many other shallow lakes. This was one of the chief commercial roots of the tribes, much sought after by those whose country did not produce it. Numerous other roots lent variety to the diet—blue lupine, which, when baked, resembles the sweet potato; Chinook licorice, bitterroot, the tuber of the foxtail, wild turnip, lily bulbs, and onions.
A host of plants was included in the medical kit of the Indians. Roots of the wild poppy were used to allay toothache. The dried ripe fruit and the leaves of the scarlet sumac were made into a poultice for skin disease. A tea from the bark of the dogwood was imbibed for fevers and colds. Wild hops and witch hazel aided in the reduction of sprains and swellings, and rattlesnake plantain was efficacious for cuts and bruises. Oregon grape and sage brush, buckthorn and trillium, death camas and yarrow, false Solomon's seal and vervain, went into the pharmacopoeia of the tribes, while the juice of the deadly cowbane augmented the supply of rattlesnake virus as a poison for arrows.
Mats, baskets, nets, and cords were made of the fibres and leaves of grasses, nettles, Indian hemp, tough-leaved iris, milkweed, dogbane, and scores of other fibrous plants. Cedar was the favorite lumber tree, because of the ease of working the long, straight boles. Canoes, from the small one-man craft to those of sixty feet in length, were wrought from single cedars, while the great communal houses were made of huge slabs split from cedar logs and roofed with the bark. Drawing and casting nets were woven of silky grass, the fibrous roots of trees, or of the inner bark of the white cedar. Bows were usually made of yew or crab-apple wood, while arrows were shaped of the straight shoots of syringa or other tough stems. Fish weirs were made of willow, as were the frames of snowshoes. Fire blocks were of cedar and twirling sticks of the dried stems of sagebrush or manzanita.
Many of the Indians of Oregon still continue in this ancient economy. Each season the Klamaths reap the wocus seed from the yellow water lilies of Klamath Lake, the Warm Springs Indians journey into the mountains for the berry picking, and some tribes still dig the wild roots. On the Warm Springs Reservation a root festival is held in the spring and a huckleberry festival when the huckleberries ripen in late summer. These are thanksgiving feasts bringing out colorful costumes and consisting of dances, speeches, and religious ceremonies that are parts of a well defined ritual, the meaning of which is preserved in the tribal life.
Following the customs of their red neighbors, the pioneers drew a portion of their subsistence from the wilderness. Wild berries and fruits of all kinds went into the frontier larder, as well as many of the
