November 20, 1998
By Raoul Lowry Contreras
They are the wiliest creatures in the forest ranging from Canada on the north to Central America on the south. With an explosion of sound, they burst from the ground into the air startling anyone in the vicinity. We are surprised and we know about them, the wild turkeys.
Imagine what the first Europeans who saw them in Massachusetts thought as the wild turkeys flew circles around those blunderbuss carrying men, blunderbusses that couldn't hit anything except by sheer accident. There were no rifles and the shotgun,. though a direct descendent of the blunderbuss, hadn't been perfected for accuracy.
Unlike the British settlers at Plymouth Rock in 1619, the Spanish were far more fortunate when they landed in Mexico in 1519, for the Mexican turkeys were big, fat and totally domesticated, raised from egg to feast purposefully by the Meso-American Indians to eat. They were herded in flocks, communal and filial, and were the opposite of their more northern cousins who led the Pilgrims deeper and deeper into the forests. The Pilgrims thought they were some sort of partridge as they were used to in England, but they weren't, of course. They were also bigger and faster than partridges—and, everywhere.
In England, the Pilgrims couldn't hunt in most cases because the lands were owned by royalty and if they hunted, at all, they were poachers and subject to prison if caught in the act. In America, millions, perhaps billions, of acres of land lay before the Pilgrims, as did millions of wild turkeys, neither of which were owned by royalty, only "savage" natives. The Pilgrims, however, didn't know how to hunt, nor what to plant in the flinty soil of their new home. They didn't even know what was edible in the trees or bushes around them. Certainly, they must have been befuddled by the explosive bird with a blood red neck that made strange noises and silently ran like the wind on the ground and launched themselves from that run with a startling explosion of noise, only as a last resort.
In Mexico, the opposite was true. The Spanish were handed cooked turkey by their Indian allies, the ones who flocked to the Spanish 200-man army of Hernando Cortez that wondrous year of 1519, about a hundred years before the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts by way of Holland and England. They flocked to the Spanish to join in making war on their oppressors, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, rulers of many many Indians throughout the Mexican highlands. Where there were many many Indians, there were many many turkeys. The Spanish had made one of the world's most important discoveries, the domesticated turkey.
They weren't as large as today's scientifically bred versions found by the millions in our supermarkets, nor as meaty, but they were everywhere and took little effort to prepare into meals. The Spanish didn't have to chase the birds, nor even shoot them, for even then, the domesticated turkeys were dumber than their wild cousins.
Did I forget how smart the wild turkey is and was. Hunting them today takes patience, smarts, good camouflage clothing, handmade calls to imitate the hens looking for mates and a good experienced eye. For non-hunters, however, it is easy, for America has taken what Benjamin Franklin wanted to be the American national bird, the turkey, and turned it into an entire industry. Turkey farming has produced so many turkeys in America that they are now exported to Mexico, their original home.
They are exported as turkey bologna, salami, ham, pastrami and good giant breasted white meated birds that are totally delicious. The American turkey industry has worked wonders with their bird and created a year-round industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Pilgrims nearly starved despite more turkeys than they could count in the forests around them; they nearly starved because they didn't know what corn, maize, was, though the Spanish were flooding Europe and Africa with what would become the world's most eaten product, corn, a product of the Valley of Mexico and Peru's contribution, the potato. The Pilgrims nearly starved in Massachusetts until the Indians, much to their later chagrin, showed them how to grow corn, how to hunt and cook turkeys and how to find and pick cranberries. Today's Thanksgiving dinner, if you will.
The Spanish were more fortunate. No bitter winters in Mexico. Food? They were surrounded by dozens of tropical foods such as pineapples, avocados, mangoes, papayas and berries of all kinds; there was corn, there were turkeys, there were fish, oysters, clams, mariscos (mahr-ee-scohs), they called them. But, turkey was the perfect dish for Spanish tastes. It was so delightful, they even produced a new Spanish word-name for the bird — PAVO (pah-voh).
But pavo is such a boring, European word for such an exciting Meso-American, American bird. The Indians had another word-name for it and it wasn't and isn't a boring turkey . It is G-U-A-J-A-L-O-T-E (wah-haw-low-teh). Sure has a ring to it, doesn't it, Pilgrim?
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