Category: maple sugar

By Matthew M. Thomas

Fans of maple history are often intrigued by the question of the origin of maple sugar. Related to that there seems to be a particular fascination with various Native American legends and folk tales that have been used to explain how Native North American people learned to make maple sugar. As a historian whose work is based on careful documentation, getting to the gist of folklore and legends that come from an oral story telling tradition can be a challenge. On top of this is the problem of sorting out what Native American stories are “true,” “old,” or “authentic,” versus those that are the creation of more recent authors and story tellers.

One notable example of such a questionable legend is the often-repeated Native American maple sugar origin story of Woksis and Moqua. However, contrary to the belief that the Woksis and Moqua story is an ancient legend of the Algonquian peoples that has been passed down orally over the generations before finally being committed to print, the Woksis and Moqua story is the 19^th century work of the imagination of a European-American story teller from Vermont by the name of Rowland E. Robinson.

The first time the Woksis and Moqua story appeared in print was the April 1896 edition of the magazine The Atlantic,  appearing in a six-page article written by Robinson, titled “Old-Time Sugar-Making.” In introducing this origin story, Robinson initially makes note that Native people may have learned to tap the maple tree for its sap by watching the spring time actions of the red squirrel nibbling on the smooth bark of young branches of the maple tree, before moving on to the legend of an Algonquian man Woksis and his wife Moqua, and declaring “the true story of the discovery of maple-sugar making is in the legend of Woksis, the mighty hunter.”

Picking up in the middle of Robinson’s text, he first notes that Moqua was aware that the maple tree, when wounded, would produce a sweet water. Robinson then goes on,

Happily, she bethought her of the great maple behind the wigwam, tapped merely for the provision of a pleasant drink, but the sweet water might serve a better purpose now. So she filled the kokh (container) with sap, and hung it over the mended fire. In spite of impatient watching it presently began to boil, whereupon she popped the ample ration of moose meat into it, and set a cake of pounded corn to bake on a tilted slab before the fire. Then she resumed her embroidery, in which the sharp point of each thread supplied its own needle.

The work grew more and more interesting. The central figure, her husband’s totem of the bear, was becoming so lifelike that it could easily be distinguished from the wolves, eagles, and turtles of the other tribal clans. In imagination she already beheld the moccasins on the feet of her noble Woksis; now stealing in awful silence along the war-path; now on the neck of the fallen foe; now returning jubilant with triumph, or fleeing homeward from defeat, to ease the shame of failure by kicking her, in which cases he felt herself bearing, as ever, her useful part. So she dreamed and worked stitch by stitch, while the hours passed un-heeded, the shadow crept past the mark, the kokh boiled low, and the cake gave forth a smell of burning. Becoming aware of this obvious odor, she sprang to the fire. Alas, the cake was a blackened crisp, and lo, the once juicy piece of meat was a shriveled morsel in the midst of a gummy dark brown substance!

She snatched kokh and cake from the fire, and then, hearing her husband coming, she ran and hid herself in the nearest thicket of evergreens ; for she knew that when he found not wherewith to appease the rage of hunger he would be seized with a more terrible one against her. Listening awhile with a quaking heart, and catching no alarming sound, but aware instead of an unaccountable silence, she ventured forth and peeped into the wigwam. Woksis sat by the fire eating with his fingers from the kokh, while his face shone with an expression of supreme content and enjoyment. With wonder she watched him devour the last morsel, but her wonder was greater when she saw him deliberately break the earthen pot and lick the last vestige of spoiled cookery from the shards. She could not restrain a surprised cry, and discovering her he addressed her : —

“O woman of women! didst thou conceive this marvel of cookery, or has Klose-kur-Beh been thy instructor?”

Being a woman, she had the wit to withhold the exact truth, but permitted him to believe whatever he would.

“Let me embrace thee!” he cried, and upon his lips she tasted the first maple sugar.

The discovery was made public, and kokhs of sap were presently boiling in every wigwam. All were so anxious to get every atom of the precious sweet that they broke the kokhs and scraped the pieces, just as Woksis, the first sugareater, had done. And that is why there are so many fragments of broken pottery, and so few whole vessels to be found.

A complete copy of the story in The Atlantic can be viewed at this link.

Following Robinson’s publication in The Atlantic, the Woksis and Moqua story was widely circulated and republished in New England newspapers like The Rutland Daily Herald and The Greenfield Recorder, and the Brattleboro Reformer, as well as a variety of national newspapers and magazines in both the United States and Canada.

Who was Rowland Robinson and how did he come to write this story? Rowland E. Robinson (1833-1900) was a well-known and once popular nineteenth century farmer-writer and illustrator from Ferrisburgh, Vermont. Robinson wrote both fiction and non-fiction, specializing in novels and short stories that featured characters and folklore from life in Vermont. He also frequently made drawings to accompany and illustrate his stories.

As a farmer and rural resident of 19^th century Vermont, Robinson was well-aware of the details and legends of maple sugaring and wrote about it often in his works on Vermont life. In his 1895 story “A New England Woodpile,” he wrote, “here is a sugar-maple, three feet through at the butt, with the scars of many tappings showing on its rough bark. The oldest of them may have been made by the Indians. Who knows what was their method of tapping? Here is the mark of the gouge with which early settlers drew the blood of the tree; a fashion learned, likely enough, from the aboriginal sugar-makers, whose narrowest stone gouges were as passable tools for this purpose as any they had for another.”

In his short story, “In the Spring Woods,” Robinson shared his observations of squirrels intentionally wounding and sucking the sweet sap of the maple tree in the spring. Robinson wrote, “if you wade into the woods — and it is easier wading without a gun than with it — about the time the sugar-makers are beginning their work, you may see that someone has been before them, tapping nearer the sky than their augers bore, and where the sap has a finer and more ethereal flavor. You can see little trickles of it darkening some of the smaller smooth branches, and if your eyes are sharp enough, the incisions it flows from. These are the chisel marks of the red squirrel, the only real sap-sucker I know of, excepting the boy. Make yourself comfortable on some patch of ground that the spring ebb of the snow has left bare and keep still long enough, and you may see him stretch himself along a branch and slowly suck or lap the sap as it oozes from the wound. Evidently he enjoys it greatly, and it must be grateful to his palate, for all winter, save in a thaw or two, he has had nothing to quench his thirst but snow, and eating one’s drink is a hard and poor way of taking it. Was he the first to discover the sweetness of the maple, and did the Indians take the hint of sugar-making from him? If so we are under obligations to him…”

Interestingly, these words relate to an earlier maple origin story published in 1882 by Robinson that uses the same narrative and storyline as the later Woksis and Moqua legend. In March 1882, Robinson published The Story of Maple Sugar in Wide Awake magazine. Wide Awake was a monthly American children’s magazine that published between 1875 to 1893 before it merged with another magazine called St. Nicholas Magazine. A complete copy of the story in Wide Awake magazine can be viewed at this link.

In his 1882 story, Robinson told the tale of how Native Americans came to learn about the sweet sap of the maple tree and went on to make the accidental discovery that maple sap could be made into maple sugar by boiling. In this telling of the story, the characters are an Indian man named Awahsoose, the bear, and his wife, Wonakake, the otter, and a young son called Wungbasahs, the woodpecker.

 

The story begins when the son is out hunting and encounters Mekwaseese, a little red squirrel. When the squirrel was cornered by Wungbasahs with his bow and arrow, the squirrel offered to tell the boy a secret in exchange for his freedom. Robinson wrote,

“Let me hear your great secret, and then I will see.”

“Well,” sighed Mekwaseese, “I suppose I must tell, whether you kill me or not. When you first saw me here I was sucking sweet water from this branch!”

“Sucking sweet water from this branch? You lie, Mekwaseese! There is no sweet water in trees.”

“Yes,” said Mekwaseese, “sweeter than the juice of the sata (blueberry), and ever and ever so much of it. Put your lips here where I have bitten through the bark, and taste for yourself. If I have lied I hope to be shot.”

So Wungbasahs lay down upon the limb, and putting his mouth to the wound, got a few drops of a very sweet and pleasant liquid. The squirrel, having no great faith in Indians, big or little, took advantage of his enemy’s position, and jumping upon his head, scampered along his back, and gaining the trunk of the tree, got behind it in almost no time at all. The boy was angry enough at being played such a trick, and made all sorts of murderous threats against him; but the squirrel asked, peeping from behind the trunk,” Did you not find it as I told you?”

Wunghasahs admitted that it was sweet, but so little of it that he could never get enough to satisfy him.

“But if you will promise never to shoot me, I will tell you how and where you can get a bucketful in half a day.”

Yes, Wungbasahs would promise, if what was told him proved true.

So Mekwaseese told him to take a gouge and cut through the bark of the trunk near the ground, and stick a spout of senhalon wood just below for the sap to run through into a pkenmojo. a birch-bark pail, which should be set at the end of it.

Then Wungbasahs got down from the tree and went home to devise means to carry out the squirrel’s instructions.

He could make a pkenmojo and spout easily enough, but he must borrow the gouge. He knew where his father kept his stone gouges and knives and axe, in a pesnoda, or deer-skin tool-bag, hung in the back side of the wigwam; and he knew as well that he could not get the precious tool for the asking; so he took it-the very best and sharpest one of the lot; for I am sorry to say Wungbasahs was not quite so good as the best boys nowadays. Then he cut a slender stick of senhalon wood, ‘which we call sumac, where it grew on a barren place by the lake shore and where he had often gathered its leaves for his father’s smoking, and whittled out a spout; then peeled a sheet of bark from the mask-wamozi, the white birch, and made a pail; and with these he set forth to the tree where he had found the squirrel, for that, he thought, must be better than any other.

With a good deal more labor than he liked, he cut a furrow through the bark and into the wood, and below it made a slanting cut with the gouge and stuck in the spout. It was a soft, half-sunny day, following a frosty night, and the sap came dropping out of the spout into the bark pail at such a lively rate that there was soon a good draught of it, which Wungbasahs swallowed with great relish.

In an hour or so he had got his fill of drink, and began to wish for something to eat. A bright thought struck him. Only two days before, his father had come back from a hunt, hauling home on his dobogan half the carcass of a moose. Would not a chunk of moose-meat, seethed in a kettle of this sweet water, be better than cooked in any other way? So home he went, and added to his sins by purloining a bit of meat half as big as his foot, and one of his mother’s kokws, or earthen kettles, with a handful of live coals in it, and made off with his booty to his one-tree sap-works.

Here he started a fire with the coals, and, by a cord of bark about its rim, slung the kettle over it filled with sap and the piece of meat.

They say that a watched pot never boils, and this one did not till the watcher had fallen asleep with his back to a tree and his feet to the fire. When he awoke the sun was down and the snow was blue with twilight shadows. His first thought was for his cookery. There was nothing left of the fire but ashes and embers; but the kokw had boiled almost dry, only in the bottom was a gummy mass, out of which rose, like the barren rock, wojahose, the shrunken remains of the moose-meat. Wungbasahs was hungry as a wolf, and, tearing it out, set his teeth into it without waiting for it to get cooler. His delight and astonishment raced with each other over the most luscious morsel he had ever tasted. Sweeter than the minute drops in the bags of the columbine, and a whole mouthful of it, to say nothing of what was left in the kokw!

He was so delighted with his discovery that he ran home with what was left of its results as fast as he could, and told the whole story from beginning to end. When Awahsoose and Wonakake had tasted, and then licked and scraped the kokw cleaner than it had ever been before since it was first made, Wungbasahs was forgiven his theft and unauthorized borrowings, and named, with solemn rites, “The-one-whom-the-squirrel-told-how-to-get-the-sweet-water-and-who-himself-found-out-how- to-make-it-better,” which in Indian is so very long a name that I have not paper enough left to write it on.

And so began the making of maple sugar. This story was not told me by the Indians, but by the Blue Jay; and so I cannot vouch for it, since it is said that, blue as he is, the jay is not true blue.

But I do know that to this day, the red squirrels spared by Wungbasahs suck the sap of the maples.

A complete copy of the story in Wide-Awake magazine can be viewed at this link.

In saying that “the story was not told to me by the Indians but by the Blue-jay” and that the words of the Blue-jay are less than reliable, Robinson freely admits that his story is a tale that sprang from his imagination and not a part of the oral traditions of Native peoples that were passed down through the ages or to Rowland Robinson.

In truth, 14 years before Robinson’s imagination brought the world the Woksis and Moqua story, he published essentially the same story. For his 1896 version of the story, Robinson changed the names and roles of the characters but stuck with the narrative of the squirrel sharing the knowledge of sweet sap and the accidental discovery of boiling sap down to make sugar by neglecting a pot of meat cooking in maple sap.

There are those who will claim with great certainty that the Woksis and Moqua story has deep roots in the oral history and traditions of Native Peoples of New England. I will admit that there is always a possibility that I have made a mistake and my research in incomplete or has led me astray. I would love for another researcher to produce a well dated earlier example of a close version of this story gathered from the oral traditions of the indigenous peoples of North America. As a historian of the maple industry, it is important to try to be objective and dispassionate and take an empirical approach when looking at the past. I have learned to question our assumptions about long-held beliefs and to look a little deeper to see if there is in fact a story behind the story, like with the Woksis and Moqua story.

Is it plausible that there is some truth in this legend as far as the way humans learned to make maple sugar? Yes, it is a plausible tale, but at this point we just do not know how or who first made maple sugar. Was an “authentic” Native American legend passed on to Rowland Robinson for him to put to paper and share with readers of late 19^th century magazines? Almost certainly not.