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Undaunted Botany | 1 | 2

The most significant of the edibles, camas (Camassia quamash), was eaten during the first of many friendly encounters with the Nez Perce along Idaho’s Clearwater River. After weeks without adequate nourishment, the men gorged themselves on the plant’s roots, which the Nez Perce steamed in earth-dug ovens; they had, Lewis reported, a “sort of sweetish taste and much the consistency of roasted onion.” Soon after the feast, however, Lewis and several of his men became violently ill. “This root is pallateable but disagrees with me in every shape I have ever used it,” he wrote, although some authorities believe the men’s sickness was caused by the abrupt change from an all-meat diet. Despite Lewis’s unpleasant experience, on the way home the following spring he would still describe a field of blooming camas as “a lake of fine clear water.”

Moving into the Northwest after Lolo Pass, Lewis began encountering numerous unfamiliar tree species. These included sitka alder (Alnus sinuata), western larch (Larix occidentalis), whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulus), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), and—most important for the expedition—ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa). Lewis described in his journal how, during times of famine, the Indians collected the black lichen (Bryoria) that hangs like hair from ponderosa branches. When Lewis came across several ponderosa pines stripped of their bark, Sacagawea explained that Indians had done so in order to get at the soft, edible undersides. It’s not known whether Lewis and his men sampled this food, but they did fashion the pine logs into badly needed dugout canoes.

After traveling more than 4,000 miles, in November of 1805 the expedition finally arrived at the Pacific. There they built Fort Clatsop and wintered near the outlet of the Columbia River. From December through March, Lewis recorded upwards of three dozen plant species, including the grand fir (Abies grandis). He was especially taken by the huge conifers that surrounded their fort, unlike any he had seen in the east. The Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), he wrote, “grows to imence size. . . . in several instances we have found them as much as 36 feet in the girth or 12 feet diameter perfectly solid and entire. they frequently rise to the hight of 230 feet, and one hundred and twenty or 30 of that hight without a limb.” Closer to earth he noted the western bracken (Pteridium aquilinum pubescens), its root “much like wheat dough and not very unlike it in flavour, though it has also a pungency which becomes more visible after you have chewed it for some time; this pungency was disagreeable to me, but the natives eat it voraciously.” The fruit of the salal (Gaultheria shallon) was prepared by the Indians in much the same fashion as the evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum), the berries mashed and dried in large cakes weighing as much as 10 or 15 pounds. Combined with salmon, these and other plants provided the Chinook Indians with more than enough to share with the Corps of Discovery until the expedition departed the following spring.

During the corps’ eastward push in the spring of 1806, Lewis collected more than 70 new plants, including modern favorites such as salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) and balsamroot (Buphthalmum sagittatum). The Nez Perce taught them to prepare and bake the roots of cous (Lomatium cous) like bread. Cous and dog meat, sometimes eaten together, strengthened the party as they approached the mountains. Lewis wrote that “the flavor of this root is not very unlike the gensang. this root they [the Nez Perce] collect as early as the snows disappear in the spring.”

By July 1 the corps had made it over the still snowy Continental Divide, just in time for Lewis to record the Bitterroot Range’s namesake, Lewisia rediviva, with its fleshy, low-slung leaves and ephemeral, light-pink flowers. Lewis took home six bitterroot specimens, which he later gave to botanist Frederick Pursh, who named the genus after Lewis. (Clark got his own genus too—Clarkia pulchella, the ragged robin, collected on June 1, 1806, by Lewis.) Two hundred years later, those same specimens bloom in Philadelphia’s Lewis and Clark Herbarium.

On the long journey home Lewis was accidentally shot in the left buttock by one of his men while hunting along the Missouri. “As writing in my present situation is extremely painfull to me,” Lewis wrote, “I shall desist untill I recover and leave to my frind Capt. C the continuation of our journal. however I must notice a singular Cherry [the pin cherry, Prunus pensylvanica] which is found in the Missouri in the bottom lands about the beaver bends. . . .”

In South Dakota two weeks later, August 29, Lewis paused to collect one of his final specimens, the pink cleome (Cleome serrulata). He had recorded it two years earlier, but after two years and 7,000 miles by foot, horse, canoe, and keelboat, Lewis still maneuvered his vessel to the Missouri’s shore in search of one last flower.