The North American Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) is a tree not well known by the general public. It belongs to the family of custard apples, Annonaceae, and some refer to the fruit as the North American banana. It requires the nearby presence of a Pawpaw relative to cross pollinate and produce fruit.
I have sampled a few of the fruit and found it quite tasty, with some resemblance to that of a banana. What surprised me was the size and amount of seeds within the fruit, an oblong one half inch, dark pod. I tried several ways to get some seeds to sprout, but to no avail. Like other trees, the literature suggests the acid within the digestive juices of an animal, such as a raccoon, might be needed to break down the seed covering.
An interesting and seemingly unrelated fact has entered American folklore connecting the Pawpaw to the Lewis and Clark expedition. During their three year expedition there were several members of the party that were game hunters. Lewis and Clark realized they could not take enough food provisions to last the entirety of a quest that would take who knows how long. So the strategy included the use of hunters who would go in advance of the group and harvest wild game and bring it to a riverbank campsite that the others were progressing to. Those in the rear were in larger boats and in the journey westward, they were going against the current of the Big Muddy. It was an arduous feat and they averaged only ten miles a day as they pushed, paddled and pulled their watercraft upstream. No wonder each member ate around eight pounds of meat every day.
On the return journey their daily mileage increased as they went with the flow. The group got excited as they recognized they were getting closer to the goal of returning to their departure point of St. Louis. It was more than three years since they started and they were eager to return. They wrote in their journals that a shift had occurred in their food collection ways. In the waning days of the expedition they took advantage of the nature of Pawpaws, the trees propagate by root sprouts forming significant groves and therefore, in the ripening days of September when the trek was about to end, they subsisted almost entirely on Pawpaws. The services of the hunters was no longer needed.
Pawpaw fruit - Missouri Department of Conservation photo
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