BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 205 



the pine of which the Indians eat the young cambium, which 

 they scrape off with a knife, after removing the bark. It is 

 a very cooling and by no means unpleasant article of food. 

 The two former are the trees of the level plateaux, on stony 

 rocky, sandy soil. Different Coniferce appear on slopes 

 towards rivulets, or grassy plains, and especially in deep 

 defiles. 



Far more sombre and dense trees than P. ponderosa fill 

 with perfect darkness the deep defiles in the Green Moun- 

 tains, and principally the majestic Thvja gigantea of Nuttall. 

 Its average height is 200 feet, and the diameter of the 

 trunk 10-12 feet; one very large specimen, which I measured 

 with my horse-line, came up to about 47 feet circumference. 

 These trees are as straight as can be imagined, forming a slender 

 pyramid with their many horizontal and slightly refracted 

 branches, fringed with dense branchlets and elegant broad 

 fan-like foliage. They are only found in such perfection on 

 the vast beds of that blackish fertile soil, accumulating by the 

 decomposition of basaltic rock. The trunks are mostly hol- 

 low, their wood splits very easily, and is lighter, though not 

 less durable when exposed to weather, than cedar-wood. The 

 bark is used by the Indians, especially the Coeur d'Aleines, 

 °r Skitsoes tribe, for various purposes, as for roofing their 

 nuts, they make a frail sort of canoe with it to navigate their 

 placid river and lakes, and bags for carrying their roots 

 a «d use it for binding their fishing apparatus. The tree 

 *■ indeed very useful to them * Clumps of evergreen 



* On our way from the Flathead to the Spokan or Coeur d'Aleiue river, 



10 November 1843, we had to traverse a high spur of the Green Mountains, 



already clothed with deep snow. Owing to the difficulties of this cross- 



in g> which cost us most of our horses, (having for nearly five days nothing 



fe «l on) I could not pay proper attention to the vegetation. But this 



Biuch I do know, that I saw Taxodium aempervirens growing with the 



h W gigantea, on the borders of these woods, and that my hungry animal 



d u P on its branches; they were all low slender trees, of a somewhat 



n aked aspect; but I never met with them again in any of my future excur- 



s, °ns to similar regions. 



