My Indian friends never burdened themselves with work. They lay in the sun for hours and did not work until they felt like it. We cut the straight and slender trees of lodge-pole pine for tepee poles, peeling off the bark and standing them in the sun to dry. The women also gathered plants and herbs in meadow and forest, both for eating and healing; and they helped me make a botanical collection[1] of my own. [[160]]
For vegetables they gathered wild onions, wild potatoes, cow parsnip, bitterroot and prairie turnip. But the camas was their favorite vegetable. It had a root like a small potato and had a sweet flavor. They roasted the stalks of the cow parsnip, when they were tender and juicy in the spring; and dried the leaves of bearberry for tobacco, also pipsissewa or princess pine. They used a lichen that grows on pine trees as yellow dye, a pore fungus for cleaning buckskin, and yellow orthocarpus for dyeing skins. For eye inflammation they used the blossoms of horsemint, the long plumed avens for coughs, Oregon grape for stomach trouble, and gum plant for the liver.
One day I went with Little Creek for a hunting trip on the mountains. He took his rifle and I my camera for pictures. Little Creek was a good guide. He had the instinct of an Indian for traveling in the forest and a wonderful memory for landmarks. He was a fountain of shrewd wisdom and something of a philosopher.
We crossed a valley to the base of a mountain; then went slowly up the steep slope, stopping to rest and smoke and listen to the birds, to see the trees and flowers and look for signs of game. I heard a Gambel sparrow singing among the spruces. It closely resembles the white-crowned sparrow and is related to our Eastern white-throat. But its song has only three notes which are of different tones, like the sounding of clear bells. Many squirrels chattered at our approach and ceased from hiding cones to watch us pass. We raised some blue grouse, saw signs of wapiti and moose and the splay footprints of a wolverine, called “Mountain Devil” by the Indians, because of its meanness and wonderful cunning.
We went through a chain of meadows with masses of wild flowers of many shades and colors, crimson, yellow, pink and blue, growing luxuriantly among the tall grasses. A warm wind swept across their faces, bearing a delicious fragrance [[161]]that reminded me of the sweet clover fields of our Eastern States in June.
Deep down in the soft grass were anemones and lady’s-slipper, and along streams masses of pink wild heliotrope, bluebells, and shooting stars—vivid little red flowers that held their pointed yellow noses downward towards the ground. In the woods were tiny twin flowers, golden arnica growing high above the forest floor, and clematis with lovely purple blossoms, festooning with its vines the shrubs and logs and lower branches of trees. The Indian called clematis “Ghost’s Lariat,” because it catches people and trips them up in the dark.
In the forest the largest trees were Engelmann spruce and Douglas fir, growing in scattered groups, some one hundred feet in height. But the chief tree was the lodge-pole pine, tall, slender, and clean-shafted.
Near timber-line many trees were broken, having been thrown by the southwest wind. The forest became open and the trees shorter, till we passed from the cover and came to battered and storm-twisted “limber-pines.” Some of them were centuries old, undersized and imperfect, with trunks only a foot in diameter and several feet in height; some trailed on the ground, like serpents and long-bodied animals; others, in exposed places on the mountain side, looked like tattered and wind-torn banners, with branches all flung out on one side of the trunk.
On the high slopes it was still early spring; the flowers followed close upon retreating snowdrifts. There the growing season is so brief, the spring and autumn flora bloom together. High up I saw blossoms in all their vernal freshness, that had long ago faded on the prairies.
Along the borders of streams and in mossy bogs, the swamp laurel was in flower, its blossoms rosy pink, also snow buttercups and the Western globeflower. Close by a snowbank, I [[162]]saw a carpet of yellow snow lilies, a belt of solid gold, false forget-me-nots and chalice cups of cream-white blossoms and fluffy gold-green centers.