38 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the grains of our broom-coni. They are well flavored and nutritious, 

 and are locally much used by the Indians for food. One of the Kla- 

 math lakes, which is about ten miles in diameter, is very shallow, and 

 a large part of the surface is covered with the leaves of this water- 

 lily. The Indians who live upon the banks of this lake gather the 

 capsules as they mature, and store them for winter use. In some of 

 their wigwams we found as many as twenty or thirty bushels of them 

 at the time of our visit in August. Just how they are used I can not 

 say, but I believe they are either ground to make a kind of coarse 

 flour, or are parched, as the grains of maize so frequently are by the 

 Indians. Perhaps nowhere else does this plant furnish an important 

 food-staple, but for many hundreds of the Klamath Indians it is one 

 of the most valuable of their winter stores. 



AcoRxs. — At least two kinds of oak in California furnish acorns 

 which are used as food by the Indians ( Quercus lohata and Quereus 

 agrifoUa). Of these, the first is the largest of Western oaks ; it is 

 found in the greatest perfection along the streams in the Sacramento 

 valley, where I have sometimes seen it a hundred feet in height, and 

 covering with its spreading branches a circle more than one hundred 

 feet in diameter. The acorns are long — elliptical in outline, an inch 

 and a half in length by half an inch or more in diameter. The kernel 

 is sometimes rather bitter, but more palatable than that of any of our 

 Eastern oaks, and quite nutritious. In the region where the tree 

 abounds, the Indians in former times were in the habit of collecting 

 acorns in large quantities and storing them for winter, and I have seen 

 nearly a hundred bushels in one wigwam. They are prepared for 

 eating by grinding the kernels to a kind of coarse flour ; this is mixed 

 witli water to a thick paste ; a circular depression with raised edges is 

 made in the sand, into which this paste is poured. A fire is then built 

 over it, and it is half-baked, half-steamed, to the Indian taste. This 

 treatment takes the bitterness from the acorn, and the resulting cake, 

 though according to our notions somewhat lacking in cleanliness, is 

 well-flavored and wholesome. 



In Southern California the evergreen-oak ( Q. agrifolia) grows to 

 be a magnificent tree, but throughout the broad region it inhabits it is 

 more generally a small tree or even a large bush. Its acorns are long 

 and pointed, sometimes quite acute ; the kernel is somewhat bitter, 

 but it is often used for food by the Indians who inhabit the more arid 

 portions of the region where it is found, and where the scarcity of 

 subsistence drives them to eat whatever is nutritious and not positively 

 harmful. 



Tlie mezquite {Prosopis glandulosa) is one of the most wide- 

 spread and useful ])lant8 in the southwestern portion of the United 

 States and Northern Mexico. In Texas it is a tree of respectable size, 

 the trunks attaining on the Brazos a diameter of a foot or more, but 

 it is always low and spreading. In the more arid regions it sometimes 



