Essays
Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities
Ethnobotany Program at Sibley – the art of living off the land
February 4, 2009
If you were without any modern stores, could you make string? Could you build a shelter? Could you find medicine to cure what ails you? Do you know what wild plants are good to eat? If you are a hiker, a hunter, a backpacker, a canoer, or a ORV’er that likes to get into the back country, you might like to know what is useful. James Saunders, the education director at the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center south of Fort Davis, will speak on all of the myriad uses of wild plants Saturday, February 7th, at 1.30 p.m. at the Sibley Nature Center at 1307 E. Wadley. The program is free.
Did you know that there are over 200 species of wild plants here in Midland County that have been used by Indians, Hispanic and Anglo settlers? The landscape is a shopping center, if you know the plants! Almost 1,000 species of West Texas plants have been recorded as useful. Some of the plants now growing wild were “introduced.” Some, like horehound, were in the earliest medicinal herb gardens of the earliest settlers in New England, and followed settlement west. Some came as “weeds,” like dandelion, which makes a great wine, and when young the leaves are acceptable as spring greens. “Weeds” came in hay for livestock, or in the hair of the livestock, or as dust in trunks full of clothes or tools.
My grandmother was fed a number of the spring greens as a child on the Seminole Indian Reservation in Oklahoma in the 1890s. Her grandfather was the first missionary to the Seminole Indians when they were moved to Oklahoma in the 1840s. Some of the native plants like pepperweed and lambquarters, she continued to use until her death in the 1960s. In the spring, she would walk across our pasture picking pepperweed and until she had enough to add to salads. She also loved to eat lambsquarters after she boiled them in water with a little bit of salt and bacon. She made horehound candy for cough drops, too. The early settlers needed spring greens, for after a winter of stored foods, everyone needed fresh Vitamin C.
Do you know what wild plants you can use for soap? One is “super-common.” Yucca is known as soapweed. You chop up the roots and swirl them around in water, and the water suds up. You can even buy “amole shampoo” online and in some select stores! But yucca has many uses, as you might guess. You can make string and rope from the fibers of the leaves, or weave the leaves into mats to sleep on, or into footwear to protect yourself from thorns and rocks. If you weave many mats, you can lay them across branches of trees and shrubs that you have secured into the ground and make a wickiup for shelter. In late May the flower stalks just when they are shooting up taste like asparagus, and when the flowers are open, they taste like broccoli. When the seedpods form, you can harvest the yucca moth caterpillar for a little bit of protein. When the seeds are black, you can grind the seeds into flour.
The other plant used for soap is soapberry, one of the few native species of trees on the Llano Estacado. You just swirl the berries in hot water, and you have lots of suds. Soapberry has another use, too. If you strip the bark from a branch, you can use the stick as the drill to make fire, quickly spinning it in your hands onto a split seedstalk of yucca until you see smoke, and then you add shredded dry grass, and bingo, you have a little fire without a match. The branches are great for making the wickup that you cover with yucca mats and animal hides.
Are you one of many people that know you can find aspirin growing wild? Well, you can find willows growing along streams and in the sanddunes, and willow was the original source of aspirin. Next time you get a headache, brew up some willow tea and add a little sugar. Lots of West Texans believe in the power of creosote bush as a great healer. I met a lady in Fort Stockton that swore it cured her cancer, and I have met several people that say if you crush the leaves and mix them with grease and spread the mixture on to a cut on your skin that your healing time will be shortened significantly. Scientists identified a chemical in creosote bush that does exactly that!
When you come to Mr. Saunders’ lecture, take a little time and see Ethel Matthews’ display on dye plants. Ethel is a biology lab instructor at Midland College and participates in rendezvous (fur trapper reenactment). The variety of uses of plants is totally amazing. If you need to catch a bunch of fish in a hurry you can collect snailseed vine (it grows on trees in draws) or dogbane (that grows near water in the sanddunes and along streams) and toss the plants into the water to stun all of the fish in a pool. If you want to tan leather, dig up the roots of canaigre (dock) that grows in sandy soil and macerate the roots and let them soak for a day, and then soak an animal hide in the liquid. Indians planted Osage Orange seeds near springs and streams far from the tree’s natural range so that the best bow wood would be available in more places. There are many plants to use as culinary herbs, too. One of my favorites is lemoncillo, which grows in the sanddunes. Great tea plants abound, too. Navajo tea blooms most of the summer, the sticks of popotillo are always available, and wild pennyroyal grows in rocky soil.
When a person’s job was harvesting the bounties of the land a person often only worked just a few hours a day for the basic needs of survival. That left many more hours to harvest other plants to raise the standard of living by creating something for every facet of life. You better watch out – if you attend Mr. Saunders’ lecture, you may walk away with a new hobby – that of being an avid ethnobotanist!