Plants of the Prairie
The buffalo no longer roam the Great Plains, now covered with farms and cattle. But we still see the medicinal, commercial and troublesome plants the explorers found there

By Jolene Krawczak
Photos by Joan Carlin,
The Oregonian

PURPLE CONEFLOWER
(Echinacea angustifolia)

Then: Treatment for snakebites and sore throats.
Noted and collected: Roots sent back from Fort Mandan, N.D., winter 1805.
Today: Visit any drug store in America and see this top-selling herb's legacy: capsules, tablets, liquids and powders. Find echinacea tea, throat lozenges and spray, cough syrup, tinctures, echinacea for kids and even echinacea shampoo.

Purple coneflower is vanishing from the tall-grass prairie, one of the most threatened ecosystems in America.

FORT MANDAN, N.D. — A shipment sent back down the Missouri for Thomas Jefferson from Fort Mandan, N.D., in 1805 included about 60 dried plants, seeds, roots and a live prairie dog, as well as the roots of echinacea. Lewis and Clark had learned of echinacea from the Native Americans, who used it as a cure for snake bite, "the cure of mad dogs" (Clark) and "an excellent poultice for swellings or soar throat" (Lewis).

Today echinacea still grows wild around Fort Mandan and elsewhere on the Great Plains. It is also one of the top-selling herbal products in the United States and Europe, used to fortify the immune system and to lessen the effect of colds and flu (yes, even sore throat).

But the demand exceeds the commercial supply, and wild harvest, which includes the root, threatens to wipe out native echinacea.

Glinda Crawford, professor of environmental studies at the University of North Dakota, has been a leader in the fight to preserve wild echinacea. Thanks in part to her efforts, "bio-prospecting" of the wild plants without permits or permission is now illegal in several states along the Lewis and Clark Trail. North Dakota legislators have made illegal collection of echinacea a Class A misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison and a $2,000 fine and subject to civil penalties of a $10,000 fine and forfeiture of a vehicle used to transport illegal echinacea.

Crawford grows echinacea in her own garden and harvests the seeds, leaves and roots. When she buys echinacea, she's careful to get it from a natural food store that monitors its sources. That way she knows the herb hasn't been collected illegally or from the prairie.

Echinacea is just one of the vanishing prairie plants. Native prairies are among the most threatened landscapes in America today, Crawford says. "The tall-grass prairie, especially, is the most devastated and most misunderstood of ecosystems."

PRICKLY PEAR CACTUS
(Opuntia polyacantha)

Then: Lewis, seeing it in bloom, says it best: It "forms one of the beauties as well as the greatest pests of the plains."
Noted and collected: A bane through much of the journey, gathered in Montana on May 20, 1805.
Now: Still found on rocky slopes and where the soil has been displaced.

The Great Falls in Montana, now dammed and fenced, remains friendly habitat to invasive prickly pear cactus.

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — Lewis and Clark encountered prickly pear all along their journey through the Plains, though it didn't become a real problem to them until they left the Missouri and traveled overland around the Great Falls.

The portage around the five Great Falls was brutal. The men had to transport the boats and their supplies up and down steep, rugged slopes full of rattlesnakes and prickly pear with only thin moccasins to protect their feet. It took 11 painful days and four trips to move all their gear 10 miles.

Lewis wrote on July 19, 1805, "Capt. C informed me that he extracted 17 of these bryers from his feet this evening."

Overgrazing by herds of buffalo depleted the natural grasses and allowed the prickly pear to invade and cover the bare soil.

Today the Great Falls have been dammed and much of the surrounding land is now covered with wheat farms. But prickly pear still grows where it gets the chance — on rocky slopes, on roadsides where the soil has been disturbed and not replanted, and tucked low in fields of taller grasses.

LEWIS'S WILD FLAX
(Linum lewisii)

Then: "The bark of the stem is thick and strong and appears as if it would make excellent flax," Lewis wrote in his journal.
Noted and collected: Near Great Falls, Mont., on July 9, 1806.
Now: The plant was a new species, Linum lewisii, one that gives its all. Seeds for linseed oil and health foods; fiber for linen fabric.

ONAKA, S.D. — "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture," Thomas Jefferson wrote. He passed that philosophy along to Lewis, who thought the wild flax "thick and strong" and had high hopes it would be useful for farmers.

But Lewis never envisioned a farmer like Rick Heintzman.

On his farm near the Lewis and Clark Trail, Heintzman, 51, works the same land his grandfather once homesteaded. Heintzman is part entrepreneur, part visionary and part high-pressure salesman, and his whirlwind of activity revolves around an offspring of Lewis's wild flax.

About 10 years ago, in response to low wheat prices, Heintzman began cultivating a golden flax he calls Dakota Flax Gold. Then he began packaging and marketing direct from his farm and Web site when he realized golden flax contains significant amounts of fiber, Omega-3 essential fatty acids, high-quality protein, lignins, vitamins and minerals.

Early research also indicates flax has the potential to lower cholesterol levels, prevent heart disease and benefit those with diabetes, arthritis and even cancer.

"In 10 years this country won't be able to produce enough flax to meet the demand," Heintzman declares. But he'll also tell you he's always been misunderstood and "seven years ahead of everyone. People in town think I'm crazy."

Heintzman's ideas tumble out faster than he can talk. Business is booming. Sold as a health supplement from his Internet site, golden flax earns Heintzman at least $335 a bushel. At the local grain elevator his annual production of 30,000 bushels would bring about $3 a bushel for feed or oil. He plans to triple flax production this year, shooting for 100,000 bushels and contracting out half that production, though rains have delayed planting this spring.

He's gotten others interested in flax, too. At the Florida-based Diabetes Resource Center, dermatologists and psychiatrists have started to further study flax as a health food.

The market for flax — other than for linseed oil or as a fiber — has never been big because ground or processed flax quickly loses health benefits if not used shortly after grinding. Heintzman solved the problem by selling whole flax in kits that include small coffee grinders to grind each day's supply. He also has worked out a process to stabilize the flax oil in a nutrition bar that actually tastes good.

"A year from now, this whole operation is really going to take off," Heintzman says. "It will finally be accepted."

PACIFIC YEW
(Taxus brevifolia)

Then: Green giants filled the forests. Journals make note of evidence of forest fires, some likely set for ceremony, more set by lightning.
Noted and collected: Clark wrote of eight kinds of pine trees when crossing through Montana to Idaho on Sept. 16, 1805.
Now: The source of taxol, a breakthrough cancer-treatment discovered in 1967. Until the drug was synthesized, treatment for one patient required the harvest of six 100-year-old trees. The slow-growing tree is sparse or wiped out of many Northwest forests.

Many yews have disappeared from Northwest forests, stripped of their bark for the cancer drug taxol. The remaining yews are mostly small and shrubby.

Lewis and Clark would have been proud to know that one of their plant discoveries — the same tree they would have seen at Fort Clatsop — would provide one of the most significant cancer-fighting drugs more than a century later.

One hundred and fifty years after the explorers saw the Pacific yew as they crossed the Lolo Trail between Montana and Idaho, scientists discovered the tree's bark contained taxol — a break-through treatment for ovarian, breast and other cancers.

Taxol is now synthesized, but for years it could be obtained only by tripping the life-saving bark from yews, killing the trees. In 1991, the National Cancer Institute contracted for 60,000 pounds of dried bark for its taxol, the equivalent of 12,000 trees.

Which is how botanist Sally Claggett got her floor.

The tongue-and-groove wood floors in Sally and John Claggett's kitchen, living and dining rooms in their White Salmon, Wash., home are yew. They bought the salvaged yew after the bark had been stripped for taxol.

On her hands and knees, Sally Claggett, a botanist for the Mount Adams Ranger District, can read the story of the forest in her unusual blond-wood floor.

"This imperfection shows where a limb was lopped off. Here is where a tree was likely hit." And the rings on one plank show "that tree was 700 to 800 years old," she says. "Because the tree is so very slow-growing, you get those tight rings."

Claggett appreciates the complexities beneath her family's feet. She knows the decimation that Northwest forests suffered to create taxol, and she knows that thousands of lives were saved in the process.

"It's so special to have that connection," she says. "I never take the floors for granted."

THE LEGACY GROWS reproduced courtesy of the Oregonian.
These stories originally ran May 24, 2001
© 2001 The Oregonian
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