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Southwest Home
Cooking
Introduction
Beans
Many experts consider the
bean the most important food in the West. They tell us that the
bean ended the nomadic life of the Southwest Native American.
Villages were built to allow the Native peoples to grow the bean.
In the Western expansion, the bean was important to their diets.
The chuckwagon cook used the bean to feed the hungry cowboys. The
wagon trains West staple was the bean. The railroad construction
crews diet was the important bean.
It was common for the Indian
farmers to plant corn and squash, and then add beans in the same
row. As the corn reached a few inches high, the beans would use
the corn stalk as a bean pole. The corn plant then shaded the
squash. The squash leaves, an ideal ground cover, conserved any
moisture that happened along.
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