Wapato

Meriwether Lewis temporarily dropped behind the rest of the party “to examine a root of which the natives had been digging great quantities in the bottoms” along the Deschutes River.

The leaves of this herbaceous plant are sagittate, or arrow-shaped. The leaf stems spring from the base of the plant, celery-like. Below, in the muck, are rhizomes that produce small starchy tubers at their tips, the way potatoes do.

The plant still grows, in a dozen slightly different species and varieties, in marshes, swamps, borders of lakes, streams, and ponds in every one of the lower 48 states except Nevada, as well all of Canada south of 60° North Latitude.^[1]United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Plants Database, http://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=LOCO4. Accessed December 15, 2014. Consequently it could have been recognized by all the members of the Corps of Discovery—although maybe not as food. In any case, that undoubtedly explains why Lewis didn’t collect a specimen of it.

Fresh wapato might be roasted in a fire’s embers, the way the expedition first tasted it on 4 November 1805, when its appearance reminded Clark of “a small Irish potato.” For preservation, Native people pounded the dried roots and compressed the meal into cakes that Lewis said served well as bread. Throughout the Fort Clatsop winter, wapato was a frequent feature of the Corps’ diet, obtained by trading with local people, and a welcome addition to meals of “pore elk” when they boiled meat and roots together.

The captains named today’s Sauvie Island, in the Columbia River off Multnomah County, Oregon, “Wappetoe Island.” On 29 March 1806, Clark recorded how the women harvested wapato—”by getting into the water, Sometimes to their necks holding by a Small canoe and with their feet loosen the wappato or bulb of the root from the bottom from the Fibers, and it imedeately rises to the top of the water, they Collect & throw them into the Canoe, those deep roots are the largest and best roots.”