A multicoloured mosaic of corncobs adorns the 19th-century ‘Corn Palace’ of Mitchell in South Dakota, celebrating the importance of this crop to the economy. But how did these plants, whose wild forms prefer the hotter, drier zones that are found in the highlands of Mexico, come to dominate the Northern Plains?
The answer is through the expansion of farming peoples up the river systems of North America – the Mississippi, the James, and the Missouri – over many centuries, accompanied by gradual selection of the most appropriate strains of crops to survive the changing environments and climates.
Though farming reached this region comparatively late, in about AD 1000, today the area is a major agricultural producer of commodities such as maize and beans. The people who lived at Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village 1,000 years ago were among the first to grow maize here. Their descendants, tribes such as the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa, still lived in similar style villages, and were using similar farming techniques along the banks of the Missouri when the first European settlers arrived.
