Health on the Great Plains

Dietary diversity’s benefits were evident on examination of 273 Arikara skeletons interred between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, most between 1680 and 1750.¹¹⁶ Femur robustness evinced excellent nutrition, and iron, vitamin B_q, and B₁₂ deficiencies were uncommon.¹¹⁷ Bone density benefited from the fact that Arikara and other Plains Indians were active outdoors. Exertion and exposure to sunlight correlate with bone density, partly explaining Ankara's stout femurs. Of skeletons classified men, only 2 percent had porotic hyperostosis, defined in Chapter 1, and 8.3 percent had cribra orbitalia. Women exhibited no porotic hyperostosis and just 2 percent had cribra orbitalia. These data suggest adequate iron and vitamins B₉ and B_l2. Because vitamin C aids iron absorption, it too was likely satisfactory in diets.

Other evidence indicated healthfulness. As noted, most Arikara skeletons dated between 1680 and 1750, prosperous decades when number of villages and size of storage pits and middens increased. These people must have been well nourished to have stored more food and generated more garbage. Population increase is harder to interpret. Vitamins B₉ and B,₂, omega 3 fatty acids, olive oil, vegetables, fruits, fish, and nuts may increase fertility.¹¹⁸ Soy foods, dairy, vitamin D, antioxidants, caffeine, and alcohol may contribute little or nothing to it. Junk foods and beverages, red meat, and potatoes are thought to depress fertility. Such thinking provides no insight into the fact that prehistory and history supply countless examples of population increase amid penury and dietary distress. Additionally, the premise that some foods enhance fertility whereas others diminish it is questionable. Against the opinion that potatoes reduce fertility, for example, Chapter 13 demonstrates that birthrate rose throughout northern Europe upon their widespread adoption in the eighteenth century.

Nonetheless, the Arikara inhabited no utopia. Food was scarce during winter. Every five to ten years, shortages were severe enough to kill weaklings, infants, and the old.¹¹⁹ As noted, population increased amid abundance, crowding Arikara villages and polluting the nearby Missouri River. Pathogens, parasites, rodents, and insects multiplied in this environment. After roughly 1740, conflicts escalated with the Sioux. These problems offset good nutrition, dragging e° below twenty years.¹²⁰

Where it occurred, anemia probably did not result from dietary deficiency. As mentioned and as Tables 4.2 and 4.3 indicate, porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia were infrequent among the Arikara, and the ninety-seven Pawnee skeletons exhibited no instances of either among men.¹²¹ Only two women suffered from porotic hyperostosis and none had cribra orbitalia. All seventy-six Omaha skeletons, both men and women, displayed no anemia.

TABLE 4.2

Porotic Hyperostosis in Great Plains Indians Adults

TABLE 4.3

Cribra Orbitalia in Great Plains Indians Adults

Arikara, Pawnee, and Omaha skeletons of children who died before age eleven had higher rates of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia, in Tables 4.4 and 4.5, than adults. Anemia must have stunted these youths during years normally devoted to growth and contributed to their demise.

Surprisingly, the 217 Cheyenne, Crow, and Sioux skeletons had the most adult and childhood porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia.¹²² These horsemen should have been least vulnerable to anemia because, as noted, they had access to the most bison and other game. Meat constituted two- thirds to 85 percent of their diet whereas sedentary Plains Indians got under half their calories from it.¹²³ Additionally, being more than transportation and status symbols, horses supplied meat when food was scarce. The wealthiest, ow'ning as many as forty horses, had plenty of extra food during shortages.¹²⁴ The Plains staple was pemmican, a combination of dried bison, lard, and wild berries, cherries, or plums that stored years in an era before refrigeration.

Although these horsemen compared poorly to their sedentary neighbors in skeletal pathologies, Table 4.6 demonstrates that they lived longest. Omitting youth mortality, Table 4.6 shows that the Cheyenne, Crow, and Sioux as a group outlived the Omaha by 16.3 years, the Arikara by 13.7 years, and the Pawnee by 11.1 years.¹²⁵ Unlike skeletal pathology data, differences in lifespan are unsurprising given nomad mobility and greater bison consumption.

TABLE 4.4

Porotic Hyperostosis in Great Plains Indians Children

TABLE 4.5

Cribra Orbitalia in Great Plains Indians Children

TABLE 4.6

Age at Death of Great Plains Indians

Unlike beef, bison does not raise low-density lipoproteins (LDL), whose role in transporting cholesterol to cells Chapter 2 discussed.¹²⁶ When allowed to eat grasses, as is their preference, bison store unsaturated fat as omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids in a 4:1 ratio.¹²⁷ Grain-fed cattle yield beef with a ratio around 13.6:1, and modern diets approach 30:1.¹²⁸ In contrast, studies of modern hunter- gatherers indicate a ratio near 1:1.¹²⁹ Chapter 2 examined the structure, naming, and function of fatty acids, including omega 3 and omega 6.

Returning to anemia, an earlier section mentioned iron and vitamins B_q and B_l2 as crucial nutrients. Table 4.1 indicates that 100 grams of bison supply 15.4 percent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) daily value (DV) for iron, 3 percent for B_q and 32.3 percent for B_l2. Focusing on iron, Table 4.1 shows that by mass bison trails beef, mutton, goat, and venison but surpasses pork. Nevertheless, Prince and Steckel judged bison intake adequate in iron to enable Plains Indians, even the poorest, to attain maximum heights.¹³⁰ Under this circumstance, iron cannot have been deficient.

That is, bison eaters should have been unlikely anemics. The contradiction between bison consumption and anemia amplified the larger incongruity that Plains Indians who ate a varied diet exhibited signs of dietary distress. Movement beyond this problem requires examination of the mythology of the hunt. Always on the move, Cheyenne, Crow, and Sioux seldom resided anywhere long enough to accumulate the wastes that nourished germs, parasites, rodents, and insects. These peoples lived in small bands, not in cramped cities that incubated contagion. Getting plenty of sunshine and feasting on bison, other game, and a variety of plants, these nomads must have been hale.

Yet this image of Plains peoples as paragons of vitality was an anachronism by the late nineteenth century, when anthropologists began to study them. By then, reservations warehoused the remnants of tribes that had once relished their independence, giving them too much white flour and alcohol, too many canned goods, too little fresh meat, and too few fresh vegetables and fruits.¹³¹ Among students of native peoples, German-American anthropologist Franz Uri Boas (1858-1942) measured Plains Indians in the 1880s, presenting these data at the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.¹³² Marking the quatercentenary of Italian-Spanish mariner Christopher Columbus’ (1451-1506) first encounter with Amerindians, the event heightened scholarly and popular interest in them.

FIGURE 4.7 Christopher Columbus. (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ item/96513605/.)

These measurements came at a crucial moment. As mentioned, the Plains Indians then occupied unhealthy reservations. The bison that had nourished them faced extermination as whites slaughtered them to clear land for cattle, sheep, railroads, and towns. Yet the 1880s were not distant from good times. Older adults had eaten bison and other game as children. Their heights therefore recorded nutrition during youth’s growth spurt. Boas and his assistants measured men and women from eight Plains tribes: the Arapaho, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux. Table 4.7 shows that men averaged 172.2 centimeters (67.8 inches) and women 159.7 centimeters (62.9 inches).¹³³ The tallest were the Cheyenne, w'hose men were 176.7 centimeters (69.6 inches) and women 161.5 centimeters (63.6 inches). The shortest were the Comanche, whose men stood 168 centimeters (66.1 inches) on average. The mean for women was 156.7 centimeters (61.7 inches).

The Comanche occupying the southernmost Plains, temptation exists to apply Bergmann’s rule, introduced in Chapter 1, to them. German biologist Carl Georg Lucas Christian Bergmann (1814-1865) described size as an adaptation to climate. Near the equator, people tend to be small because smallness dissipates heat, an advantage in hot climates. Away from the equator, largeness conserves heat, a benefit in cold climates.

Height is an aspect of size, though largeness may be achieved through bulk irrespective of stature. For example, the Romans described Mediterranean peoples as shorter than northern Europeans, evidence that shortness might be an adaptation to warmth.¹³⁴ Yet skeletal measurements do not entirely confirm this impression because remains interred in Greece between roughly 3000 and 146 BCE indicated that women were 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) shorter—but men 0.5 centimeters (0.2 inches) taller—than their counterparts in Roman Germania.¹³⁵ Even had heights differed north and south, dietary dissimilarities rather than climatic adaptation might have been the cause.

Returning to the Great Plains, the Comanche, occupying the southern Plains, confirmed the expectation of smallness if shortness were always an adaptation to warmth. Yet the two cannot be equated because the Assiniboine were the second shortest Plains people despite inhabiting the U.S.-Canada border. Not a consequence of Bergmann’s Rule, Plains tallness—and possibly height across time and place—must illuminate nutrition, making it a metric for comparing nutrition among various peoples. This view aligns with Dutch historian Willem Marinus Jongman’s judgment that “Stature is no doubt the best generalized indictor of nutritional status.”¹³⁶

In 2012, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia reported a mean height of 176.5 centimeters (69.5 inches) for American men.¹³⁷ The average American woman stood 161.8 centimeters (63.7 inches).¹³⁸ These heights almost mirror 1880s Cheyenne stature, an achievement given that food is more plentiful in the United States today than at any time in the past. Equally impressive, global measurements indicate that in the 1880s the Cheyenne were the world’s tallest people.¹³⁹ As a group, Plains nomads stood 1-2 centimeters (0.4-0.8 inches) above

TABLE 4.7

Plains Indians Heights

whites in nineteenth century United States and Australia and 6-12 centimeters (2.4-4.7 inches) over Europeans.¹⁴⁰ These data do not guarantee that abundance produces health. People are tall today despite prevalence of junk foods, cigarettes, and inactivity.

Meat and Health in North America

Reaching North America some fifteen millennia after the first arrivals, Europeans and their descendants ate beef and pork rather than game like bison. Despite this difference, European Americans also benefitted from meat. Data from pensions certified between 1654 and 1830 in Middlesex County, Massachusetts demonstrated that widows’ meat allowances increased over time.¹⁴¹ Between 1675 and 1750 the annual allotment per widow rose from 36.3 to 76.2 kilograms (80 to 168 pounds). American historian, economist, and 1993 Nobel laureate in economics Robert William Fogel (1926-2013) extrapolated this trend, noting that by roughly 1750, Americans’ meat intake reached an amount that Britons would not match until after 1900. By 1750 Americans were taller than Brits on average and had reached twentieth-century developed w'orld heights, indicating nourishment equal to recent times.

Stature and lifespan grew' until about 1790, w'hen gains reversed as entrepreneurs created factories.¹⁴² Management underpaid workers, inequalities widened, and nutrition, height, and longevity fell. Since the 1880s these measures rebounded. Over the long term, meat consumption increased and mortality fell 35 percent in the United States and 21 percent in the United Kingdom between 1700 and 1980.¹⁴³ This book emphasizes that diet alone did not determine longevity. Chapter 7 notes that pasteurization, clean w'ater, sew'age treatment and disposal, antisepsis in hospitals, and hygiene in the home reduced deaths.