Sky Island - Grocery and Drugstore
Excerpts from DCI March 17, 1983.
Muriel Marshall

      Restocked fresh every spring, the shelf-like shoulders and tabletop of Grand Mesa provided Utes and earlier Indians with a rich variety of edible and medicinal plants, which they are known to have used at least a hundred different ways.  For instance, more than twenty varieties of roots were eaten raw, boiled or roasted.  One plant, sage, was used in twenty ways - from making rope, to curing rheumatism.

    Indian women used dock leaves, a favorite potherb green, to tenderize meat, having discovered that its tart juices considerably reduced the cooking time of a tough old rabbit or brisket of ancient buck.

    Men smoked dock leaves, mixed with willow or kinnikinnick, when they ran out of the real tobacco (leaves of the nicotiana flower) which they themselves had gathered and cured - only men had to do with whatever concerned the sacred tobacco.

    Both women and men used dockstem tea as an after-shampoo rinse, to increase hair strength and sheen.

    The Indian cook’s bread and cereal menu was anything but monotonous.  She gathered, parched, winnowed and stone-ground flour and meal from fifteen or
twenty kinds of seed including buttercup, primrose, Indian millet, sunflower, rice grass, saltbush and squaw grass.

    Some of the best sources of flour required special treatment.  Acorns, for example, are plentiful (and rewardingly big to gather compared to grass seed), but bitter with tannin - even Grand Mesa’s relatively sweet gambel oak acorns.  The tannin could be leached out by pouring several changes of boiling water over the meal, but hot water in such quantities was hard to come by when it could only be produced by putting heated rocks into the basket-pot; so a prevalent method was to put the acorn meal in a porous basket made especially for the purpose (a cloth bag was used after the Utes got cloth along with other appurtenances of civilization), and then sink the glob of dough-like stuff in a creek or lake, turning and kneading it three or four times a day for about a week.

    Sweet-tasting at last, the dough was seasoned with flaxseed or spicy wallflower seed, patted into flat cakes and baked on a hot rock.  Acorn meal was also dried for winter use.

    Besides grains and seeds, a dozen or so kinds of roots were dried and ground into flour - among them the yampa, cow parsnip, salsify, biscuit root, cattail, yellow pond lily, and sego lily.  They were almost pure energy-rich starch; biscuit root, for instance, was one of the plants called “Indian potato,” and the yellow yampa was called “Indian carrot.”

    Onions were put into meat stews, of course, but so was any of a bewildering variety of other potherbs, such as lambs quarter, purslane, chickweed, prince’s plume (resembling cabbage in taste), fireweed tips, stinging nettle, sorrel, saltbush bracts, water cress, all manner of edible roots.  And berries.

    Of the nineteen kinds of berries found on Grand Mesa and vicinity, the Utes used fifteen varieties - nine in great quantities: serviceberries, chokecherries, raspberries, holly grape, elderberries and strawberries. 

    It is said the early Ute (before some of picking up ideas from the Plains Indians) did not make true pemmican - a mixture of berries, pounded dried meat and fat. But they did knead dried berries and fat together, producing a traveling ration, which they put into buckskin pouch “lunchboxes” along with pieces of jerky for their men to carry while hunting.

    An infusion of raspberry leaves was given women during labor to make the process more comfortable, but since babies were often born out of leaf-season, the usual method of making birth easier was half a cup of juniper-twig tea taken daily beginning about a month before the birth was expected, then to speed things up during actual labor a decoction of ground juniper berries.

    Indian knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants was ancient, a lore handed down from eons of experiment and experience.  And the effectiveness of a great deal of it has been verified by scientists isolating the chemical agent in each plant, and its effect on the human body.  Of those Indian remedies that will elude scientific endorsement, many were so disagreeable to take that they doubtless “worked” simply because they tasted so bad they must be good for you, as do some modern remedies, for the same psychological reason.

    Nature is tricky.  Among the hundreds of edible and medicinal plants on Grand Mesa are at least 14 poison ones, some of which look almost like food plants – cow parsnip and deadly water hemlock, for instance.  Some are poisonous at one time of year, but not another.

    Wild rhubarb stalks are a fine tonic food, the leaves can kill you.

    Like their modern counterparts, Ute children roving Grand Mesa had their “entertainment” foods.  Half a dozen plants produced chewing for them in half a dozen flavors.  Mountain dandelion, cactus, pussy toes, chicory and rabbitbrush yield milky sap that on drying hardens to a satisfying chew.  Chewing gum was
not just for children, it was used by adults to reduce thirst during long treks through dry country.

    They had “pop corn.”

    This fun food was a product of the yellow pond lily so prevalent on Grand Mesa.  Earlier in each Mesa season the yellow pond lily had already provided a rich harvest of “root-bread” which the Ute woman secured by wading out waist-deep and, with a hooked stick, yanking up the tubers that snaked over the pond floor.  Then in late July or August, she would extract the seeds from the pods of the lillies and crack them in a hot fire until they opened [kind of like popcorn].  The cracked seeds could then be then eaten or ground into meal for breads.