The first Europeans to visit this part of the Great Plains made some assumptions about the people they met here. The communities they saw didn’t consist of permanent villages surrounded by cultivated farmland, and from the European point of view the people here simply hadn’t “progressed” to the sort of settled agrarian society that was the norm back home. To them, “progress” was a natural transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a society based upon domesticated and cultivated food supplies. They also assumed that what they saw was the way it had always been, and that the people here didn’t farm because they didn’t know how!
The evidence to the contrary was buried beneath the sod.
Remains found in pottery residue from several sites scattered across southwestern Manitoba tell us that cultivated crops were part of the local diet. Digs at places like the Snyder II Site have revealed storage pits: an indicator of plant cultivation
activity. The concept of planting, tending and har- vesting crops was wide- spread across North and South America. In fact the horticultural knowledge of many North American peo- ple was sophisticated and productive.
Corn, beans and wild rice were present in the Gainsborough Creek/Souris River region. Corn is native to North America and is completely domesticated: it cannot reproduce on its own. It was grown here or imported.
We have long known that agriculture was extensively practiced in North Dakota by the Mandans, and we now have evidence of agriculture from the Snyder II and the Lockport Site north of Win- nipeg, Manitoba.
By the time of contact, how- ever, European visitors didn’t perceive signs of either village life or domesticated crops on these plains.
What happened? Climatologists now know that a succession of cold periods, in what was already a short growing season, made gardening difficult. In addition, the increasing sophistication in both the harvesting and processing of bison, along with their abundance, encouraged a specialization in that direction. The Plains Hunters were in fact “managing” the buffalo herds rather than simply hunting them in an opportunistic manner.
Today, with the right infrastructure, we can grow bananas and other warm-climate fruits here in Mani- toba. We have greenhouses, we know how, but it is smarter to trade for those items, and focus on pro- ducing crops that do well here.
The same was likely true centuries ago. Growing corn and living in permanent villages just didn’t mix with the buffalo economy and the new climate reality.
Sources:
Hamilton, Scott; Syms, Leigh; Gibson, Terry “Reexamination of the Plains Woodland Snyder II site, SW Manitoba.” Lakehead University Manitoba Museum Alberta Western Heritage.
Wiecek, Matthew; Syms, Leigh. “Culture Contact and Diversity at a Site of the Northeastern Plains: An analysis of the ceramics and lithics at Snyder V (DhMg-6) in southwestern Manitoba.” Manitoba Archaelogical Society.
