USEFUL WILD PLANTS 



Millet or Sand-grass (Eriocoma cuspidate, Nutt.). 

 It is a perennial, growing in bunches a foot or two 

 high, with peculiar panicles whose thread-like, twist- 

 ing branchlets are tipped with husks containing 

 small, blackish seeds, which have long been valued 

 by desert Indians for flour making. This is one of 

 the wild grains upon which the Zuni Indians of New 

 Mexico have been in the habit of relying in times of 

 failure of their cultivated crops; and Dr. Edward 

 Palmer tells of parties of Zunis being seen as far as 

 ten miles from their villages carrying enormous 

 loads of these seeds for winter provision. Still an- 

 other desert grass with edible seeds, but restricted 

 in its distribution in our country to Southern Cali- 

 fornia, is Panicum Urvilleanum, Kunth, which the 

 desert Coahuillas call song-wal. It is a stout per- 

 ennial, one to two feet high, the whole plant, includ- 

 ing the seeds, more or less hairy, and is quite near 

 of kin to the millet of the Old World, whose nutri- 

 tious properties it shares. 



Among the various gummy plants of the Pacific 

 Coast known there as Tarweeds is one called Chile 

 Tarweed (Madia sativa, Molina). It is a heavy- 

 scented annual, one to three feet high, sticky and 

 hairy, with rather narrow, entire leaves, and incon- 

 spicuous, pale yellow flowers of the daisy type, the 



56 



