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Transcription: [00:08:53]

{SPEAKER name="Helen Rountree"}
...there are also some pignut hickories, scrubby ones, but you've got to compete with the critters for them. So the food-getting is not particularly good, whether you are gathering edible plants, or whether you're hunting critters. It was an area that people might have camped in if they really were getting pushed. But otherwise it's not ideal.
[00:09:12]

Alright. This brings us to the next zone, which people would go to for food but they wouldn't camp in, which is just as well. This is the saltwater marsh zone. And there's a lot of that. I'm going to mark it in with yellow. There's loads of it. For instance, along the eastern part of the eastern shore. All these islands are actually saltwater marsh.
[00:09:34]

There are extensive zones of it. All along the western edge of the bay, unless the cliffs come down too high, tons of it in southeastern Virginia, the place is lousy with saltwater marsh. And there is a small lining of saltwater marsh along many of these smaller creeks as well.
[00:09:52]

Now, saltwater marsh is not a bad thing to have in your territory, although it's still not as good, from the Indian standpoint, as freshwater marsh. Saltwater marsh, as far as I've been able to discover, does not really produce plants that are edible by people.
[00:10:05]

It produces a rather tough set of grasses and of reeds, and so on. And these are useful for building materials and for making baskets and that sort of thing, up to a point, but edible plants, no. And Indians' minds were firmly fixed in their stomachs, if you can believe the English colonists. And if an area didn't produce enough food then the heck with it.

[00:10:25]
What the saltwater marsh does produce instead is animals on a rather small scale. If you're absolutely starving, pennywinkles are real easy to get, periwinkles sorry. (I grew up calling them pennywinkles). There are saltwater mussels, which are edible, contrary to modern opinion. There are oysters that will grow up to the edge of it, but they're better actually out under the waterways, and I'll come to waterways, 'cause that's a heavy use area, later.
[00:10:50]

There are at high tide blue crabs, which you might be able to catch, and also a variety of minnows and sometimes slightly bigger things. And in the saltwater marsh, when it's of any real extent, there will be a lot of these waterways going through it. And those waterways will be populated by fish of considerable size, crabs of considerable size, and also in season there are
[00:11:14]