Indian Breadroot

Sacagawea’s Comfort Food

At Decision Point in mid-June 1805, Sacagawea became “extreemly” ill. Meriwether Lewis thought “her disorder originated principally from an obstruction of the mensis in consequence of taking could [cold]”, and many pundits have offered theories about her illness since.^[1]Meriwether Lewis, The Definitive Journals of Lewis & Clark, Gary Moulton, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 4:299–301. See also Moulton note 1 and on this site, … Continue reading Following 18th-century medical practices of the time, William Clark bled her and later tried a dose of salts.

She only worsened as she traveled with the boats to their camp below the Great Falls of the Missouri. By 14 June, her condition became “Somewhat dangerous.” The next day, Clark tried cinchona bark, after which she became even worse and perhaps wisely, she refused to “take any medison.” On the 15th, Lewis added laudanum and water from Sulphur Springs to her regimen. Finally, after two more days, she began to recover. Lewis put her on a diet of peppered and salted buffalo broiled and in a “rich soupe of the same meat”.^[2]14—18 June, Journals, 4:294–303.

Lewis’s report of 18 June was encouraging. She walked for the time since arriving at the Lower Portage Camp, ate “hartily”, and was “free from fever or pain”. The next day would see a relapse after she ate Indian Breadroot gathered from the surrounding prairies:

. . . she walked out and gathered a considerable quantity of the white apples of which she eat so heartily in their raw state, together with a considerable quantity of dryed fish without my knowledge that she complained very much and her fever again returned.^[3]Lewis, 19 June 1805, Journals, 4:309.

When she consumed the breadroot she had gathered, it is quite plausible that she was self-medicating. The plant’s use as a drug is documented among the Blackfeet and Cheyenne cultures to treat gastroenteritis, colic, bowel complaints, and diarrhea. Additionally, the plant was used to treat sore throats, earaches, and tooth aches, especially with infants and children.^[4]John C. Hellson, “Ethnobotany of the Blackfoot Indians,” National Museum of Man Mercury Series, no. 19 (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1974), 68, 82, … Continue reading

Most likely, after her long illness, she was simply hungry and in need of a nutritious comfort food.

A Staple of the Prairies

A month prior to her illness, Sacagawea and her husband Toussaint Charbonneau gathered large Indian breadroot while walking along the shores near the Milk River—the ‘River that Scolds all Others’:

The Interpreter & his wife, the Squar [Squaw] Geathered on the Sides of the hills wild Lickerish, & the white apple as called by the angegies [engagés] and gave me to eat, the Indians of the Missouri make great use of the white apple dressed in different ways—^[5]Clark, 8 May 1805, Journals, 4:128.

These ‘white apples’ as they would be called by the journalists—now called large Indian breadroot, prairie turnip, hankee, or timpsula (Pediomelum esculentum, Pursh, syn. Psoralea esculentum)—also made their way to Meriwether Lewis who gave the plant a botanical and ethnobotanical description. In his description, Lewis depicts the various ways the plant was prepared and consumed by Prairie People:

when collected they are striped of their rhind and strung on small throngs or chords and exposed to the sun or placed in the smoke of their fires to dry; when well dryed they will keep for several years, provided they are not permitted to become moisty or damp; in this situation they usually pound them between two stones placed on a piece of parchment, untill they reduce it to a fine powder thus prepared they thicken their soope with it; sometimes they also boil these dryed roots with their meat without breaking them; when green they are generally boiled with their meat, sometimes mashing them or otherwise as they think proper. they also prepare an agreeable dish with them by boiling and mashing them and adding the marrow grease of the buffaloe and some buries, until the whole be of the consistency of a haisty pudding. they also eat this root roasted and frequently make hearty meals of it raw without sustaining any inconvenience or injury therefrom . . . .^[6]Lewis, 8 May 1805, Journals, 4:126.

Lewis didn’t much relish the flavor of the root, but nevertheless he recommended its use to cooks from the United States:

the white apple appears to me to be a tastless insipid food of itself tho’ I have no doubt but it is a very healthy and moderately nutricious food. I have no doubt but our epicures would admire this root very much, it would serve them in their ragouts and gravies in stead of the truffles morella.”^[7]Ibid.

Nutritious Vegetable

For millennia, large Indian breadroot bulbs have been an excellent source of vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates. Each bulb provides approximately 4.5 grams of carbohydrates and 0.7 milligrams of vitamin C—a nutritional compliment to protein-rich meat-based diets.^[8]“Prairie Turnips, raw (Northern Plains Indians,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169818/nutrients, accessed 11 March 2024. Expedition member John Colter lived on the roots while he fled the Blackfeet “having subsisted on a root much esteemed by the Indians of the Missouri, now known by naturalists as psoralea esculenta . . . .”^[9]John Bradbury, Travels in the Interior of America in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1911 (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817), 17–21 footnote, archive.org/details/travelsininteri00bywagoog, … Continue reading

Lewis wasn’t the last to recommend cultivating Indian breadroot. While in North America in 1847, natural historian Lamare-Picquot heard of a potato famine in Europe and made a special trip to the Canadian mid-west to gather Indian breadroot seeds. He took his seeds to Paris, and the French Ministry of Agriculture sent him back to gather more along with two other tubers collected by Lewis: Lewisia rediviva (bitterroot) and Camassia quamash—camas. ^[10]“Lamare-Picquot and the Breadroot”, Marjorie F. Warner, Agricultural History 21, No. 1 (Jan., 1947): 23–26, www.jstor.org/stable/3739768. Indian breadroot grows best in undisturbed natural prairie and is said to take two or more years to develop harvestable tubers. This may be why the root was rarely cultivated by Indigenous and European farmers.

Lewis’s Specimen

A specimen sheet of Pediomelum esculentum exists as part of the Lewis and Clark Herbarium at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Lewis collected the plant on the Missouri River likely on the last day of August 1804.

Specimen Transcription

On the specimen sheet shown in the figure are several notations:

Stamp: Ex. Herb. A. B. Lambert

Printed and typed label:
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Pediomelum pentaphyllum (B. Juss.) J. Grimes
var. scaposum (Gray) J. Grimes
Det. James Grimes, 1987.

Handwritten note: a new species P. esculenta Nutt [Gray?]

Handwritten note: P. hypgaea? N. L. B. [Britton?]

Handwritten label:
Type of Psoralea esculenta Pursh
Signed: Rickett 2 Mr 1949

Handwritten note: Lewis & Clark herb [Meehan?]

Printed and typed label:
HOLOTYPUS
Psoralea esculenta Pursh
Fl. Amer. Sept. 2: 475. 1814.
=Pediomelum esculemtum (Pursh) Rydebert
Det. James Grimes, 1987
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Printed and typed label:
HERBARIUM OF
ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES, PHILADELPHIA
Psoralea esculenta Pursh

Perforation: ANS PHILA

Handwritten note: Psoralea esculenta

Handwritten note: This plant produces the large root found in the [illegible] ^[11]Journals: Herbarium, 42–43, Plate 123.

Not shown in the figure are three more labels, one especially important where Lambert has written on the back of the sheet: “N. America Herb: Lewis & Clarck.” Without original notes from Lewis or Frederick Pursh, attributing this specimen to Lewis becomes difficult. Fortunately, Pursh elsewhere identified the specimen as coming from Lewis:

Note—In addition to the observations under Psoralea esculenta, p. 475. it may be interesting to state, that A. B. Lambert, Esq., raised in the summer of 1812 a number of plants, the seeds of which were taken out of a specimen collected in the year 1805 [1804] by M. Lewis, Esq. Also, that this highly interesting plant is now growing at Messers. Frasers, Sloane Square.^[12]Frederick T. Pursh, Flora Americae Septentrionalis, or, A systematic arrangement and description of the plants of North America . . . . (London: White, Cochrane, and Co., 1813), 2:490.

In their analysis of the specimen, Reveal and Schuyler conclude that the specimen was collected by Meriwether Lewis, and that Lewis’s specimen constitutes the species’ lectotype—a specimen that serves as the description and name of a new species. Moulton goes further by suggesting the plant was collected 31 August 1804 near Calumet Bluff in present Nebraska.^[13]James L. Reveal, Gary E. Moulton, and Alfred E. Schuyler, “The Lewis and Clark Collections of Vascular Plants: Names, Types, and Comments,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences … Continue reading

Lewis’s Description

In his journal of 8 May 1805, Lewis gives the plant’s botanical description:

The white apple is found in great abundance in this neighbourhood; it is confined to the highlands principally. The whiteapple, so called by the French Engages, is a plant which rises to the hight of 6 or 9 Inchs. rarely exceeding a foot; it puts forth from one to four and sometimes more stalks from the same root, but is most generally found with one only, which is branched* but not defusely*, is cylindric* and villose*; the leafstalks*, cylindric*, villose* and very long compared with the hight of the plant, tho’ gradually diminish in length as they ascend, and are irregular* in point of position; the leaf, digitate*, from three to five in number, oval* 1 Inch long, absolutely entire* and cottony: the whole plant of a pale green, except the under disk* of the leaf which is of a white colour from the cottony substance with which it is covered. the radix* a tuberous bulb; generally ova[l]* formed, sometimes longer and more rarely partially divided or brancing*; always attended with one or more radicles* at it’s lower extremity which sink from 4 to 6 inches deep. the bulb covered with a rough black, tough, thin rind* which easily seperates from the bulb which is a fine white substance, somewhat porus, spungy and moist, and reather tough before it is dressed; the center of the bulb is penitrated with a small tough string or ligament, which passing from the bottom of the stem terminates in the extrimity of the radicle*, which last is also covered by a prolongation of the rind which invellopes the bulb: The bulb is usually found at the debth of 4 inches and frequently much deeper.^[14]Lewis, 8 May 1805, Journals, 4:125–126.

*Analysis of Botanical Terms

The table below gives a brief analysis of the botanical terms Lewis used to describe the large Indian breadroot. The first column is the term with Lewis’s alternate spellings—when they exist—enclosed in square brackets. The last two columns give the number of times the term is used by Benjamin Smith Barton and John Miller in their botanical guides that are thought to be in the expedition’s traveling library.

Term	Definition	Barton Count	Miller Count
absolutely entire	“the margin or edge not in the least cut or notched” Barton 33.	9 [acute]	69 [acute, acutely]
branched [branched, branching, unbranched]	“subdivided,” Barton 15.	12 [branched, branching, unbranched]	7 [branched, branching]
cylindrical [cylindric, cilindric, cilindrical, celindrical]	“formed into a cylinder, or equal tube,” Barton 65.	26 [cylincrical, cylindrica, cylindricae]	47 [cylindraceum, cylindraceous, cylindrica, cylindrical, cylindric, cylindricum]
diffuse [diffuse, defusely, defuse]	“furnished with spreading branches,” Barton 23.	14	3
digitate	“when a simple or undivided footstalk connects several distinct leaflets at the end of it,” Barton 36 (palmate).	5	0
irregular [irregular, irregularly]	“when the parts of the limb differ in figure, magnitude, or proportion,” Barton 134.	33 [irregular, irregularly, irregularity]	11 [irregular, irregularity, irregulary]
leaf stalk [leafstalks, leaf stalk]	“The Petiolus, or Petiole, . . . or Foot-stalk,” Barton 69. Now called a footstalk.	1	0
oval [oval, ova]	“round,” Barton 193.	4	16
radicle	“fibrous string,” Barton 7; today, “the first root arising from the germinating seed,” Kew 99.	93	3 [radical]
radix	“root,” Barton 2.	32	1
rind [rind, rhind]	“cortex,” or “Outer-Bark,” Barton 245, 3:7; present meaning is a “region of tissue between the epidermis or bark and the vascular cylinder,” Kew 33.
under disk	the groundward center surface of a leaf, Barton 43, 114.	5	3
villose [villose, villouse]	“a stem covered with down or soft hairs” Barton 23, 88 passim.	8 [villose, villous]	16 [villous]

The above definitions come primarily from:

• Benjamin Smith Barton, Elements of Botany: or Outlines of the Natural History of Vegetables (Philadelphia: 1803), www.google.com/books/edition/Elements_of_Botany_Or_Outlines_of_the_Na/Hk0aAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

When appropriate, additional modern definitions have been given for clarity or when today’s definition has changed. The modern definitions come from:

• Henk Beentje, The Kew Plant Glossary: An Illustrated Dictionary of Plant Terms (Royal Botanic Gardens: Kew Publishing, 2012).
• James G. Harris and Melinda Woolf Harris, Plant Identification Terminology: An Illustrated Glossary (Spring Lake, Utah: Spring Lake Publishing, 2009).

When not enclosed with quotation marks, the definition has been paraphrased from the given source.

In the two columns of word counts, every effort has been made to count only those instances where the intended meaning is the one given in the definition. Alternate forms—for example, claw, claws, clawed—have been counted. Latin equivalents have been excluded from the count except when they are used exclusively by the author.

John Miller’s counts come from his two-volume translation:

• John Miller, An Illustration of the Sexual System, Of Linnaeus (London, 1779), books.google.com/books/about/An_Illustration_of_the_Sexual_System_Of.html?id=ak8-AAAAcAAJ.
• John Miller, An Illustration of the Termini Botanici of Linnaeus (London, 1789), archive.org/details/illustrationofse02mill.