FOOD AND FIBER PLANTS OF THE INDIANS. 43 



the country people. It is the well-known Amole, or soap-plant. It 

 rises from a subterranean bulb, which is egg-shaped in form, two or 

 three inches in diameter, and enveloped in a thick coating of black, 

 matted, hair-like fibers. This bulb has the detergent properties of 

 soap, cleaning the hands or clothing quite as well as and much more 

 pleasantly than the coarser kinds of soap. 



In Mexico and our Southwestern Territories there are several other 

 soap-plants, of which the narrow-leaved yucca ( Y. anyustlfolia) is the 

 most famous, because of its wider distribution rather than its greater 

 efficiency. Aside from baser uses it is generally employed by the 

 Mexican women to wash their luxuriant and lustrous hair, of which 

 the beauty is said to be largely due to this practice. The leaf pulp 

 and the roots of the larger yucca ( Y. haccata) have the same prop- 

 erties though to a less degree ; but the most effective soap-plant of this 

 region is the lechuguilla, of which the parenchyma of the leaves is 

 thought by the inhabitants of the country where it grows to be better 

 than the best soap for washing, and it is claimed that this portion of 

 the leaf if dried and powdered may be made as useful an article of 

 export as the fibeis. 



Still another and very different soap-plant is found in Texas and 

 Mexico, the (soap-berry) Sapindus marginatus (Wild.). This is a tree 

 twenty or thirty feet in height, which bears a multitude of whitish 

 berries as large as small cherries, and which have a very mild and yet 

 efficient detergent property. 



Berries. — The Indians are great berry-eaters. During the sum- 

 mer the huckleberries, strawberries, blackberries, etc., contributed large- 

 ly to the subsistence of the Indians who formerly lived in the Mississip- 

 pi Valley and the Eastern States ; and when the white population 

 increased, and villages and towns came near enough to offer mar- 

 kets, the women depended largely upon their baskets of berries for the 

 purchase of the muslin, calico, blankets, and trinkets that soon became 

 necessary for their happiness. 



In the Far West berries are a much more important element in the 

 commissary of the Indians, probably because they are produced there 

 in an abundance and variety unknown in any other part of the world. 

 The service-berry {Amelanchier Canadensis) grows throughout nearly 

 the entire wooded region west of the Mississippi, not as a tree, but as 

 a shrub, which forms tufts or thickets that in some regions become 

 storehouses of delicious food. The berry is black when ripe, ovoid in 

 form, and often half an inch in length. It is very sweet, palatable, 

 and nutritious, and no one need starve or suffer from hunger where it 

 is plentiful. In places it covers mountain-slopes continuously for miles, 

 and I have there seen thousands of acres thickly set with bushes six or 

 eight feet high, fairly bending under the weight of fruit, which was 

 drying up and decaying because there seemed neither insect, bird, 

 animal, nor man to eat it. 



