Beans

From Colonial America To El Camino Real — The Great American Heritage Grains Adventure (Part 4)

This blog is the final installment of a series on my (Richard's) recent trip across the country visiting important sites related to heritage and landrace grain studies. View the previous posts here.


Cabizon Cultural Museum, Indio, California

Judy Stapp, Director

The Garden Oasis Of Mara, Joshua National Monument, Twenty-Nine Palms

John Legniole, Keeper

Oasis of Mara Scythe

Oasis of Mara Scythe

My incredibly gracious hosts and longtime friends, Cliffand Lee Ann Trafzer of Yucaipa, California, generously provided lodging for me during my week in the Los Angeles area so I could further my research on landrace grain varieties of the American West. Cliff and Lee Ann are both noted professors of history, and our friendship goes back to the 1970s when Cliff taught at Washington State University where we began a close friendship that has long endured and led to collaborations on many publishing projects. Lee Ann is an author in her own right, and by some coincidence we learned when she was also studying at WSU back in the day that has many mutual friends and relatives from Brewster, Washington, where she had lived for many years.

Cliff serves a Rupert Costo Endowed Chair of History at UC-Riverside and arranged for me to lecture there on environmental sustainability. Cliff is a prolific writer with the heart of a humanitarian, and he introduced me to an impressive group of graduate students who included Cahuilla tribal elder Sean Milanovich. What Cliff and Sean proceeded to share with me about early Southwestern agriculture was fascinating. I learned that early grain culture spread from 17th century Mexico to the native peoples of the Southwest where some like Cahuilla of present south central California had long gathered grain-like seeds of indigenous plants. Cahuilla elder Francisco Patencio (1857-1947) explained the appearance of the first wheat through the ancient tribal story in which benevolent Cahuilla Creator Múkat fell victim to a conspiracy of the people and animals he had fashioned. The people mourned his loss, and in the place where Múkat died and was cremated in Painted Canyon near Palm Springs, they noticed a variety of nutritious plants emerge from the ashes of his heart, teeth, hair, and other remains. “The first name that they had was the beans, which were the fingers of Múkat,” Patencio related. “These were named Ta va my lum. The corn was named Pa ha vosh lum and the wheat was named Pach che sal and the pumpkins were neh wit em, ….” Soon afterward Múkat returned to earth as a spirit. The following day Cliff took me on an extensive tour east of Riverside to tour the Cahuilla’s legendary Garden of Mara, a place know widely from the tragic story of Willie Boy, Joshua Tree National Monument, and the Painted Rocks area associated with the Múkat story.

Garden of Mara Keeper John (left) and Author-Scholar-Friend Cliff Trafzer

Garden of Mara Keeper John (left) and Author-Scholar-Friend Cliff Trafzer

Cliff is of Wyandot Indian heritage and was raised in the Yuma area so also had much to share with me about the early grain culture of the Pima and Papago peoples of the Gila River basin. By the mid-1800s Pima growers substantially supplied wheat to private teamsters for trade along the Overland Mail Route. These grains contributed to nutritious piñole and other staple soup mixtures of grain, corn, and beans. Some of the earliest California missions developed substantial grain farming and milling operations including places I had been like San Carlos Borroméo de Carmel (1770) and San Antonio du Padua (1771), founded on the fertile lowlands to the south near present Jolon, and San Gabriel Arcángel near present Los Angeles. By the early 1800s San Gabriel, Santa Inéz, and La Purísima led the California missions in production of wheat and barley and helped provision other missions along the El Camino Real. The 1806 stone foundations of San Antonio du Padua’s reconstructed grain mill remain intact, and a stone circular stone-lined threshing floor remains remarkably preserved and is likely the oldest known feature of its kind in North America. German-born artist Edward Visher (1809-1870) included these missions in his collection of twenty-six drawings and pen washes, The Missions of Upper California (1872).

Colored lithograph after Edward Vischer, “Mission San Antonio du Padua”; The Missions of Upper California (1872)

Colored lithograph after Edward Vischer, “Mission San Antonio du Padua”; The Missions of Upper California (1872)

Mission Mortars and Pestles

Mission Mortars and Pestles

The Alta California missions produced substantial amounts of grain and vegetables and raised considerable livestock. An 1850 sketch by frontier artist William H. Dougal (1822-1895) of the San Mateo Rancho granary near the San Juan Bautista Mission shows one side of the wide two-story structure with six doorways and five high windows near the eaves. The oldest extant one in North America is believed to be the Mission San Jose Granary (c. 1726) near San Antonio, Texas, which is a massive barrel-vaulted stone structure with flying buttress supports. Wheat production was especially notable at San Gabriel, Santa Inéz, La Purísima, and San Luis Obispo where at least 150,000 bushels raised at each location from the 1780s until secularization in the 1830s. Mission granary foundations have been located at Mission San Antonio de Padua, La Purísima, and Nuestra Señora de al Soledad. I had read somewhere that the latter, located a few miles west of Highway 101 near Soledad, was among the least restored of the El Camino missions so had not intended to stop there until I found out later its namesake was Mary’s sorrow between the time of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Since I was traveling by on that Saturday I made a pilgrimage to that quiet place which gave some consolation since I had never spent an Easter apart from the family. 

 

The Huntington Library and Gallery, San Marino, California

Rivera Library, University of California, Riverside

Huntington Library Interior

Huntington Library Interior

Lois and I had visited the Huntington Library and Gallery in 1974 when we lived in Monterey, but in those days I was more interested in Western history than European art. So I spent most of the time back then reading through old records of Northwest military posts without much luck without finding much that was useful while Lois had more sense and strolled through the galleries and beautiful grounds. We had no idea that California’s oldest grist mill—El Molino Viejo (c. 1816), was located just a short walk from the library. It has been nicely restored so my recent journey included a visit there to learn more about the story of early Southwest grains and milling. El Molino is officially closed on Mondays—the day I went, but I pled my case of having come so far to a kindly grounds-worker who let me take a look inside. Back at the Huntington I visited the gallery building that was constructed as a grand villa of 55,000 square feet for the family of railroad magnate Henry Huntington and was completed in 1911. A year after his death in 1927, the house was opened to the public for tours of the magnificent rooms, library, and art gallery with such treasures as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie. What I didn’t expect to find was a masterpiece by French artist Jules Breton, The Last Gleanings (1895), the subject of recent writing I had been doing for a manuscript tentatively titled “Hallowed Harvests” about agrarian themes in art and literature.

El Molino Viejo Entry

El Molino Viejo Entry

Nineteenth century France presented the growing contrast between landlord plenty and tenant suffering as the enclosure movement displaced the landless. The trend restricted access to fields and forests traditionally held in common to provide grain for bread, barley and beans for soupe, berries, chestnuts, and other traditional peasant staples. To be sure, the demise of the open-field (“champion”) system occurred to varying degrees throughout Europe due to geographic diversity and social-political circumstances, but brought similar social pressures with changes to land tenure. Across the richer soils of France’s northern plains, for example, open-field access known artists and authors of the time endured well into the nineteenth century as the old village communes could maintain economic viability on smaller plots of fertile allotted lands. The lighter soils of the south required substantially larger acreages which led to consolidation of holdings by fewer residents and erosion of agrarian collectives. More steeply rolling districts in the west like Brittany, Maine, and Vendée facilitated enclosure as farmers demarcated their fields with rows of the native hedge, shrubs, and trees.

Standing next to Breton’s The Last Gleanings (1895); Huntington Gallery, San Marino, California

Standing next to Breton’s The Last Gleanings (1895); Huntington Gallery, San Marino, California

The art of French artist Jules Breton (1827-1906), who I discussed in an early blog in this series, spurred emergence of a new European Realism. He and others elevated the virtues of country life in new ways through more refined interpretations of agrarian workers and thriving community. Principal themes included rural festivals and depictions of the noble, longsuffering strength of peasants—often women and children clad in ragged clothes tending to field labors, and visually document the laborers’ dress, tools, and toil. But the artists’ rustic colors, backgrounds, and resilient expressions of their characters honor creation’s bounty above arduous service. They struggled to interpret the continent’s shifting values in the face of industrial displacement of common folks whose humility, hard work, and happiness had long impressed them.

Breton was raised in rural Artois village of Courrières and his The Life of an Artist: Autobiography (1890) contains numerous descriptions of places and agrarian experiences that influenced his art including lines about inspiration for his first rendering of The Gleaners in 1854: 

The bending wheat sprinkled me with dew as I walked along the narrow foot-path. Among the mists the willows dropped their tears, while their gray tops caught the light overhead. Then I re-entered the village, now all bright and awake, where rose, at times, with the blue wreaths of smoke from the chimneys, the sweet, monotonous songs of the young embroiderers.

I returned to the fields to look at the gleaners. There yonder, defined against the sky, was the busy flock, overtopped by the guard. I watched them as they worked, now running in joyous bands carrying sheaves of golden grain; now bending over the stubble, closely crowded together. When I went among them they stopped their work to look at me, smiling and confused, in the graceful freedom of their scanty and ill-assorted garments.

…I loved the simple beauty of my native place, that offered itself to me, as Ruth offered herself to Boaz.

 

Breton’s paintings also exhibit remarkable depth of field and suffused light of dawn and dusk—his “magic hours” of luminous high summer beauty, that engender intimacy with his rural subjects. Other works depict peasant life throughout the year, but among the most notable are others showing summer labors—Return of the Reapers (1854), The Harvesters (1867), and luminous The Last Gleanings (1895). The latter shows three sheaf-bearing peasants—young, middle-aged, and elderly, returning together from the field at day’s end as if a metaphor for the passage of time and life’s simple blessings. 

Ceres with Grain Cluster Diadem, Huntington Library

Ceres with Grain Cluster Diadem, Huntington Library

From Colonial America To El Camino Real — The Great American Heritage Grains Adventure (Part 3)

This blog is a continuation of a series on my (Richard's) recent trip across the country visiting important sites related to heritage and landrace grain studies. View the other posts here.


The Presido Of Monterey, California

Missions San Antonio Du Padua (Jolon) and San Carlos Borremeo (Carmel)

 

Mission San Juan Carmel Sanctuary (founded 1770); Good Friday, 2017

Mission San Juan Carmel Sanctuary (founded 1770); Good Friday, 2017

From 1973 to 1974 my wife, Lois, left the rolling hills of our native Palouse Country to begin married life in Monterey, California, where I attended the Defense Language Institute to study Russian at the oceanside city’s historic Presidio. While stationed there we explored many of the region’s Spanish missions that had greatly benefited from New Deal era restoration and other preservation work undertaken since the 1930s. One memorable visit to nearby historic Carmel Mission, founded in 1770, was a thoroughly multicultural experience—singing Russian folksongs with our Presidio choir in a Spanish church with commentary by our American conductor in English!

Cousin Patty Poffenroth Bell tending our German “Suesspleena” pancakes(Monterey Bay beyond the windows!)

Cousin Patty Poffenroth Bell tending our German “Suesspleena” pancakes

(Monterey Bay beyond the windows!)

Monterey Bay’s breathtaking beauty is legendary, and we are blessed to have gracious relatives who have lived there for many years—John and Patty (Poffenroth) Bell. Patty’s grandmother and my grandfather were sister and brother, and our family has special memories of their annual summer treks north to tiny Endicott to visit us country cousins. Patty’s Grandma Mae Poffenroth Geier was a young girl when she arrived in 1891 with her Russian-born parents in the Palouse, and shared stories with me about her life at the Palouse Colony where they lived before located nearby on a farm where I was raised between Endicott and St. John.

Back in California, due to concern long before about colonial ambitions by Russia and Great Britain, King Carlos III of Spain authorized an expedition from San Diego led by Gaspar de Portolá and Franciscan friar Junípero Serra to travel overland to Monterey to claim the region “for God and the king of Spain.” They reached this scenic area in 1769 and six years afterward Monterey became the capital of Alta California. Father Serra established the Royal Presidio Chapel in 1770 and in the following year founded Mission San Carlos Borromeo as his headquarters in nearby Carmel Valley. Two hundred years later we attended a friend’s wedding here! San Carlos and San Diego were the first in a chain of twenty missions constructed along the 600-mile El Camino Real from San Diego to present Sonoma (San Francisco Solano) over the next fifty years.

Above: Mission San Antonio Threshing Floor and Grist Mill, near Jolon, CaliforniaLeft: Father Serra Statue and Mission San Antonio du Padua Façade

Above: Mission San Antonio Threshing Floor and Grist Mill, near Jolon, California

Left: Father Serra Statue and Mission San Antonio du Padua Façade

Exhibits at the Presidio of Monterey Museum and Carmel’s San Carlos Borromeo showcase many treasured art objects associated with the missions’ spiritual and agrarian heritage including crosses meticulously decorated with lustrous grain straw appliqué, tapestries with colorful rural scenes, and deftly hand-wrought metal work in the forms of wheat stalks and grape clusters.

Our Mother of Perpetual Help Icon with Grain Stalk and Grape Cluster Candelabras (c. 1850); Mission San Carlos Borromeo near Carmel, California

Our Mother of Perpetual Help Icon with Grain Stalk and Grape Cluster Candelabras (c. 1850); Mission San Carlos Borromeo near Carmel, California

Wooden Cross with Grain Straw Appliqué (c. 1860); Mission San Carlos Borromeo near Carmel, California

Wooden Cross with Grain Straw Appliqué (c. 1860); Mission San Carlos Borromeo near Carmel, California

Until the United States seized control of California during the Mexican-American War in 1846 and later secularized the missions, these centers of regional development utilized Indian workers to raise vast livestock herds and substantial amounts of wheat, barley, corn, beans, and other crops. Areas of highest crop production, with a total of approximately twenty thousand tons of wheat produced from 1782 to 1832, centered around the missions San Gabriel Arcángel west of present Los Angeles, and at Santa Inéz and La Purísima Concepción to the northwest. San Antonio du Padua, founded by Father Serra in 1771 near present Jolon in central California, is today the most fully restored of the El Camino missions and features the original stone threshing floor—among the last extant in North America, adobe granary, and water-powered grist mill.

Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, San Gabriel, California

Mission San Gabriel Sanctuary

Mission San Gabriel Sanctuary

In recent years scientists in the fascinating field of archeobotany have turned their attention to old adobe bricks from the El Camino Missions in order to determine the varieties of wheat, barley, and oats raised in the region from the 1770s. Since the bricks were made using grain straw and can be dated using church records with some precision, this research has been of great interest to many and has relevance to our work reviving landrace varieties at Palouse Colony Farm.

Cereal grains arrived in the New World in the late 15th century when Columbus brought Mediterranean wheats and barleys to Isabella, Puerto Rico, in order to sustain the men and livestock of his later voyages and subsequent arrivals. The grains of the early Spanish explorers did not mature well in the humid Caribbean, but eventually spread across fertile Mesoamerica following Hernán Cortés’ discovery of three wheat kernels in a sack of rice soon after the conquest of Mexico City in 1521. The conquistador directed his Black secretary-aide, Juan Garrido, to plant the grains in a newly established chapel garden plot (huerta). Andrés de Tapia’s sixteenth century Relaciòn Geográfia records that “little by little there was boundless wheat,” and by 1535 wheat was being exported from Mexico City to the Antilles. By the end of the century this grain was adapting to the fertile plains in Spanish-dominated areas to Oaxaca and beyond as the foreigners preferred wheat flour to the flatbreads and tortillas made from cassava, maize, and other indigenous crops.

Original El Camino Real Route, near San Juan Batista Mission, San Juan Bautista, California

Original El Camino Real Route, near San Juan Batista Mission, San Juan Bautista, California

“Chronicler of the Indies” Pedro de Cieza de León (c. 1520-1554) traveled widely throughout the Inca empire in the 1540s and records fields of wheat and barley “thick with stalks” in valleys of Ecuador. The Flemish Franciscan Jodôco Ricke had planted South America’s first wheat at Quito about 1538. Since the eleventh century, the Catholic Church only allowed wheat flour for altar breads so the far-flung missions of New Spain encouraged local cultivation given the irregular schedules of colonial pack trains. Cereals also represented means of acculturation and nutrition. “Eat that which the Castilian people eat,” preached Friar Bernardo de Sahagún to the native peoples of Mexico, so they could also become “strong and pure and wise.”

Mission San Gabriel Harvesters (c. 1895)

Mission San Gabriel Harvesters (c. 1895)

Frontier trade in grain northward advanced before Spanish settlement and evidence indicates that wheat reached the Pima Indians of the Gila Basin in present southern Arizona in the late seventeenth century. Father Eusebio Kino distributed wheat seed among the area’s native peoples upon his visit to Pimería Alta in 1687. Wheat sown in December during the appearance of Wēq—Sculpin (The Pleaides) ripened in the time of Na’sigînax-qua—Three Men in a Line (Orion’s Belt) after harvest of traditional crops like maize and pumpkins. In this way cultivation of Pima Club and other winter grains fit well into the agricultural calendar of the Pima and Papago peoples and were soft enough to grind with stone metatas. When explorer Juan Bautista de Anza visited the Pima in 1774, he wrote that “…standing in the middle [of their wheat fields], one cannot see the ends, because they are so long. Their width is also great, embracing the whole width of the valley on either side.”

Southern California Indian Basket Grain Design

Southern California Indian Basket Grain Design

Pima and Papago women crafted exquisite watertight fine- and coarse-woven baskets and platters for winnowing and storing grains using wheat straw bundle foundations. With Pima vessels these were typically wrapped and decorated in geometric patterns with willow and mesquite bark while Papago bundles, sometimes also fashioned from beargrass and ocotillo, were bound with split yucca leaves and mesquite bark. Large barrel-shaped globular household granary baskets up to six feet high and wide were also made of coarsely woven wheat straw to hold grain, corn, and other seeds.

Mission San Juan Bautista Cradle Scythes, Plows, and Other Farm Tools

Mission San Juan Bautista Cradle Scythes, Plows, and Other Farm Tools