THE NUT PINES A group of soft pines, with fewer needles than five in a bundle, grows on the Western mountain slopes. Small trees they are, which have to struggle hard against the winds and storms, and with the scant moisture of the desert air and soil for a bare living. They are very interesting because of the fact that they have nuts, rich, sweet, and nutritious, under the scales of their cones, and these nuts are important items in the food of many Indian tribes of the West.
The first is the four-leaved nut pine that grows on the barren mountain slopes of Southern and Lower California. It is a desert tree, rarely reaching forty feet in height, and this only in the most favourable situations. The foliage is pale sage green. No other pine has four leaves in a bundle. Its nut-like seeds are rich in oil, starch, and sugar. Without them the Indians of Lower California would probably starve. In Riverside County the tree is common at 5,000 feet above sea level. It has a regular pyramidal head, when young, becoming low, round-topped and irregular when very old.
Another pifion, but this one with a bushy, broad top, and often considerably taller, grows with the four-leaved pine on the mountains of Lower California, and northward along the canyons and mountain slopes of Arizona. The short leaves are dark green, and there are but two or three in a bundle. The seeds are plump, and rounded, or angular. The upper side is brown, the lower side black, and each has a pale brown wing.
A third nut pine, or pifion, two- or three-leaved, grows on the eastern foot hills of the outer ranges of the Rocky Mountains, on both sides of the system. Forests of it are found on the high plains of Colorado and Arizona. It sometimes grows large enough to be used for lumber. The nuts are half an inch long, and have thin, brittle shells. They are gathered by Indians and Mex icans, and may often be bought in the markets of Colorado and New Mexico.
The one-leaved nut pine seems to belong with the spruces and firs, and other single-leaved evergreens, but there are frequently two leaves in the bundle, and there is a little scaly sheath at the base. The grey-green leaves often hang on
for ten or twelve years. The winged nuts are over half an inch long. The wood furnished fuel and charcoal to the smelters in the mining regions, and the Indians of Nevada and Califor nia harvest the nut crop.
Every autumn when we are going for chest nuts and hickory nuts in our Eastern woods, we may think of the Indian families who leave their homes in the lowlands, and climb the mountain slopes to gather their nuts which are their staff of life. If we should miss our nutting excursion, it would make no vital difference in our lives during the coming winter. Our nuts are not a serious part of the provisions of the household. But with the Indians, to miss the nut pine harvest, means to have no bread for the winter that is coming.
Mr. John Muir, who has often lived among these stunted upland forests, and seen the Indians gathering the nuts and using them later as food, tells us many interesting things. The trees of the one-leaved nut pine are low, like old apple trees, and full of cones. The Indians get long poles, and beat the cones off the trees, then roast them on hot stones, until the scales open. Then they shake out the nuts, and gather them in baskets and bags to carry home. These nuts are eaten raw or parched on hot stones. These are the easiest and simplest ways. But the best and most palatable form in which they are pre pared costs much more time and labour. The nuts are parched, then ground or pounded into meal. This is stirred up with water, into a kind of mush, which is formed into cakes and baked. This is, in general, the way in which all pine nuts are made into bread.
The time of the nut harvest is, for the Indians, the merriest time of the year. If the crop is heavy, the spirits of the party are light. A single family, if it is fairly industrious, can gather fifty or sixty bushels of these rich, thin shelled nuts in a single autumn month; and with this quantity to carry home, can go down the mountains, tired but happy, knowing that their bread for the winter, and plenty of it, is assured.