It is certain, however, that from the very first, Americana plums were much used by the early settlers as wild fruits, for the histories of all the colonies and states in which plums are found contain innumerable references to wild plums, usually with some expression showing that they were considered makeshifts until the European plums could be grown. Long before white men came to America the possessors of the continent knew and esteemed these fruits of the woods. According to some of the early writers wild plums of this species, since found where the Americanas are dominant, were planted and rudely cultivated by the natives.[111] It is likely, however, that these Indian orchards were more often the result of seeds dropped about camping places and towns rather than regularly planted orchards. It is not improbable that the wide distribution of this species in the Mississippi Valley and the country about and beyond the Great Lakes is due somewhat to the hand of the Indian, of the voyageur and of the missionary of the French regime. The common names under which this plum passes in the states where it is found as a wild fruit are indicative of the knowledge possessed of it by the people. The Americana is nearly always the wild plum of eastern America. It shares with several other species the names in various parts of the country of Red Plum, Yellow Plum, the Horse and the Hog Plum. In Iowa this is most often the “native plum;” in Indiana it is the Goose plum; in Georgia, the August plum, while in the states bordering on the Gulf it is often called the Sloe. The domestication of Americana plums is due to the fact that the plums of Europe will not thrive in the Mississippi Valley, the prairie states, nor, for the most part, in the South. The European species are tender both to cold and heat in these regions and they are attacked by those scourges of plum culture, black-knot, leaf-blight and curculio. If, then, the people in the West and South were to have plums at hand when wanted, the wild species had to be brought under cultivation. Where the two will grow side by side it is doubtful if any would choose to grow the Americanas in preference to the Europeans or even for the sake of variety. The Americana plum was introduced into European gardens at an early date, for references to it are found in the pomological works of the Eighteenth Century, Duhamel having described it in his great work on pomology in 1768, under the name _Prunier de Virginie_, and later Poiteau[112] gives a very good description of it under the name _Prune de la Gallissioniere_. Just how much earlier than these dates it was taken to the Old World cannot be said, but seeds of it are likely to have been taken there by some of the returning explorers of early colonial times. The important fact is that as a cultivated fruit it has made absolutely no headway in competition in Europe with the plums of that continent though it is to be found not infrequently as an ornamental.