The American Botanist 



VOL. XVII JOLIET, ILL., FEBRUARY, 1911 No. 1 



LIBRARY 

 %Tirst came the forivard durlings of the Oprinff, NEW YOIk.: 



s!> no tu drops anfi violets and daisies ivhite, BOTArSIl^- 



Cfhe year's faint smiles before its hurst of mirth, 

 ^he soft siveeta breathing babies of the earth; 

 Glose to her ivarm broivn bosom nestling in, 

 ^hat the luild ivinds take laughing by the chin. 



— Kemble. 



T 



THE YUCCA AND THE INDIAN. 



By Charles Francis Saunders. 



HE Indian was the first American Botanist, and of all our 

 redmen those of the arid regions of the great Southwest 

 have exhibited the most remarkable sagacity in exploiting the 

 secrets of the wild plants with which they have come in contact. 

 One of the United States Government investigators has record- 

 ed the fact that out of about one hundred and fifty known spe- 

 cies of plants indigenous to the Moqui Reservation in northern 

 Arizona — largely a desert reservation — these Indians have 

 utilized in one way and another, about one hundred and forty. 



The remorseless Indian policy of the government, which 

 is de-Indianizing the Indian at a rapid rate, has already de- 

 stroyed so much of aboriginal practice that one has to travel far 

 indeed into the wool of the wild west to find Indians who de- 

 pend nowadays to any extent on the native plants. Fortun- 

 ately, however, there are some of this sort left — the most nu- 

 merous being the Navajos whose great reservation lies across 

 parts of northern Arizona and New Mexico. They live a sort 

 of patriarchial, pastoral life, dwellings not in villages but each 



