Climates of Hunger: Mankind and the World's Changing Weather

2. The Case of the Missing Farmers

CHAPTER 2 The Case of the Missing Farmers STRETClHNG ACROSS the Great Plains from Iowa to Colorado, drifted over with the soil of centuries, lie the vestiges of a thousand small villages. They are lost to the sight and mind ofall but a few archaeologists, but once they teemed with life-the bustle of hunting preparations alternating with the care of fields and the tending of com. For generations the cycle of seasons and the cycle of life went on, summer alternating with winter and cultivation with hunting. The debris of the hunt and of daily chores accumulated in and around the villages, to be smoothed out occasionally with a general housecleaning, gradually building layer on layer with remains of generations past-pots and hoes, bones, and occasional charred cobs and kernels of com. In the sixteenth century, when Coronado traversed the plains in his vain search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, he found no cities, and very few of the small agricultural villages that had once dotted the area. 19 20 I. Two Tales of Famine In the early nineteenth century, when the mountain men and explorers who spearheaded the European invasion of the American heartland crossed the plains, they found no corn-farming Villages. They left behind the last of the agricultural tribes as they moved out onto the grasslands-the Arikara and Mandan on the Missouri and the Pawnee in eastern Kansas-not to find corn fields again before reaching the Pueblos in the southern Rockies. They traded with nomadic tribes and hunters who had lived in the area for centuries. In the twentieth century, remnants of the villages were uncovered , but only as layers of accumulated debris covered by windblown soil. Where had all the farmers gone? When had the villages been abandoned? And why? The fire ofSt. Anthony Several centuries before Coronado and before the mountain men, from the ninth to the fourteenth century, a strange madness accompanying a devastating illness periodically reached epidemic proportions in western Europe. Whole villages would suffer convulsions , hallucinations, gangrenous rotting of the extremities, and often death. Pregnant women would abort, and even pets and domestic animals would give evidence of the same illness and die. In its acute form the disease broUght great abdominal pain and violent convulsions, followed by speedy death. In the chronic form it affected the extremities: an icy chill developed, followed by a burning sensation. The limbs darkened, shriveled, and fell from the body. The affliction was so widespread that monasteries were devoted to the care of the unfortunate sufferers who did not immediately die, and in 1096 the order of the Hospital Brothers of St. Anthony was founded to care for the victims of the disease. Because the blackened, gangrenous hands and feet looked as though they had been burned, the disease was likened to fire; it was often called St. Anthony's fire. In 1596, though the incidence of the disease was greatly reduced, the medical faculty at Marburg identified the poison which had wrought such havoc (Haggard, 1929, p. 218). It was contained in kernels of rye affected with ergot blight-the fungus now known as C/aviceps purpurea. The blighted kernels are blackened and en- The Case of the Missing Farmers 21 larged, and only a few incorporated into a sack of flour are enough to affect those who eat the bread made therefrom. St. Anthony's fire last appeared in 195:[ in southern France, and investigation there finally solved its most puzzling feature-the hallucinations, which had, of course, been given a religious interpretation in earlier times. Blighted grain, if stored damp, ferments slightly and besides ergot produces a second drug-a form of the hallucinogenic drug now known as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Why should a fungus like Claviceps purpurea be particularly prevalent across Europe, especially in eastern France, from the ninth to the fourteenth century, then diminish? Ergot blight develops in cool, persistently damp weather. This suggests that such weather was common in western Europe between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. There is documentary evidence of such weather as well. From manuscripts and chronicles it is possible to extract pieces of weather information which, carefully collated, yield an outline of the changing weather patterns of the last millennium. There are few references in medieval sources to very wet summers, but there does emerge a pattern of summers when fields were not dry enough to be...