Plants of the Expedition

Even on the toughest days of the expedition, Lewis somehow found time to observe plants along the way. However, his major periods of systematic work evidently were at Fort Mandan, Fort Clatsop, and Long Camp.

This interview with botany Professor James Reveal recorded at Packer Meadow near Lolo Pass analyzes the botany of Lewis.

The Fort Mandan shipment of specimens was registered in the so-called “Donation Book” that was compiled for the Lewis and Clark materials received in November 1805. The entries were sequentially numbered by John Vaughan of the APS in Philadelphia.

The French explorer Samuel de Champlain found the vegetable growing in Indian gardens along the Saint Lawrence seaway and carried specimens of it back to France in 1603, where its root soon became a staple food for humans.

Lewis and Clark sometimes called it kinnikinnick, sometimes sacacommis. At Fort Clatsop on 29 January 1806, he described this useful plant.

There is a great abundance of a species of bear-grass which grows on every part of these mountains,” wrote Lewis on 15 June 1806. “It’s growth is luxouriant and continues green all winter but the horses will not eat it.”

Columbia plateau biscuitroots: “one of the grateful vegetables” by naturalist Jack Nisbet. An Indian food source for thousands of years.

Flathead Salish, Kutenai, Shoshoni, and Nez Perce people all regard the bitterroot with solemn reverence. No other root may be harvested until the elder women of the tribe have conducted the annual First Roots ceremony.

The day Sacagawea gathered Indian breadroot, Lewis wrote a detailed ethnobotanical description. The specimen he prepared a year prior is now used as the primary identifier of the species.

Lewis collected buffaloberry specimens which were new to science and Clark had them in a delightful tart. Native Americans had been eating the bright red berries for generations.

William Clark, pushing on in advance of the hungry men of the Corps, came upon two adjacent Indian villages totaling about 30 lodges on Weippe Prairie. They gave him and his six hunters “roots in different States, Some round and much like an onion which they call quamash.”

As the expedition moved across the Northern American continent, Lewis took particular notice of the changes he saw in the wild cherries. For a deeper dive into the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s encounters with wild cherries, see these four articles.

William Clark first mentioned the root cous on 1 November 1805, saying that native people living near the future Bonneville Dam site traded beads to obtain it from people up the Columbia River. To Clark, it was “cha-pel-el bread.”

Justified by the ethnobotanical record, the captains went to unusual lengths to preserve and document echinacea. Most—if not all—the Tribal Nations encountered along the Missouri River used the plant to treat snakebites in the manner described by the two captains.

The plant’s common names include elkhorn, ragged robin, pink fairy, and deerhorn. In the spring of 1807 Lewis turned over his plant specimens to Frederick Pursh, who gave this flower the scientific name Clarkia pulchella

Lewis reported that a specimen of this plant “was taken the 1st of June at the mouth of the Osage River; it is known in this country by the name of the wild ginger.”

In his journal for 12 February 1806, Lewis described the plant that now goes by the name Berberis aquifolium, which he had first noticed in the vicinity of the Cascades of the Columbia River, about 145 miles from the ocean.

On 8 July 1806, Lewis descended from the Rocky Mountains and entered the “Plains of the Missouri,” a prairie type that extended as far as North Dakota.

For thousands of years sweet grass has been used as incense in spiritual and religious ceremonies, as a personal perfume, and braided into necklaces and bracelets for wearing as amulets to ward off illness and injury.

Above Montana’s Lolo Creek, Lewis noticed a flower: “in shape and appearance like ours”—in Virginia, of course—”only that the corolla is white, marked with small veigns of pale red longitudinally on the inner side.”

Because it appears in the Rockies at the edges of receding snowbanks it has also earned the name glacier lily. Lewis’s specimen, collected 15 June 1806 on the Clearwater River, was the one used by Pursh to describe the species.

“The prickly pear is now in full blume,” he wrote on a mild early-summer day in 1805, “and forms one of the beauties as well as the greatest pests of the plains.”

Meriwether Lewis was sufficiently familiar with the genus back home to recognize the new species he termed the “small rose of the prairies,” which he found on 5 September 1804, in present-day Nebraska near the mouth of the Niobrara River.

Everybody liked the abundant serviceberry fruit—the Lemhi Shoshones were living on them, the enlisted men “regaled themselves,” and Lewis was the first to collect a specimen for science.

13 August 1805 near Lemhi Pass, Lewis wrote that he noticed “a species of honeysuckle much in it’s growth and leaf like the small honeysuckle of the Missouri.” He had discovered a plant that was new to the scientific community—the snowberry.

The common sunflower as a staple food among the Mandans and Lemhi Shoshones did not escape the attention of the journalists. Includes two traditional Hidatsa recipes.

Lewis mentioned two species of tobacco, possibly Nicotiana quadrivalvis and N. rustica—a Mexican species called Aztec tobacco—that the Arikara cultivated.

Previous explorers and trading ships came back from the Northwest Coast with reports of forests thick with gigantic spruce, cedar, and firs. What would Lewis report of this natural resource? And what of the cottonwoods along the drainages everywhere else?

One of the roots obtained by George Drouillard on 21 August 1805 may have been a species of valerian (vuh-LEHR-ee-an), such as Valeriana edulis (vuh-leh-ree-AYE-nuh ed-YOU-lis), or edible valerian.

If this plant was what Sacagawea was referring to when she told Clark she favored spending the winter anyplace where there was “plenty of Potas,” it may be that some of the men had recognized it as “duck potato” or “Indian potato.”

During the summer of 2003 a weed inventory team from the University of Idaho searched the Lolo Motorway for weeds. They saw spotted knapweed four times, orange hawkweed twice, yellow hawkweed twice, henbane once, and goatweed 28 times: 37 widely-scattered weed sightings in about 50 miles.

On 25 June 1806, on the branch of Hungery Creek where they “nooned it,” Sacagawea brought the captains “a parcel of roots” that Lewis immediately recognized as the kind Drouillard had given him ten months earlier.

None of the expedition’s journalists made any note of yucca, although in writing of Lemhi-Shoshone Indian dress, Meriwether Lewis mentioned “a small cord of the silk-grass” which at least one scholar has interpreted as referring to the yucca.