Ancient Places (10 page)

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 really 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’úx
^w
pux
^w
. 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.”

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.

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’úx
^w
pux
^w
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’ux
^w
pux
^w
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.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, multiple discoveries of precious metals—from silver in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains to lead-zinc on the lower Pend Oreille River, from gold on the upper Columbia River to copper above the Colville Valley—transformed the character of the Inland Northwest. Young men of all descriptions rushed to the region to seek their main chance.

William Morley Manning’s story began like many of them. A farmer’s son wandering far from his home in rural Ontario, the twenty-year-old Manning was first attracted to the gold strikes around Idaho’s Salmon River. He apparently liked what he found there, for in 1897 he
filed a Declaration of Intent to become a US citizen. Within the next year, he
returned to
eastern Canada to study mining engineering at the Ontario School of Practical Science in Toronto.

He soon made his way west again. In October 1899, the Northwest Mining Association held an industrial exposition during its annual gathering in Spokane, the main supply center for the mining industries of the entire Inland Northwest.
William Manning was in charge of a large display from southeastern British Columbia’s Ymir district near Nelson, touting the area’s potential in an attempt to attract investors.

January of 1900 found him
traveling in northeast Washington in the company of a millionaire mine owner who was planning to develop a gold claim in the area. That year’s Washington census lists Manning as an assayer living near the town of Bossburg in Stevens County, which at that time covered the entire northeast corner of the state and encompassed several rich mining districts. By August, according to the
Bossburg Journal,
he was
in charge of thirty employees at the new First Thought Mine, located on a hill above the Kettle River. In his spare time, he was busily
locating and filing mining claims on adjoining properties, both in his own name and in partnership with one of the trustees of the First Thought.

As development of that operation continued apace, Manning
visited the
superintendent of the Colville Indian Agency in company with Alex Herrin, an enrolled tribal member who owned an allotment adjacent to the mine. Herrin was seeking approval from the superintendent to lease part of his allotment to the mining company for a tramway that would ferry wood and supplies to the mine. Manning had offered Herrin $150 for the right-of-way, and the superintendent saw no problem with the arrangement.