Raceme amer

n August 22, 1805, interpreter and hunter George Drouillard was scouting through the cove west of Camp Fortunate, near the forks of the Beaverhead River, when he came upon a half-dozen Shoshone Indians and had a friendly exchange of pleasantries via sign language. Suddenly a young man snatched Drouillard's gun, and the whole party mounted up and raced off in the direction of Lemhi Pass, with the hunter in hot pursuit. After a heated chase, two of the women's horses gave out and Drouillard was able to overtake the fleeing party. He wrested his gun from the young man, and the Shoshones hurried toward the pass.

The next day, back at Camp Fortunate, at present Clark Canyon Reservoir, Captain Lewis wrote down the story:

Drewyer now returned to the place they had left their baggage and brought it with him to my camp. It consisted of several dressed and undressed skins; a couple of bags wove...of the bark of the silk-grass, containing each about a bushel of dryed service burries, some chokecherry cakes, and about a bushel of roots of three different kinds, dryed and prepared for uce, which were foalded in as many parchment hides of buffaloe.

One of the roots proved to be a vegetable highly prized by Indians throughout the inland northwest. Lewis noted the specimen was

much mutilated but appeared to be fibrous. The parts were brittle, hard, of the size of a small quill; cilindric and as white as snow throughout, except some small parts of the hard black rind which they had not seperated in the preperation. This the Indians with me informed me were always boiled for use. I made the experiment, and found that they became perfectly soft by boiling, but had a very bitter taste, which was naucious to my pallate, and I transfered them to the Indians who had ate them heartily.

This was the root that French trappers were soon to call racème amer--"bitter root."

When the expedition returned to the mouth of Travelers' Rest Creek in the lower Bitterroot Valley, on its return trip early in July of 1806, Lewis collected some whole plants of the species. Back in Philadelphia, he turned them over to one of the leading botanists of the day, Frederick Pursh (1774-1820), for official classification. In honor of Captain Lewis, Pursh established a new genus in the purslane family, Latinizing it as Lewisia (lew-EE-see-uh), and designating this species rediviva (red-ih-VEE-vuh).

References

Paul Russell Cutright, Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969).

John Craighead, Frank Craighead, Jr., and Ray Davis, A Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963).

Steven Foster and Christopher Hobbs, A Field Guide to Western Medicinal Plants and Herbs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002).

Jeff Hart, Montana Native Plants and Early Peoples (Helena: Montana Historical Society, 1976).

Linda Kershaw, Edible & Medicinal Plants of the Rockies (Edmonton, Alberta: Lone Pine Publishing, 2000).

Kim Williams, Eating Wild Plants (Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1984).

--Joseph Mussulman; rev. 5/03