and Southwest—was the pecan weevil. The Indians, however, had no need to fear the pecan weevil because it and other potential insect predators were effectively controlled by the red-headed woodpecker, which at the time thrived in numbers high enough to keep the weevil in balance. “The redhead,” one ornithologist wrote in the 1920s, “is very fond of insects.” And so it was throughout pecan territory. By the nineteenth century, though, with the systematic harvesting of snags (fallen timber), red-headed woodpeckers (which relied on the snags as a primary food source) diminished in number, providing a small but critical berth for the weevil. As is true of most invasive insects, the weevil did not need much of a chance to proliferate to invasive proportions. But for pre-contact Indians, natural control kept the weevil, and other like-minded insect predators, in balance.15

  Another pecan predator that had yet to arrive in significant numbers was the raccoon. Today, raccoons pursue urban and suburban garbage as their primary source of food. This, however
, is a relatively recent dietary change. Writing about raccoons in southern Illinois in the 1940s, one wildlife biologist noted, “Pecan nuts undoubtedly contribute much to the excellent condition of raccoons,” suggesting that raccoons had always been a fierce competitor for pecans. In pre-contact North America, however, that was not the case. Raccoons would not have been prevalent (if existent at all) in regions where the pecan grew. The reason is that the expansion of European-style agriculture, plus later urbanization, was the primary factor that eventually drove the raccoon out of the far southeastern corner of the United States and into trash cans across the Northern Hemisphere. In pre-contact days, though, raccoons would have known no pecans, for the simple reason that they did not share space with native pecan groves.16

  One shouldn’t overlook the wood rat as a pecan predator. This rodent, which would become an especially vigorous competitor for pecans in the Brazos Valley, was also not yet a factor for the Indians. Its numbers were similarly monitored by natural control, specifically the abundance of hawks, owls, and rat snakes that prevailed before aggressive deforestation and agricultural development. Its decline, which seems to have begun in the late nineteenth century, led to a situation in which, according to one early-twentieth-century wildlife biologist, “native rats and mice have so increased their numbers that their depredations have assumed almost the proportions of a plague.” Again, this is a relatively recent development, one that would not have impinged upon Indian access to their native nuts. Rats, raccoons, weevils—plus dozens of other species—would go on to compete for pecans in groves throughout North America. When Native Americans were eating pecans before European arrival, however, these animals were too involved in other ecological relationships to bother much with pecans.17