24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [Feb., 



THE ETHNO-BOTANY OF THE GOSIUTE INDIANS. 

 BY RALPH V. CHAMBERLIN. 



The home of the Gosiute Indians was formerly all of the generally 

 desert territory bordering the Great Salt Lake on the south and 

 extending westward into eastern Nevada. To the passing traveller 

 this whole region, before certain favored portions were reclaimed by 

 irrigation, appeared so utterly desolate and uninviting that he must 

 have wondered that any human being should be found there excepting 

 from direst necessity. Yet to the Gosiute this still is, as it long has 

 been, home and native land, and he loves it with a love as ardent as 

 ever burned in the breast of patriot. Away from it he pines; and no 

 thought to him is so harrowing as that the Government may yet force 

 him away to some hated reservation; no suffering so deep as that he 

 bears when he sees his last remaining foothold steadily encroached 

 upon by stockman and rancher. He knows well the haunt and habits 

 of its living creatures; the familiar note of its every bird has become 

 woven into his very life ; while from grandparents he knows the quality 

 of root and leaf and seed of its plants, among which he finds food for 

 every season and for every ill a medicine. Nature's severe parsimony 

 in this land forced him to know minutely and to use to the utmost 

 such resources as she had bestowed. 



The region is broken by a series of mountain ranges running in a 

 generally north and south direction and rising for the most part from 

 one to six thousand feet above the plateau. Between the ranges are 

 level valleys floored with alluvial gravel, sand and silt, washed and 

 accumulated through many ages from the mountains and charged 

 with the alkaline salts forming so marked a characteristic of the 

 country. In the lower central portions of each valley there is typi- 

 cally an alkaline flat or playa where in the winter season water collects 

 in a shallow sheet and converts the soil into a soft clay-like mud that 

 is "bottomless and impassable." In the summer time the flat is dry 

 and hard and often shows white and glistening from an incrustation 

 of the alkaline salts. The mountains are furrowed with many gulches 

 and narrow canyons which here and there in their courses widen into 

 pleasant, meadow-like basins which are locally termed "parks." 



The annual rainfall in the valleys is very low, the precipitation 



