A Brief History of the Onion in America.

The onion remained a predominantly wild plant in the Americas for much longer than in Europe and Asia. French explorer Jacques Marquette, traveling along Lake Michigan in 1674, ate onions, which the local natives called qigaga-wunj. This word means "place of onions" and is the origin of the name Chicago. In later times it came to be called the Canadian onion, Allium canadense, and it grows wild throughout most of North America, from New Brunswick to Florida and westward to the Rocky Mountains. It is not hard to spot, as it has a very strong onion smell and blooms spectacularly in small pink or white flowers. These days it is commonly used as an ornamental plant.

But some historians and naturalists insist,''that the wild onion that gave Chicago its name was actually the leaning wild onion Allium cernuum. It is called leaning because it does not stand upright and, unusually for an onion, is slanted, even when in bloom. It is characterized by white or deep pink flowers with a strong onion odor. According to a description from the 1890s, these onions look "bright as the reddish hues predominate. They often grow so thickly that little else can be seen near them. "

Such brightly colored prairie patches are very rare these days, even in their native range such as Chicago, although they are also found in Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

There are seventy species of wild onions that have been known in North America for centuries. American Indians''They were harvested and sometimes consumed raw, but were also used to flavor cooked dishes or eaten as a cooked vegetable. Onions were also used in syrups and for dyeing substances. Native Americans used roasted wild onions and honey to treat snake bites.

The Indians of North America apparently grew few onions, with the exception of the Aztecs. But Europeans could not imagine life without cultivated onions and so brought them with them.

Christopher Columbus apparently did not find onions on his first voyage to the Caribbean, which was a voyage of discovery, and so brought onion seeds, cattle, horses and sheep on his second voyage, which was a voyage of colonization. In 1494, his crew sowed onions in what is now''is the Dominican Republic.

But the Mexicans probably already had cultivated onions. Hernán Cortés, on his trek from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, found that the natives cooked onions, leeks and garlic. According to Cortés, they ate onions called honacatl. This is a word in Navatl, the original Aztec language still in use today. It currently means "onion," but exactly what kind of onion was originally honacatl is unknown. In the Mayan language, the word sounds like cucut. Francisco Hernandez, a physician to Philippine King Philip II, was sent to Mexico from 1570 to 1577 to study the flora. According to Hernandez, the honacatl was an onion with a "split roof," which probably meant a split bulb, more like a''shallot.

Previous Spanish cooking, many elements of which are still used, does not use much onion. Rich sauces like mole often include dozens of ground ingredients, but rarely onions. The famous mole from Puebla, mole poblano, uses about five different kinds of peppers, chocolate, ground tortilla chips, seeds, and a dozen other ingredients, including garlic but not onions. Mole manchamanteles includes boiled onions and garlic in its long list of ingredients.

It's much easier to trace Mexican cooking back to Spanish cooking because the Spaniards wrote down what they discovered, and the indigenous people still have their own culture and continue to make the dishes they cooked before''the coming of the Spaniards. Some modern innovations have been made. Urban tortillas are now made by machines, but indigenous villagers consider this a disgrace, and tortillas there are still made by hand, exclusively by women. There is still a mention of honacatl in recipes, but today cooks usually use onions brought over by the Spanish. Here's a recipe for honacatl from historian Eriberto Garcia Rivas from his book Cocina prehispánica mexicana:In hot chia oil, fry three finely chopped onions. Add three ripe zucchini, peeled and quartered, a tablespoon of yam or sweet potato flour, stir with a wooden spoon, add six large peeled and de-boned tomatoes, atoy or corn syrup, salt, pepper, herbs, slowly''cook.

It is not known whether the indigenous people of the Pacific North consumed wild onion bulbs, but it is known that, like ancient Europeans, they used other bulbs. They were particularly fond of camas, Camassia quamash, which, like onions, were formerly considered a variety of lily. Modern botanists have concluded that they belong to the agave family.

White settlers learned to eat camas during hard times, noting that it is similar to onions but sweeter. However, there is another species of kamas known as "deadly poisonous kamas" that grows alongside edible kamas, and this causes understandable resistance among new immigrants to harvesting these bulbs. After the Nez Perce presented Lewis and Clark with a nice camas, Lewis described''are harder to find. They most often grow untouchable in national parks, but that's because it's illegal to collect wild plants in national parks.

The Native groups have tried to get an exemption, but it's a tough fight. The Cherokee were charged in 2009 with illegally harvesting ramps in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, despite the park being located on their traditional plant gathering lands. It's an ongoing struggle for a number of Native American groups.

Europeans favored cultivated onions because that's what they were used to. One hundred and fifty years after Columbus, there were still few cultivated onions in the Caribbean and North America. When Richard Lygon, fleeing the English Civil War,''a product for settling pioneers on wagons that traveled westward. An 1860 issue of the California Magazine indicated that a bow was one of the 'necessities' for an eight-day journey into the mountains.

Elizabeth Bacon Custer, widow of George Armstrong Custer, did not write about his racism and genocide, but she did write about onions while driving into the badlands west with Custer, saying they were "as rare there, and more valued than pomegranates in New York City. "

Custer and his younger brother Tom, who also died on the Little Bighorn, were avid bow enthusiasts. But apparently, according to a rare indication, Elizabeth didn't like the smell of onions from her husband. In an 1873 letter to his wife while on an expedition on the Yellowstone River, Custer wrote that he was gorging himself on onions''now, while away from her. "I have dined on a WEEDED ONION; breakfast, lunch, and dinner probably pass on it to-morrow, and the day after to-morrow, and the day after that, ad libitum, ad infinitum.... That's it, old boy! Enjoy your freedoms! ... If you intend to eat raw onions, it's your time, because '\'missus is coming'\'".

Custer apparently ate onions as he found them, but some Americans wanted more-they wanted onions bigger, smaller, stronger, weaker, sweeter. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, onions became big business.