Ancient Places (8 page)

As a final stipulation of the agreement between the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde and the American Museum of Natural History, if the Willamette Meteorite is ever retired from public display, its ownership will revert to the tribes. It is possible, therefore, that at some future date the turtle-shaped stone will once more journey across space and time, echoing one brief chapter of its long life history. If it should travel by rail, it will retrace its climactic Ice Age voyage across Lake Pend Oreille, through Spokane, and down the Columbia as it makes one more partial orbit of our small planet.

Viewed from the scablands of southeastern Washington and northeastern Oregon, the Blue Mountains float like cumulus clouds above the eastern edge of the Columbia Basin. The Blues are old geologically; their terrain stretches more than sixty miles across the adjacent state corners, and their peaks rise over five thousand feet above the Snake and Columbia Rivers that circle below them. Early white travelers described the plains that border these waterways as stark and thirsty places, and looked to the shimmering bluish heights above for comfort.

The fingered ridges that work their way downslope from the high country are treeless along their tops and do not appear to offer much promise of water. Yet as the snow recedes each spring, life-giving moisture oozes from every crack of their
broken knuckles. An April traveler hungry for early wildflowers can wander up a digit, such as Biscuit Ridge, and enjoy sagebrush buttercup, blue-eyed Mary, yellowbell, spring beauty, shooting star, ballhead waterleaf, and long-flowered bluebell just by stepping a few yards.

Although such showy flowers are plentiful, the real abundance appears on slumping roadcuts and within bony swales, where yellow flowers with distinctive dark-green leaves blanket the muddy basalt. These are members of a diverse genus that we call by two common names: biscuitroot, after a bread-like staple that many western tribes prepare from the roots, and desert parsley, after their habitat and finely cut leaves. The genus name
Lomatium,
from the Latin “winged seed,” refers to the severely flattened edges of their ovoid seeds. Several species carry seductive strong aromas that have been compared to cultivated parsley-family relatives such as anise, fennel, or caraway.

From my vantage point on Biscuit Ridge, these modest plants seem as common as the gravels that trickle downhill. Above each clump of lacy leaves, a single reddish stem rises no higher than my boot top. A compound flower head composed of a dozen dense florets rides atop the stem like a small yellow umbrella. This shape supplied the original family name Umbelliferae (now changed to Apiaceae) and remains the common calling card of the tribe.

My field guide confirms my guess that this cheery yellow biscuitroot is the one known as cous, pronounced both as “coos” and “cows.” Many people—especially members of several Plateau tribes who gather these biscuitroots for food—will quickly praise their flavor, whether boiled, roasted, or pounded and formed into cakes.

The crew of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery had their first taste of cous in late fall of 1805 at the Cascades of the Columbia, near modern Bonneville Dam. Here William Clark watched a broad array of native bands trading robes, skins, beargrass, camas roots, and some flat cakes that he and Lewis called
“cha-pel-el” or “shapalell.” It’s not too hard to find corollaries for their spellings in
the Chinookan word
a-sáblal
and the Chinook jargon,
saplíl,
both of which translate as “bread.”

Although the captains described trading for
“a kind of biscuit” during their winter at the mouth of the Columbia, the shapalell did not assume its full importance in their diet until their return journey upstream in 1806. After arriving back at the Cascades of the Columbia in early April, Lewis again noted a lively traffic in goods, with the root bread as one stock item among many. On April 12, he purchased
“2 pieces of Chapellel and Some roots”; two days later, approaching the Dalles, his grocery list included
five dogs, along with hazelnuts, dried berries, and more root bread.

As the Corps continued upriver, Meriwether Lewis made a connection between shapalell and the abundant yellow flowers that he was seeing along the way. His naturalist’s eye recognized them as members of the same family as carrots and dill, familiar from eastern gardens. Near the mouth of the Walla Walla River, he pressed a sample and attached a brief label:
“An umbelliferous plant of the root of which the Wallowallas make a kind of bread. The natives call it shappalell.” He tried to approximate the Sahaptin word for the root,
xáws,
which he rendered as “cous” and sometimes “cows.” Lewis’s designation was later married to the Latin genus to arrive at the scientific name of
Lomatium cous.

During the month of May, while making final preparations for crossing the Continental Divide, the Corps camped on the Clearwater River above its confluence with the Snake, near the village of a hospitable Nez Perce leader called Broken Arm. There they found spring food processing in full swing.
“The noise of their women pounding roots reminds me of a nail factory,” Lewis remarked. “The Indians seem well pleased, and I am confident that they are not more so than our men who have their stomachs once more well
filled with horsebeef and mush of the bread of cows.” In other words, the men were getting plenty of horse meat and cous bread to eat. Lewis’s use of the letter “w” instead of “u” in his spelling of cous can sometimes be confusing, but his description of the tuber that was providing so much of the Corps’ sustenance is filled with important details.

He compared cous to the ginseng he had grown up with back in Virginia and the baked camas bulbs that hospitable tribes had fed to the white visitors from the moment they arrived in the Columbia drainage. Lewis not only paid close attention to cooking and preservation methods that might benefit the Corps, but he also caught a hint of the seasonal rounds involved in collecting and processing the resource.

As the Corps stockpiled food for its upcoming journey, the great quantities of roots processed with mortar and pestle by Nez Perce women became all the more evident. On May 19, a group of his men returned from a trading session with
“about 6 bushels of the cows roots and a considerable quantity of bread of the same materials.”

Recalling their difficult mountain journey of the previous fall, the Americans wanted still more. The captains debated sending the crew out to dig on their own but thought better of it.
“We would make the men collect these roots themselves but there are several species of hemlock which are so much like the cows that it is difficult to discriminate them from the cows and we are afraid that they might poison themselves,” wrote Lewis. He was wise to be cautious: the extremely toxic water hemlock,
Cicuta douglasii,
is also a member of the parsley family, and it does grow in that vicinity. Plateau plant identification is not an easy learning curve for newcomers.

Choosing to rely on local knowledge, Lewis and Clark issued an allowance of trade goods to the men so they could each purchase
“a parsel of roots and bread from the natives as his stores for the rocky mountains.” The visitors continued to barter for more cous until early June, when they decided they had enough to see them through the mountain pass. By then, the Nez Perce women had switched their focus to digging camas bulbs. These the Americans found much less palatable,
leading to disappointment with the tribe’s departing gift.
“The Broken Arm gave Capt. C. a few dryed Quawmas [camas] roots as a great present,” wrote Lewis on their last day. “In our estimation those of cows are much better, I am confident they are much more healthy.”

On a recent cold morning in early March, botanist Pam Camp and I strolled along the western curl of the Columbia River’s Big Bend. Behind us, the North Cascades remained fully wrapped in winter’s grip, but in the lower country, the snow had melted away from the southern exposures. Ropes of freshly exposed gopher work glistened with frost, and although the first buttercups had yet to appear, we were hopeful that the seasonal biscuitroot clock had begun to tick. Camp’s experienced eye landed on a short strand of green thread easing up from a crack in the rocky ground. A few steps farther along, more visible leaves branched upward, like tiny fingers reaching for the sun. We circled a pocket of shattered basalt where she spotted an umbrella, no larger than a thumbnail, made up of tiny white florets. I dropped to my knees to eye the dark purple anthers that bristled among the white petals—the inspiration for the flower’s common name of salt and pepper.

Although most wildflower manuals equate salt and pepper with
Lomatium gormanii,
that would be far too simple. There are actually three different small, early flowering biscuitroot species in the Columbia country that feature white petals and purple anthers. All three also share many characteristics of leaf and stem. All three have edible roots, though not as large or as popular among tribal families as cous. All three spread across the Columbia’s shrub-steppe habitats with subtle variations. All three
may be found in association with others of their kin, and their identification can confound the most dedicated of plant lovers. Although a professional botanist, Pam Camp readily admits to struggling with these biscuitroots and is sympathetic to a layperson trying to navigate the taxonomic maze.

She directed my attention to the ground. I already knew that an inch or so below the earth’s surface, the root of each salt and pepper forms a garbanzo bean–sized globe of almost perfect roundness. But I didn’t know that the root of a closely related cousin does the same. In order to tell them apart, Camp explained, we were supposed to look for subtle differences in the tendrils that sprout from the bottom of the root, in the simplicity of the plant’s growth form, and in other features that would not appear until later in the season, such as the pattern of the oil ducts of its mature fruits. And if we became frustrated, she added, we should keep in mind that
some botanists insist these two species cannot be separated in the field—not so long ago, in fact, they were lumped together in the species
confusum.

To further the confusion, there is a third species that bears an almost identical bite-sized tuber. But on its very bottom point, where its two close cousins sprout a few hair-like rootlets, this one extends a stringy root that swells into another tuber. If a plant is particularly robust, this root may continue to grow, sprouting several more distinct swellings, like beads on a delicate necklace buried ever deeper in the rocky soil.
The Okanagan Salish word for this deceptive plant translates as “something tied up on the end”—a good name, if you can ever find the necklace’s elusive final clasp.

Camp and I considered the challenge of teasing those extra beads out of the ground without breaking the connecting strands, for if they were lost on the first stab, we would misdiagnose the
species. As we discerned more and more of the tiny white parasols peeking above the ground, we wondered if maybe this would be the year that each of us, in our own way, would circle around to some kind of understanding of the biscuitroots. Or at least of this early group of three, with anthers as purple as sea urchins.

Camp unfolded a pocketknife and set to work. I slid a sharpened hardwood stick between two rocks and wriggled it around, attempting to pry out a tuber that had sprouted between two stones. I thought I was making some progress when the stem snapped off just below ground level. After the same thing happened twice more, I began grubbing with my hands, easing stones out of the way until I finally levered a little round root up from below. Upon closer examination, I discovered what might be the nub of a single broken string on its bottom.

Perhaps a little impatient, I broke off several more roots and stems before realizing that I was fighting frozen clumps of soil. Fingers numbed, I looked up to find Camp in the same claw-handed situation. On this particular morning, we were not going to define any species of salt and pepper for certain. Defeated but exhilarated—a whole season of biscuitroot searches lay ahead—we trudged back up the frost-rimmed slope. “How can it be spring for them,” Camp asked, “when it’s still winter for us?”