Plants and pioneers
My dad’s parents were born pre-1900 and lived almost 100 years each. My father lived from 1925 to the age of 97. They were literally dirt poor during their respective youths. My father did not like millet as an adult, because he ate so much of it as a child. He knew which wild plants were edible, because he had eaten them.
His father came from Kentucky with his parents as a small child. My dad’s grandparents had been a streetcar conductor and a Sunday school teacher in Louisville before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the time, the church was tiny to the point of minuscule in Kentucky, and they decided to move west to be with the saints. One of the missionaries who taught them had the first name, Ambrose; he was from the Big Horn Basin in northern Wyoming. He told them it was a good place to live, with land available and good people. So they bought train tickets to Billings, Montana.
In Billings, they bought a team of horses and a wagon. What is now a two-hour drive by car, took them two weeks by wagon. My great-grandfather had never driven horses that weren’t following trolley tracks. On top of that, one horse was balky; it didn’t want to follow orders. When they arrived in Burlington, Wyoming, they were greeted by a small group of saints living in log cabins and a few frame houses, and lots of dry land. There were no irrigation ditches yet, though there were plans to dig them. Water had to come from the small rivers, what Kentuckians would call no bigger than creeks. These “cricks” sometimes completely dried up in summer.
The terrain was divided into bottom lands next to watercourses, upper lands edged by bluffs, and mountains, actual Rocky mountains that had more water but also had snow and freezing weather. Most people farmed enough to get by, but most wealth came from cows and sheep. The bottom lands had water but also flooded every spring. The upper lands required wells dug to get water. The upper lands had grass in spring, sagebrush and prickly pear cactus all year. The mountains snowed in every September to April, impassable sometimes as late as June. The only trees growing in any numbers were cottonwoods and willows on the bottom lands, and pines in the mountains, with some groves of aspens. A locavore would have to eat meat to survive; there wasn’t enough edible plant life to sustain a population of any size.
The pioneers brought hard red wheat from the plains, along with barley. They brought salt cedar and Russian olive trees from the steppes of Asia. They brought asparagus and a persistent variety of bush rose with edible hips and bright yellow blooms. The hardier varieties of corn would grow. My ancestors planted an orchard of transparents, apples with thin yellow skin and a tendency to turn to mush, great for bottling applesauce. There were small native plums and raspberries. Black currant bushes from Asia thrived in the river bottoms.
Every once in a while I hear about the horrors of alien species, invasive plants and animals, the great Columbian exchange, extinction events and the need to prevent the loss of biodiversity. But I thank God for the ability to move plants and animals from one similar climate to another. We’d be far worse off without these edible and useful foods.
