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Camas or Quamash (Camassia esculenta Lindl.),a showy plant 
ranging from the Rocky Mountains to California and British 
Columbia, sometimes so abundant on rich meadows as to tint 
them a uniform light blue color, suggesting, as expressed by an 
early explorer, “a lake of clear water.” The bulb is globular- 
ovoid, resembling a small onion; raw it has.a mucilaginous, rather 
insipid taste, but baked it acquires the flavor as well as the color 
of chestnut. Lewis and Clarke were probably the first white men 
to eat it, as told in their narrative: “ The Indians set before us a 
small piece of buffalo-meat, some dried salmon, berries and several ° 
kinds of roots. Among these last is one which is round and much 
like an onion in appearance and sweet to the taste; it is called 
Quamash and is eaten either in its natural state or boiled into a 
kind of soup or made into a cake called « pasheco.” After our 
long abstinence this was a sumptuous treat.” 
Camas has always been one of the chief articles of subsistence 
of all Indians in and west of the Rocky Mountains. They usually 
bake it in heated pits, sometimes mixed with a black hair-like 
lichen (Alectoria jubata) which grows in profusion on Larzx occt- 
dentalis, the result being a dark brown homogeneous soft mass 
which is fashioned into large cakes. 
The other four species of Camassia described, all closely inter- 
related, have the same kind of edible bulb, with the exception of 
C. Cusickii Wats., the largest and finest, whose bulb is said, perhaps 
without sufficient investigation, to be nauseous and very acrid. 
The bulbs of all the species of Adium, or Garlic, are more or 
less edible and nutritious in spite of the strong-scented volatile 
oil they contain; many references are made to the ‘Wild Leekes” 
and “Wild Onions” by the first explorers who were sometimes 
compelled to follow the example of the Indians and eat them to 
Sustain life; however, it was their abundance all over the land 
which gave them value rather than their quality. 
Several species of Siilax have thick knobby tuberous root- 
Stocks, which were utilized by our southern Indians. The most 
noted is S. Pseudo-China L., with extensively spreading and fas- 
Cicled roots containing a large proportion of starch readily obtained 
as a reddish sediment by washing in water, and formerly, accord- 
ing to Bartram, made into soup, bread or jelly. Later these roots 
