The Plateau Culture Area is the region which extends east from the Cascade Mountains in Washington to the Rocky Mountains in Montana. It extends from the Fraser River in British Columbia to the Blue Mountains in Oregon. The Indian tribes which inhabited this area have historic and cultural ties with the tribes on the Pacific Coast as well as with the tribes on the Northern Plains. The Plateau tribes gathered and used over 130 different wild plants. It is estimated that from 40% to 60% of their calories came from the plant foods which they gathered. One of the most important root crops for the Plateau tribes was camas (Camassia quamash), which provided a major source of carbohydrates for their diet.
Camas is a lily-like plant whose bulb can be fire-baked to make a sweet and nutritious staple. In some places in the Northwest, camas was so common that non-Indian travelers would mistake the plant’s blue flowers for distant lakes. In her book on the Nez Perce, Do Them No Harm!: Lewis and Clark Among the Nez Perce, Zoa Swayne describes camas this way:
“Fresh camas meat was white and the juice milky. Roasted, the meat was brown and the juice sweet and syrupy.”
Camas is very high in protein: 5.4 ounces of protein per pound of roots. In comparison, steelhead trout (Salmo gairdneri) has 3.4 ounces of protein per pound.
The proper time to gather camas is when the lower half of the flowers begins to fade. Indian people generally gathered camas in June, but this varied according to altitude and seasonal weather conditions. Some of the tribes, such as the Flathead, designated June as Camas Moon.
The camas was often dug up using digging sticks made from elk antlers. In his book Montana: Native Plants and Early Peoples, Jeff Hart reports:
“To remove camas bulbs from the heavy meadow turf, women preferred using elk antler digging sticks. However, they sometimes used fire-hardened wooden sticks made from hawthorn, serviceberry, and other woody materials, with horn, antler, or wooden transverse handles.”
In digging the camas, the digging stick would be stabbed into the ground six to eight inches away from the plant, then worked back and forth to loosen the soil. A woman could dig up about a bushel of roots in a day from a site that was about half an acre in size.
In their book Renegade Tribe: The Palouse Indians and the Invasion of the Inland Pacific Northwest, Clifford Trafzer and Richard Scheuerman report:
“In a good field, a woman could gather enough camas in three or four days to feed a large family for an entire year.”
Historian Larry Cebula, in his book Plateau Indians and the Quest for Spiritual Power, 1700-1850, reports:
“Each woman could dig as much as a bushel of camas a day.”
Writing about the Kalispel in their book Archaeology in Washington, Ruth Kirk and Richard Daugherty report:
“Young women seeking guardian spirits hoped to gain ability to find roots, dig them, or roast and prepare them for storage. Skill in roasting roots was more valued than skill in digging them.”
Unlike other plants gathered in the Plateau area, camas has to be roasted because their sugar is indigestible until converted to fructose. Ruth Kirk and Richard Daugherty report:
“Slow cooking in earth ovens solves the problem, and with the high sugar content camas stored well.”
At the camas digging camps, the camas was usually cooked in earth ovens before eating it or storing it. Since the same camps were used each season, the pit ovens used for roasting the camas were also reused.
Although the men gathered the wood for the ovens, men were not allowed near the roasting pits for fear that the camas would not be roasted properly.
The oven (a roasting pit dug into the ground) was preheated by building a fire in it and placing small rocks (about 5” in diameter) in with the wood. In addition to the small rocks, some pits had large flat stones on the bottom which were also heated by the fire. When the rocks were hot, they were covered with wet vegetation such as slough grass, alder branches, willow, and/or skunk cabbage leaves. Then the camas bulbs were placed on top of the vegetation. Sometimes Douglas onions (Allium douglasii) were placed in with the camas. The camas was then covered with bark and earth and a fire was built on top of the oven. Cooking usually took between 12 and 70 hours, depending on the number of camas bulbs in the oven.
The camas which was intended for storage was then dried for about a week. Dried camas can be preserved for many years. Some American explorers report eating camas that had been prepared 36 years earlier.
The early Europeans in the area, such as Lewis and Clark, occasionally consumed camas after they were shown how to harvest it and prepare it. One Jesuit missionary fermented camas to make alcohol. Another Jesuit missionary observed that the consumption of camas by those unaccustomed to it is “followed by strong odors accompanied by loud sounds”.
With regard to other methods of using camas, Jeff Hart reports:
“Flatheads boiled camas to make a sweet-tasting hot beverage, drunk much like coffee. They also prized a soup made by simmering the camas-moss combination in blood. Fresh meat broth often provided a favorite medium in which to boil camas.”
Camas was also an important sweetening agent prior to the introduction of sugar by the Europeans. The name camas seems to come from the Chinook jargon which used the Nootka chamas meaning “sweet.” Much of camas is insulin which changes into fructose during the traditional baking process. Jeff Hart reports:
“The concentration of fructose in cooked camas is fairly high, 32.9 percent wet weight or 43 percent dry weight.”
In order to increase the camas yield, the camas areas, as well as other root gathering areas, were occasionally burned over.
There are a number of different stories about the origin of camas. According to one story Moose, in order to feed his guests Coyote and Kingfisher, slapped his backside and out came Camas. He then put it in a kettle and gave it to his guests as food.
Indians 201/101
Twice each week—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—this series presents American Indian topics. Indians 201 is an expansion of an earlier essay. More about Plateau Indian cultures from this series:
Indians 101: The Plateau Culture Area
Indians 101: Women, Tradition, and Plateau Indian Art (Photo Diary)
Indians 101: The Plateau Indian Longhouse (museum tour)
Indians 101: Plateau Indian Trade
Indians 101: The Plateau Indian Tool Kit (Photo Diary)
Indians 101: Plateau Horse Regalia (Photo Diary)
Indians 101: The Plateau Indian vision quest
Indians 101: Plateau Indian Spirituality (Photo Diary)