When the honorary curator of the U.S. National Herbarium first visited the Klamath Indians in 1896, he compiled a list of 40 plants in use, including roasted lily seeds called Wokas, still popular today.
The biologist, Frederick V. Colville, described plants offering everything from food and fiber to fishnets and stuffed-pillow down. Regional trees had many uses.
The white fir provided bark for dyeing and tanning buckskin. Red cedar provided material for making bows for boys and the yew tree yielded stronger bows for men.
Cedar offered multiple uses, from sagebrush sticks twirled in a block of seasoned cedar to create fire from friction, to woven pack-basket strands. Burning cedar branches and twigs fired sweat baths for the sick.
The ponderosa pine trunks were turned into dugout boats. In the month of May, the Indians removed a broad strip of ponderosa bark and scraped off and ate the moist and sticky layer of newly forming tissue between the bark and the sapwood. A small amount of lodge-pole pine pitch placed under the eyelid treated sore eyes.
There’s not enough time here today to describe all the uses Indians discovered in the other 34 plants Colville recorded.
Source: Colville, Fredrick V. Notes on the Plants Used by the Klamath Indians of Oregon: Contributions from the U.S. National Herbarium. II ed. Vol. 5. Washington, D.C.: Division of Botany U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1987. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.
