Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  Within the Intermountain West, this restless clan includes about three dozen or so different species. For all their abundance, most of these biscuitroots live so inconspicuously that they have never acquired memorable common names. The fact that “cous” is sometimes applied to several different biscuitroots as a general term only adds to the confusion.

  Pioneering naturalist David Douglas would have sympathized with this dilemma. When he traversed the northern Plateau in the early spring of 1826, he quickly collected five different kinds of biscuitroots, including two or three with white flowers and purple anthers. None of them had the kind of large, striking flowers that might sell to British gardeners, and none of them displayed any clearly defined characteristics that would allow for field identification on the fly. Douglas entered them in his notebook as Umbellifores and moved on. In the two centuries that have passed since, several taxonomists have devised keys to separate the Lomatiums, with words such as “variable” and “overlap” cropping up frequently in their technical descriptions. Field researchers not only continue to describe new species but also consistently manage to find plants that do not fit a prescribed pattern. This is why botanists refer to the genus as “unsettled,” and why, to a novice, the Lomatium complex seems like a wheeling flock of migrant shorebirds that never quite settles to Earth.

  As a professional, Pam Camp understands the value of rigorous scientific work, both in the lab and out in the field. Even with modern techniques, she believes it will take geneticists quite a while to sort out exactly what is going on with Lomatiums. “No single factor is going to solve the puzzle,” she says. “You have to consider each plant and its makeup. You have to look at how and where it lives. You have to weigh everything else around it.”

  From my tenuous foothold about a quarter of the way up that Saddle Mountain talus slope, I tried to relate her words, and a single gray-green Hoover’s desert parsley, to the larger world. It was more than I could manage.

  The Rounds

  Lomatiums have provided a key resource for the Plateau tribes with whom they have shared territory since the end of the last ice age. As late as the 1970s, families living around the Yakama Reservation described uses for no less than fourteen different species of biscuitroots. Although stems, leaves, and seeds all received some mentions, the majority involved the digging and processing of the roots for food.

  Two of these tubers are clearly the most utilized: cous (Lomatium cous), the one that appears so often in Meriwether Lewis’s journals, and Canby’s biscuitroot (Lomatium canbyi), which he never mentions at all. These two biscuitroots are easy to tell apart. The flowers of cous are yellow; those of canbyi are white. Cous tubers vary wildly in shape, like a paper bag blown up and scrunched in every possible way. Canbyi, on the other hand, produces perfectly globular spheres that, aside from depressions caused by rocks or roots, could be mistaken for dirty golf balls. Cous dominates the southern half of the Plateau—southeastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and adjacent areas of western Idaho—while the range of Canby’s biscuitroot extends from central Washington along a westward curve that follows the foothills of the Cascade Range south to the Columbia.

  When Lewis and Clark entered that region on their return trip upstream along the Columbia in spring 1806, they found that their visit coincided with the season for digging biscuitroots. At Celilo Falls on April 17, they tried to trade for some packhorses to cross the mountain ranges ahead, but had no luck, because, Clark reported, “The chief informed me that their horses were all in the plains with their womin gathering roots.” Plateau families, especially the women and children, were flowing across the countryside, branching and turning and joining again: season-dependent, flexible, persistent, hardy, resourceful, skilled, and knowledgeable to a degree that the white visitors could sense but in their short time on the scene could never quite grasp.

  A little further upstream, at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake Rivers, Lewis and Clark might have seen the ancestors of Mary Jim setting out with twined root bags and digging sticks. In a 1980 oral account, Jim described her family’s travel routes, which had persisted since the early nineteenth century, and for untold generations before that.

  “I am a Palouse Indian from the Snake River, where my people have always lived. God put us there, and we prayed, thanking Him for the river and the salmon and all good things,” Mary Jim began. “My father was Alliyua, Thomas Jim, and his father was Fishhook Jim, Chowatyet. We lived at village Tasawiks. My grandmother was Amtaloot, who was from Priest Rapids. Grandmother taught me many things about how to live when I grew up.”

  A large part of Mary Jim’s education consisted of learning the rounds for gathering roots—where and when her family sought cous and several different biscuitroots, as well as a variety of other tubers.

  “We would start to move in March. We would move to Soap Lake, dig certain kinds of roots. They used to dig skúkul [Lomatium canbyi] and some other roots.”

  Mary Jim’s uncle Harry Jim would lead the family to Colfax for still more variety. They also camped on the Waterville Plateau north and west of Soap Lake. From there, they would move up in elevation as the season progressed, arriving on sites at the most favorable moment for gathering certain species. They worked “all over that big hill, Badger Mountain,” Mary Jim said. “We used to stay there. That’s where people used to gather, play stick games, dance the Washat, you know, the Seven Drum Religion. We used to race horses at Badger Mountain.

  “When we were done there, we moved back to Snake River, last of May maybe, and then salmon came up the river. In the fall, we went over to Walla Walla to dig cous. That’s where we used to camp and dig.

  “Then we went up into the mountains to dig other kinds of roots. You baked some of them. We traveled a lot. You ought to have seen them horses: packin’, packin’, packin’.”

  Mary Jim’s relatives, who were affiliated with Palouse, Wanapum, Yakama, and other tribal entities, spoke different Sahaptin tongues. Their names for the roots that fed them varied with place, time, growth stage, preparation technique, and taste. Mary Jim learned these names and places from her grandmother and uncle, who had been going to their special sites since they were small children, absorbing the knowledge of generations and passing it along.

  For people across the northern part of the Plateau—central and northeastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle, and southeastern British Columbia—the white-flowered Canby’s biscuitroot is more accessible than its southern cousin, cous. Elders of the Spokane tribe tell a story that explains how these plants are distributed across their corner of the Columbia Basin. A character they called Doodlebug had just spent a day fishing and decided to conceal a nice salmon he had speared from his hardworking sister, who had spent her day busily digging roots of several kinds. Upon discovering Doodlebug’s deception, Little Sister was so filled with anger that she clambered up a ridge above the Spokane River with all her roots and walked to the edge of the cliff. There, to spite her deceitful brother, she scattered those roots to the four cardinal directions. The roots flew away to new places—including some especially fine p’úxw puxw that landed on Ice Age flood-scoured grounds to the south and west, where people still dig them today. The Spokane word for Canby’s biscuitroot is p’úxw puxw, and when native speakers pronounce it, their mouths and cheeks round out to form perfect globes, just like the roots.

  Spokane tribal member Ann McCrae smiled when she spoke to me about a previous generation of women going out to dig. “My mom and her cronies,” she said. “That’s what I called them. She had friends from up on the Colville Reservation and a couple from around here, and they would get in the car and drive all over the place. After they got old, I was often the one who drove them around, to all their different family digging places, and to others that they had heard about. They would talk and laugh and point this way and that, and tell me to keep on going. One time we drove down to Walla Walla for cous and just kept on going all the way to Las Vegas. They thought that was r
eally funny.

  “But they were respectful at the same time. There was this rock they always talked about somewhere near Coffeepot Lake, and it led to several good places to dig p’úxw puxw. They said the steep side of the rock was all fluted with grooves that swooped down just like the hair on the back of a woman’s head. They would go visit that rock, then go dig roots. On their way home, they would stop again to leave a few of the best roots beside the rock. They said everybody did that. Whenever you went by, you would see offerings of roots spread out at its base, as a way of saying thanks.”

  Feasts

  In the spring of 1822, Hudson’s Bay Company clerk Finan McDonald kept the journal for the Spokane House trading post, just downstream from the present-day city of Spokane. During early April, he reported that tribal groups from a dozen or more Salish bands were gathered along the river for runs of steelhead and trout, but as the month wore on, the people began to slip away.

  April 26th … fine mild weather A few Indians tented off to go and collect roots …

  Sunday 28th … A party of Indians removed off some to gather roots and a few to go in search of beaver …

  Monday 29th … A few Indians removed off toward the plains to gather roots …

  These bands were heading for the open country of the Columbia Basin. In certain areas, such as the vicinity of Soap Lake or Badger Mountain, they would have crossed paths with Sahaptin families. Then, relationships would naturally overlap, creating a web of kinship and plant knowledge that would overwhelm the information any binomial Latin designation could provide. Their complex annual rounds, which considered factors as minute as snowpack in a side canyon or the taste preferences of a distant cousin, never took exactly the same shape twice.

  When Lewis and Clark encountered people gathering food near the mouth of the Klickitat River in April 1806, they paused to add a new plant to their collection. The specimen in their herbarium is clearly barestem biscuitroot (Lomatium nudicaule), for which they noted a tribal use: “The natives eat the tops & boil it Sometimes with their Soup … the same as we use celery.”

  That comparison still seems prescient. Today, in the back-and-forth way of cultures sharing place, tribes across the Plateau call the food that anchors their first spring feasts “Indian celery.” There are several different species that answer to this description, and women carefully pick the earliest tender shoots before any flowers appear to serve with early roots, such as cous.

  David Douglas experienced that kind of spring bounty around the mouth of the Okanogan River when, just as the snow was receding, he collected an “Umbelliferae, perennial; flowers purple; one of the strongest of the tribe found in the upper country; the tender shoots are eaten by the natives.” This was fernleaf biscuitroot (Lomatium dissectum), a very robust plant often called “chocolate tips” because of its brownish-purple flower heads. Other Plateau people get their initial dose of fresh spring vitamins from Gray’s desert parsley (Lomatium grayi), clipping the young stems just as they emerge from the ground. The strong taste of this Indian celery outstrips that of fennel or Italian parsley, providing a bite clearly distinct from other shoots that share the “celery” name.

  For First Feast, people gather fresh shoots of certain plants that form part of their cultural traditions. At the same time, they dig particular early roots and prepare them according to their family ways. Much more than a meal, First Feast is a ceremony renewing a sacred compact, and various Plateau creation stories teach the same lesson in different ways: back in the earliest times, the roots promised to take care of the people, as long as the people promised to take care of the roots.

  That ancient pact is evident in late April of each year in the Spokane country, when students from the school on the Spokane Reservation join people of all ages on one communal harvest day at a traditional site on the flood-scoured scablands to dig p’úxw puxw and other roots. Everyone arrives carrying their favorite digging sticks and root bags. Elders offer prayers to begin the work. Clumps of children gather around to learn the skill of starting their stick at a good distance from their target; of twisting the handle so its recurved end will loosen the dirt and rocks; of levering the stick down and cupping their hand beneath its point to lift a root out of the ground.

  As the crowd sifts through the sagebrush, fanning out across low escarpments of worn basalt, three small girls arrange phlox and prairie rocket into a lovely pink bouquet. Lark, sage, and vesper sparrows hop up on bunchgrass tussocks to sing out territory. Harvester ants carry seeds across bare sand and disappear into their small conical mounds. A horned lizard puffs up beneath the shadow of a second grader’s hand. Another student helps his mother with a particularly stubborn biscuitroot that seems to be intertwined with the root system of an ancient sagebrush. “This bush,” whispers the mother to her son, as he leans on the stick for all he is worth, “does not want to share with us.”

  Experienced kids carry their first roots to a circle of elders seated in folding chairs, hold them in front of a favorite auntie, then drop them into a five-gallon plastic bucket. The seated elders talk and laugh as they lean forward to pick the roots from the bucket one by one. Quick fingers strip away a blackish layer of skin, revealing firm white biscuitroot flesh. A strange but irresistible odor, similar to turpentine or kerosene, emanates from the roots.

  Back home, the roots will be strung into necklaces for drying as winter food. Many liken them to popcorn, and say the longer the p’uxw puxw dries, the better it tastes. They look forward to days when they can snack on the strung roots, each bite recalling the crisp delights of spring in the open country.

  By tracking the progress of different sites through the spring, families time their rounds of digging to the period of maximum nutritional value. They also, by design, take steps to make sure the cycle will continue. Parts of roots broken off by sharp digging sticks remain healthy and stimulated underground, like garden bulbs that flourish when divided. Diggers also turn maturing seed tops back into the ground, giving individual seeds a chance to sprout with a little extra protection.

  In much the same way that recipes for roots vary from family to family, the nature of the plants themselves seems to change from one edge of their range to the other. At traditional digging sites along the Columbia’s Big Bend, the skin of the canbyi tubers takes on a slightly different color and texture, and the roots emit less of that distinct kerosene smell that fills the air around the Spokane grounds. Botanists insist that such plants all across the Columbia Basin belong to the same canbyi species, but Sahaptin speakers call the variety from the Big Bend by a different name and say that its taste is rougher. They sort them into different bags and use different methods of preparation.

  While walking on a stony ridgetop near Saddle Mountain, I listened to a Sahaptin man describe how he used to watch his mother and aunties dry, bake, roast, grind, and boil different species of biscuitroots in different sequences to achieve the result they wanted. The ladies would keep all their roots separated until each one was prepared, and then they would combine the array to make small cakes or cookies—a handful of this and a handful of that, shaped into edible form by slapping the palms together. The parents lured their children to participate with the promise that they could keep any cookies they made. Each handful had a distinctive taste, and each combination went together in a particular way. You learned how to make what you liked. After patting together their cookies, the kids laid them in the sun, then turned them carefully until they were dry enough to store.

  One group of neighbors, who gathered roots in many of the same places as the family that made cookies, formed its pounded roots into something more like large pancakes. Each round would be about an inch thick and more than a foot across. The dad would bend together a willow frame, then build a low, slow-burning fire inside. The family laid its pancakes on top of the frame, so that the fire’s smoke could slowly cure them. Different method. Different taste.

  The Sahaptin man arched his fingers to imitate how that
red willow frame allowed the smoke to curl around each giant flatbread and seal in all the flavor. He made it easy to picture Lewis and Clark breathing in that same delicious smell, then trying to barter for one more round of shapallel bread.

  Three decades after Lewis and Clark packed their shapallel on the Clearwater River, the Reverend Henry Spalding came to the same area as a Protestant missionary to the Nez Perce. He was interested in the natural history of the region and, in the early 1840s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray suggested that Spalding collect plants in his new domain. The reverend took up the challenge with vigor, often setting out on collecting ventures with tribal guides. After one such excursion, Spalding pressed the leaves and flowers of a biscuitroot; he sliced its spherical root into a marshmallow shape with a sharp knife and glued one flat side to his paper. He made a special inscription to annotate his work: THIS IS THE REAL INDIAN COUS. What he appears to have collected, however, is not Lomatium cous, with its bag-like tuber, but rather a fine example of the round-rooted Lomatium canbyi.

  As I stood in the stacks of the Gray Herbarium, looking at the yellowed specimen paper that the Reverend Spalding had labeled with such confidence, it seemed like an appropriate biscuitroot trick. One way or another, they were going to have the last laugh.

  V

  A POSSIBLE FRIEND

  The Go-Between