USEFUL WILD PLANTS 



nut's part in saving them from serious hunger. 

 Being a vegetable, it made a grateful complement 

 to the enforced meat diet of pioneers and explorers ; 

 and Major Long, whose share in making known the 

 Rocky Mountain region to the world is commemo- 

 rated in the name of one of our country's loftiest 

 peaks, tells in his journal of his soldiers' finding 

 the little tubers in quantities of a peck or more 

 hoarded up in the brumal retreats of the field mice 

 against the lean days of winter. They may be 

 ^cooked either by boiling or by roasting. 



Though the Groundnut has so far failed of se- 

 curing a footing in the gardens of civilization, there 

 is another tuber-bearing plant growing wild in the 

 United States that has a recognized status in the 

 world's common stock of vegetables. This is a 

 species of Sunflower {Helianthus tuberosus, L.), the 

 so-called Jerusalem Artichoke. It is indigenous in 

 moist, alluvial ground from middle and eastern 

 Canada southward to Georgia and west to the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley, attaining a height at times of 10 

 feet or more. The French explorers in the St. 

 Lawrence region in the early seventeenth century 

 saw the tubers in use by the Indians and found 

 them so palatable when cooked, suggesting arti- 

 chokes, that they sent specimens back to France. 



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