TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Scooter Cheatham (SC)
BACKGROUND: Female (F) and Male (M) Students
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW)
DATE: April 1, 2001
LOCATION: Chisos Basin and Lajitas, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Robin Johnson
REELS: 2146 and 2147

Please note that the video includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview.

(misc.)
DT: My name’s David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It’s April 1st, 2001 and we’re in Big Bend National Park and we have the good opportunity to interview Scooter Cheatham, who’s a Director of Useful Wild Plants of Texas and the Southwest and he’s been active in learning and teaching about economic botany and the many uses of wild plants. I wanted to take this chance to thank you for spending time with us.
00:01:07 – 2146
SC: Indeed. So shall we look at some plants?
DT: Let’s do it.
00:01:12 – 2146
SC: Okay. I want to just look at something right here real quick. Saw this at Austin at McKinney Falls and there’s a little bit right here but if we went up the trail, if we done that hike yesterday and gone up to Laguna Meadow, we would’ve seen acres of this along the trail. Does anybody remember this one?
M: The gray one or the green?
00:01:37 – 2146
SC: The gray one. The green one we saw yesterday, that’s that (inaudible). Yeah, yeah. Which is? Somebody. (inaudible). We can’t pick any, but, um, did anybody not smell it? (inaudible) when we were out at McKinney? Did everybody smell it? Anybody not smell it? What’s it good for? What do we do with it?
M: It’s a good seasoning.
00:02:09 – 2146
SC: Good seasoning. It’s used a lot in Mexican cooking and it’s used to—principally on pork and poultry. Review plant from yesterday, what’s this here?
(inaudible)
00:02:25 – 2146
SC: Pepper grass. It’s one of the peppergrasses. lasiocarpum variety wrightii and it’s—we’re going to have a bit (?) Austin, but this one’s a little bit different. And what else? For review purposes, there’s some (?) but not flower. Well, I think that—let’s go on up now. Start looking—look along the way.
(misc.)
00:03:04 – 2146
SC: Did we talk about this at all yesterday? I don’t remember now. Pretty, isn’t it? Isn’t it pretty? It’s a volume two plant. Anybody have any idea what it is?
(inaudible)
00:03:21 – 2146
SC: Yeah. Is it something you’d want to eat?
(inaudible)
00:03:29 – 2146
SC: In that it’s a legume, yes, but…
(inaudible)
00:03:34 – 2146
SC: It’s Astragalus mollissimus and its common name for it is the wooley locoweed. And if you look at it carefully, it’s got hair on the leaves and the stems at the base of the flowers. And what about it? We call it locoweed, what does that tell us?
(inaudible)
00:03:55 – 2146
SC: It’s one of the big plants that poisons livestock in the—in the West Texas area. Usually happens when—when other forage is low. It’s not particularly bad right now because we’ve got more forage and more—more grass available than we’ve had in many years, really. But it contains—know what it contains? It’s easy. Locoine. And did we talk about why the—why we call it locoweed? Where the—where the common name comes from?
(inaudible)
00:04:31 – 2146
SC: Horses and cattle get the wobblies and it’s a cen—it attacks the central nervous system and so they’re—they start kind of shaking and acting strangely and that’s where the name originally came from. So we’ve seen two locoweeds now, the (?) locoweed, the little low growing one, we saw that yesterday as we were going into Cattail Falls, remember that? The little low growing one? Okay. So we have to look at the poisonous plants as well. Since we’re on poisonous plants, this is another one. We saw a—we saw a member of the same genus back in Austin. Remember the Senecio we saw back in
00:05:15 – 2146
Austin? Obovatus, remember, had the finely divided leaves? This is Senecio longilobus and it’s all over this area and it’s also toxic. All the senecios are toxic. Okay. There’s another one. Desert Evening Primrose. These are going to closing up soon as the sun hits them. Tho—the ones that were back there in the sun were already starting to close up. What about the (?).
(inaudible)
00:06:00 – 2146
SC: All the (?) have edible leaves. Once they flower though, they—they tend to be bitter, so the way to—if you’re going to eat (inaudible) leaves, the way to do it is to learn the plant when it flowers and then look for it the next season in the vegetative states because that’s the only time it’s any good. These now would all be pretty bitter. Nice locoweed.
(misc.)
00:06:50 – 2146
SC: Beans, what about them? What—look at them a little bit. They are—what would you s—how would you describe those pods (inaudible) be careful. Hmm? How would you describe them?
(inaudible)
00:07:06 – 2146
SC: Red. What—how did they—what about the segments? Tell me about the segments. They’re squeezed down between the seeds, right? So they’re constricted. This is—we saw yesterday. We saw Acacia farnesiana, remember that? Back over at Panther Junction? Had all the yellow flowers (inaudible) smell so good, they’re used in perfume. This is acacia; it’s not flowered out yet. This is acacia constricta and the pods look very different than all the other acacias because of these constrictions. Now interesting thing about it is the seeds contain sulfides very similar to the allium, genus Allium. So it might be all right to taste a seed and tell me whether you think it has kind of an oniony or garlic flavor.
F: You want me to?
00:07:54 – 2146
SC: Yeah. Others can, too. They’re kind of hard. This is not the s—this is late. We’re not in the right season for them, but—but I think they still have the flavor.
F: They’re hard.
00:08:06 – 2146
SC: Mmm hmm. But they’re chewable. You get—did you get the…?
F: The flavor (?) but I can’t…
SC: Get—you can’t get the garlic?
F: Oh, a little bit.
00:08:16 – 2146
SC: Tell me—tell me if you get the garlic.
(inaudible)
F: Steve, you want some?
00:08:25 – 2146
SC: They’re real strongly garlicky whenever they’re fresh.
(misc.)
00:08:30 – 2146
SC: I just tasted one and it’s go—it’s—mine is definitely garlicky, you got the wrong one.
(inaudible)
00:08:41 – 2146
SC: Okay, so Acacia constricta is a new plant, that’s in volume one, if you want to—want to read about it. Now tell me about the—we’ve got an opportunity here to look at some mustards again. Now we saw the Lepidium. So what else have we got here? We’ve got another mustard right beside it.
(inaudible)
00:08:58 – 2146
SC: The Tansy mustard, Descurainia pinnata. Right. This tall one right here. Remember that? And we usually show it in Austin, but as I told you, the Highway Department now is mowing the sides of the road so well that we don’t have Tansy mustard in Austin anymore.
(inaudible)
00:09:16 – 2146
SC: Oh, yeah.
(inaudible)
SC: Very faintly. Hmm?
(inaudible)
SC: Yeah, yeah.
(misc.)
00:09:35 – 2146
SC: Let’s see. Well, there’s a real nice Senecio. Look at that thing there. Okay, this is the—this is a good chance. The Erigeron isn’t opened very well yet so this is a good chance to see the kind of purplish tinge on the other s—underside of the petals. This is the only fleabane in the western area, Erigeron modestus. And it’s got a variety of medicinal uses, but all the fleabanes have been used just supposedly as a flea repellent. That’s where the common name comes from.
(inaudible)
00:10:22 – 2146
SC: Yeah, these right here. We looked at them yesterday, but yesterday they were wide open and they look—look like—the disc flowers are yellow and the ray flowers look like they’re pure white. But whenever the—early in the morning like this, they fold up so you can see the underside of the petals that are kind of purplish. So re—really attractive.
(inaudible)
00:10:40 – 2146
SC: Dogbane?
(inaudible)
SC: No. Not that I know of. I mean, you could test it.
(misc.)
00:11:08 – 2146
SC: Is that Ungnadia? Yeah, I guess it is. Hmm mmm. (?) This is a new thing. This is something we hadn’t looked at yet.
(misc.)
00:11:28 – 2146
SC: Yeah. Very good. I di—I don’t need to teach this class. We have—we have somebody here that knows everything. To—collectively. So tell me about piñon.
(inaudible)
00:11:46 – 2146
SC: Li—had a lot of calories. Very fat, very—and very delicious. Which one is this? We have a little dab of Pinus edulis up in the Guadalupes and then we’ve got pinus remota, kind of on the backside of the Edwards Plateau. This is Pinus cembroides. This is probably the commonest pine in the mountain ranges of Texas. What about it, besides the seeds, the edible seeds? Uh huh. What about it? Mmm, yeah, but it’s not a big food supply. I’m looking for something a little different. You all notice the sap? Hmm? What about the gum?
M: It’s glue?
00:12:29 – 2146
SC: It’s an excellent glue. We’ve got—aboriginal people basically had two kinds of glue and each kind had its advantages and disadvantages. Animal hide glue and fish hide glue is a—is a real good source of glue so it was often used to bind arrows and such things as that. The disadvantage was is it’s water soluble and so you—you’re a—you—if you laminate a bow or something like that with it and it gets wet, then it’s going to come apart on you, okay. If it doesn’t get wet, then you’re all right. But it—that—out there in a primitive situation, you don’t have a chance to keep things dry, so the advantage of this
00:13:11 – 2146
adhesive is that it’s—it is waterproof and so it’s used to waterproof a lot of the pitch water bottles. And when you’re in a subsistent situation, you—a very important thing to be able to have is containers where you can transport things and—and containers that are waterproof and how—do anyone know—does anybody know how this was prepared? You wouldn’t use it directly like this because it’s real sticky. How do we get from this to the—to the pitch that we would use for glue?
(inaudible)
SC: What?
(inaudible)
00:13:42 – 2146
SC: You burn off the volatiles, right. And the way it was often done is just on a tilted rock. You’d put—put a—get a big gob of that sap and set it on fire and it runs down the rock and it’s kind of—ends up being kind of a honey color. And to use it, you heat it up. Get it real hot, then you apply it. And so it was heated up and put inside a—a—a basket—a woven basket, particularly coil and twine baskets, and then hot rocks dropped in and s—and rattled around like that to spread it around the inside. And they’d check it to see if it leaked and then add more. Same thing for glue. If you’re going to glue ar—arrow points on or something like that, so it’s—so that’s great. It’s—so it’s waterproof.
00:14:21 – 2146
What’s the disadvantage? You can’t let it get too hot because then it’ll—it’ll come apart. So—so that—that was always the problem in—in trying to figure out adhesives in—in aboriginal cultures is that you’ve either got glues that are—that break down in water or they break down when they get hot. So—so depending on the situation, you choose one or the other. This would—this is one of the really good adhesives used a lot throughout the Southwest by almost all of the ab—aboriginal cultures. And it’s also used direct on—directly as a plaster or an ointment to—to transmit other medicines, like other agents
00:15:00 – 2146
were mixed with it and then it would be applied to rheumatic joints or something like that because it holds it in place. And it was used in the—in the sticky form, the—without the volatiles being burned off for that purpose. Of course the wood has lots of uses, used in a lot of utilitarian applications. When it’s burned, it tends to pop and—and the—the volatiles make it a good fire starter, but not a good long burning firewood. Okay. So that’s an interesting one and we got a—once we get up, we see lots and lots of pinus symbrodies, piñon pine all the way up. There’s a lot of piñon in the Davis Mountains,
00:15:43 – 2146
too. One thing about the Chisos piñons is I’ve never had a good nut off the Chisos. They form cones, they form nuts, but every time I’ve checked them, they’re hollow and I’ve checked hundreds if not thousands of piñon nuts in the Chisos. I’ve never found one yet that has a solid kernel in it. Whereas in the Davis Mountains, every one I’ve ever checked has a really good kernel and I—nobody knows what that’s means—I mean, knows why. It’s not been thoroughly studied, but so be it. Okay, yesterday we talked
00:16:18 – 2146
about—we talked about some of the oaks and you see a lot of new leaves on here. You see some old leaves. What does that tell us about this particular oak? You’re talking about the, you know, you normally think of trees as being deciduous or evergreen and when most people talk about, think, well, there’re only two kinds. There’s the kind that are—they lose all their leaves or they—or they retain all their leaves or most of their leaves, you know, except there’s some—always some attrition, but there are lots of grades in between. And this is often referred to as sub-evergreen. It’s not really
00:16:54 – 2146
evergreen, but sub-evergreen means it loses lots of its leaves. You can see right here, but it still retains some. And—so which one is this? It’s the Emory oak. Now the—the young ones, you really can’t tell much from, but the older ones are sort of shiny, look like they’ve been shellacked and they’re tough, they’re rough. And they have the little spines on the edges. And what we saw yesterday was an integrate between emory and gravesii. And these oaks up here in the Chisos integrate a lot so that—so if you’re looking at any botanical work done on the oaks in the Chisos Mountains, you get Chisos
00:17:43 – 2146
X, various to other species and—or of the reverse. Quercus gravesii X Chisos with the—some sub variety. So there’s a lot of—we call them alley cat oaks. They—they play around a lot. And these are in good flower, really in good shape. That means we’re going to have a good acorn mass later. Gravesii. This is Quercus gravesii It’s known for its fall color but it also some really nice spring color, when the leaves first come in. Look how red that is, it’s really r—reds against the green in here. Kind of an
00:18:31 – 2146
alizarin crimson. Not a pure red, but a really nice cool red. And what about the acorns of these—of gravesii and—and emoryii as opposed to the acorns around Austin from our live oaks? They have l—they have less tannin, they require less leeching and they’re a lot easier to eat. And we talked about—some of you—some of—we talk—some of us talked about it—I don’t know if everybody got this, but what does—what do acorns contribute to our diet when we’re trying to set up the lifestyle out here?
(inaudible)
00:19:08 – 2146
SC: Lots of fat. They’re very, very high in fat. Very, very—we talked about the—our carbohydrate source, this is our fat source and the—that’s real important for energy.
(misc.)
00:19:39 – 2146
SC: So what do—what does that tell us?
(inaudible)
00:19:45 – 2146
SC: Alligator bark juniper, very good. Very good. Juniperus deppeana. And that’s a very distinctive feature about it, when it—if you look at the bark on it, it looks like an alligator’s back. It has something really good on it that we’re interested in. Juniper berries. This is one of the well-known juniper—edible jun—juniper berries. They’re kind of sugary, but it’s more like a dry s—kind of like a dry candy. I mean, they’re not juicy like—we’re going to see Pin—that’s Pinchot juniper right up there, it has great big, red juicy berries on it that h—have very little resin in them. They’re really good and
00:20:21 – 2146
juicy. This is more like a sugary candy kind of berry and they produce—not this time of year. If we were back out here in the fall, we’d see them in the fall. So alligator bark juniper. Oh, let’s look at this too. Look at this here. This is kind of a ratty specimen, but what is this thing?
(inaudible)
00:20:51 – 2146
SC: No. No.
F: Is it an oak, too?
00:20:55 – 2146
SC: It’s an oak, too. It’s an oak, too. This is Quercus grisea. I’m glad to see it. It has kind of the pale green rough leaf. In—in the scale of evergreen from—from zero meaning just completely deciduous to, let’s say, ten meaning completely evergreen, this is a little higher on the scale than emory and gravesii. It retains its leaves a little bit better than the other two. But it has a real good acorn, too. So we’ve seen three oaks here now, right? All real close together. And since we’re looking, we’re going to look at more
00:21:39 – 2146
things. Usually I kind of spread these out a little bit, but since we’re looking, let’s go ahead and take a look at this, too. Okay, we’ve seen—what did I say that was? Is it pinus symbrodies, right? Okay. All right. So what—what’s this thing here?
(inaudible)
00:22:10 – 2146
SC: Juniper. Is it—is it like our juniper—our junipers around Austin? It’s not. Yeah. Why not?
(inaudible)
00:22:24 – 2146
SC: It’s not like our jun—Juniperus ashei, is it?
(inaudible)
00:22:32 – 2146
SC: Yeah. These are droopy, aren’t they? You—well, you could even say—if you’re thinking of it, what’s another way of saying droopy? Weeping. Well, it—actually this is called a weeping juniper. That’s one of the common names for it. Is there another—when something’s kind of limp, what’s another term for that? Flaccid. Juniperus flaccida. Juniperus flaccida. Okay, so weeping juniper, common name. Juniperus flaccida is botanical name for this. It has edible berries, too, so. And it’s unique to—it’s unique to the mountains, and particularly, the Chisos Mountains in Texas. The real
00:23:12 – 2146
interesting—one of the real interesting features of the—the hike here is the weeping juniper. Let’s see, before we get completely up here, here’s another go—now that’s anoth—this is a little bit nicer grisea. Let’s a—have one more look here at this. These are some good ones. Yesterday, the one—the—the plants of this we saw weren’t as—look how robust these things are. And so what was this now? We saw it yesterday but it was not nearly in this good of shape.
(inaudible)
00:23:59 – 2146
SC: Nolina. Which one?
(inaudible)
00:24:04 – 2146
SC: Which one was it?
(inaudible)
SC: Erumpens. The giant nolina, right? Tell me about its application. It’s called Beargrass sacahuista, giant sacahuista.
(inaudible)
00:24:20 – 2146
SC: Baskets. Anybody that’s ever bought a Tarahumara basket, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you got this or another nolina in it. And the other plant that’s used for the Tarahumara baskets? Sotol. (inaudible) And there’s probably a sotal nearby but I don’t see it right here. Does this have any—you know, we talked about sotal having edible qualities. Does this have anything like that? It doesn’t, does it? Does it—do we know anything about it—else about its caudex or sprouts or young growth? Causes photosensitivity in mammals. It’s toxic. We talked about a lot of the edible lily family members. This is one that’s not; this is one that’s toxic. Be sure you remember that. The good things are really good and the bad things are really bad and it’s important to know the difference.
(inaudible)
00:25:21 – 2146
SC: The margins of the leaf. This has—don’t have the large teeth on it. And they don’t—it doesn’t produce the large stalk. It doesn’t—it produce—flowers down in the center of the plant. It doesn’t put the big stalk up.
M: Doesn’t really have a (inaudible)
00:25:38 – 2146
SC: Oh, yeah. It has a caudex, but it doesn’t send up the big stalk like, now, agave puts up a stalk and Dasylirion puts up a stalk. So if you’re unsure about it and—and the—you don’t remember the teeth [sneeze] pardon me. That may mess you up, but I won’t say this doesn’t have teeth. If you feel the edge, you—you could tell it would tear your finger off, but they’re not obvious. If you try to grab it and pull on it, it—I mean, it’s got like a serrated edge. It would just rip your finger wide open.
(inaudible)
00:26:10 – 2146
SC: Sometimes, not quite the same way, but that—that’s not a distinguishing feature I think you could rely on. Just not.
(misc.)
00:26:38 – 2146
SC: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. Oh, okay. The reason I stopped here is that we saw yesterday—we saw Agave lechuguilla, lots of it. We didn’t really talk much about the Agave havardii, did we? Talked a little bit about getting above it and—and shaking the nectar off into a container, remember that? And a real—it’s a real high protein, kind of sweet nectar. We might as well see it here. We’d see a lot of it on the trail if we went up, but the reason I kind of want to show you here—here’s an old stalk. You see—see how high they get and it—see, it’s died. Now that it’s put up the stalk, it’s died. You can
00:27:14 – 2146
see the kind of candelabra like structure at the top of the stalk. And this is what we’d be looking for if we wanted to collect that nectar. It’s also got excellent fiber. It’s got sap in—in the roots. There are lots of uses for that central stalk and this is a real nice agave and the…
(inaudible)
00:27:40 – 2146
SC: Well, we don’t have americana out here at all. You can look—the leaf color is similar, this—it’s a shorter, more truncated leaf. Has a different flower structure. It’s got lots of other—ooh, did you see that sap drip here?
(inaudible)
00:27:54 – 2146
SC: Well, it’s drip—the sap’s dripping.
(inaudible)
SC: See, there’s some right there. This is the sap we were talking about. See, there’s some drips.
M: Could we—we just come around the other side (inaudible)
00:28:10 – 2146
SC: Sure, if you want to.
(misc.)
SC: Yeah, this is just fresh sap here, dripping. This is the sap we were talking about.
(inaudible)
00:28:28 – 2146
SC: That’s it right there. This is what we’d use to make the adhesive with. I’m going to wipe it off because it’s really sticky. All righty. The other thing—now if we’re back out here in the fall, and we’ve been out here in the fall before, there’s another juniper that’s of interest to us. It’s the red berry juniper, or juniperus pinchottii. And that’s this plant right here. Yeah. And that—it’s probably easiest to distinguish it because of the great big, fat, juicy, red fruits and they get ripe in about October. But they’re really nice and red usually in September, but the—the juniper berries from the ash juniper that
00:29:13 – 2146
we’re familiar with back in Austin turn kind of bluish-purple and then they—they—they go through a—a long stage, sometimes almost a whole season, where they’re kind of pale blue and then they swell up, get full of juice. And they get lots sweeter but they never really lose their resinous taste. I’ve tasted a lot of these. They don’t seem to have any resinous taste or very, very small amount of resinous taste at all. They’re just very—really delicious fruits and they’re big and fat, juicy. So it—for a fall fruit, this is a really good producer. And it has all the other qualities that the other junipers have. It has a—a
00:29:47 – 2146
sap that can be used as an adhesive as well as the pinus, it’s not quite as good as Pinus cembroides, but (inaudible) sticky sap that can be used as a glue. The bark can be used—woven as cordage and all the other uses that we’ve talked about for the other junipers. Now this is a big one of what we saw yesterday. Maybe it’d be easier—remember this plant?
(inaudible)
00:30:18 – 2146
SC: What is this?
(inaudible)
SC: Uh huh. And the seeds have a little feathered tail on them. We don’t see any seeds that are left from the last season, but in the fall, you’d see the…
(inaudible)
00:30:31 – 2146
SC: Mountain mahogany. Cercocarpus montanus. And what about Cercocarpus montanus?
(inaudible)
00:30:42 – 2146
SC: The roots give a real good reddish-brown dye. They’re often used in those displays to show the reddish-brown colors for wool that are—that Indians of the Southwest use to make blankets, like Navajo blankets and things like that. But what else? Remember we—the one we saw was kind of small and I said well—well, you might not believe it, but these are used for blank and blank and blank.
(inaudible)
00:31:04 – 2146
SC: Hardwood for tools, bows, arrows, hmm mmm. Okay. This is—this is a much bigger one. I think you could see how could you might—may be make a bow out of that.
(inaudible)
SC: If Ron was here, we could have a discussion about good bow woods, but he’s not.
(misc.)
00:31:26 – 2146
SC: He supposedly—he’s supposed to join us soon, but…
(inaudible)
00:31:33 – 2146
SC: Agaves? Yeah, yeah. Uh huh.
(inaudible)
[walking in silence]
00:33:02 – 2146
SC: You know, I don’t think—to get to the next level of plants, we’d have to hike about another thirty minutes and really step—maybe we—maybe we’re going to turn around here.
F: Ah.
00:33:12 – 2146
SC: Well, we’re going to—you want to see more desert things, more stuff, so you want to go up? It’s a real steep climb here for about a hundred yards and then we have to walk about another thirty minutes to get into a new area. I think we’re—I think we’ll see more stuff if we—this is—this is part of the big hike that we didn’t do. Remember we saw some orange Psoralea yesterday? See, I told—I told you the—the colors vary a lot. This is another color range. Isn’t that an attractive thing, though?
F: Yeah.
00:33:43 – 2146
SC: I mean, I’d like to have that in—if I was in—lived out in West Texas, I’d like to have that in my landscape.
(inaudible)
00:33:48 – 2146
SC: Psoralea angustafolia. People have tried it; it doesn’t do as well in Austin. No, it didn’t do this well. Is—it’s too rich. It’s too rich back in Austin.
(inaudible)
SC: I would like to see some—I’d like to find another Chrysactinia. Did we see any good flower yesterday? Yeah, there’s one down there about to pop, but let’s go up just a little way and see if we find any.
(misc.)
00:34:50 – 2146
SC: This is not as far along as the stuff we saw at the campground.
(misc.)
00:35:11 – 2146
SC: Where’s David? David and David. David, you can smell this one. Mmm. Isn’t that potent? Then smell this. Just—it’s so small, I—I’ve just taken a little. Chrysactinia mexicana. Everybody smelled that, right?
(inaudible)
00:35:37 – 2146
SC: Damianita. Tell me about damianita besides the fact that it makes a nice landscape plant and you can use it in Austin. Nice, low growing. It flowers all through the warm months. It’s a big, brilliant, yellow flower and we saw some yesterday. I think we were driving, maybe I didn’t—maybe I didn’t show it to you in the field but the whole top of the plant was cov—cov—covered with big yellow flowers.
(inaudible)
SC: Mmm hmm.
(inaudible)
00:36:06 – 2146
SC: Uh huh.
(inaudible)
00:36:08 – 2146
SC: It’s best known as an aphrodisiac, along with Turnera diffusa. In Mexico, it’s widely used as an aphrodisiac. Yeah, it’s by the campsite too. Yeah.
(inaudible)
SC: What now?
M: Is that the same as an aphrodisiac (inaudible)
00:36:31 – 2146
SC: Right, right. That’s a—that’s conception promoter. Exactly. Exactly. It’s just a—yeah. euphe—it’s a euphemism.
[Laughter]
M: Which plant is…?
00:36:43 – 2146
SC: State of mind. It’s right over here. What now?
F: Are we talking about this plant?
00:36:47 – 2146
SC: No, no. That’s a Leucophyllum. Not in very good shape. No, we’re talking about this thing back over here. This plant. We saw it had like one or two flowers on it, lots of buds.
(misc.)
SC: That’s it, too. Mmm hmm.
F: (inaudible) put out yellow flowers?
00:37:05 – 2146
SC: Yeah. Yeah. Really pretty yellow flowers.
F: Yeah, it’s real pretty and it smells really good.
00:37:10 – 2146
SC: Yeah, it smells real good. Now, I just—yeah. Well, what do you think? I think Lola, we’ve seen more plants sooner…
[walking in silence and landscape shots]
00:44:19 – 2146
SC: The color of the stems. There’s only one out here that looks like that. It used to be called Opuntia violacea and the—it’s undergone several name changes. I still like to refer to it as violetia because it’s—it’s so obviously violet and it—it tends to get more violet, typically, when it’s very, very dry. It’s about to flower. There’s one over there in flower and not all of them are vi—if you look at some of them, there’s one there that’s kind of violet tingeing to pale green, so they don’t—they’re not necessarily all—this is just a really nice, good violet one. But you can see down in here, there’s some green right there. Down below. They’re about to pop, though, and there’s a nice flower over
00:45:03 – 2146
there. And the petals are edible, the nopalitas are edible and the fruits on apuntia violetia, every one I’ve ever tasted are just absolutely delicious. They’re very, very sweet whereas, as I’ve said, what about the Engelmann’s prickly pear back in Central Texas? Remember what I said about it? Well, it’s more like a vegetable flavor. It’s just not—it’s slightly sweet, but when you—if you could eat one of these and one of those at the same time, you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t eat Engelmann’s. You might cut it up for a stir-fry, but it’s—this is really sweet. Almost as sweet as a—as the what?
M: Strawberry cactus.
00:45:40 – 2146
SC: Strawberry cactus. And we saw a beautiful violet flower of that yesterday and, let’s see. Yeah, there’s a flower—there’s—here’s a flower bud right there. See that? There and there. It’s just going to be very pretty shortly, within the next two weeks. And you can eat the petals on that, too, but we probably wouldn’t want to eat them because why?
(inaudible)
00:45:06 – 2146
SC: Fruits are just absolutely scrumptious. One of the finest fruits in the world.
(inaudible)
00:46:12 – 2146
SC: Echinocereus stramineus, sometimes referred to as ac—acon—Echinocereus enneacantus variety stramineus. But don’t worry about it. Lynn’s going to—Lynn’ll—Lynn’s going to give you a list of all of—all these names. Just think—just put down strawberry cactus for now and you can connect it to the list later.
(inaudible)
00:46:37 – 2146
SC: Okay. Creosote, what about chaparral? What about it? It’s in good flower here, we talked about it. We talked about the little flower buds. What about them?
(inaudible)
00:46:59 – 2146
SC: Pickled as capers. What about its—what about its uses? Its medicinal and food application, food preservation uses?
M: It’s been used to treat cancer.
SC: Oh, well, good. Carry on with that.
M: But there’s been—some of the research has said that prolonged use could hurt the liver and so it’s not approved.
00:47:25 – 2146
SC: Yeah, back in the mid cen—back in mid century, (inaudible) cured and—some incurable cancer by drinking a cup to a half a cup of this, twice a day. A decoction, which means you take the leaves and simmer them for about fifteen minutes. And it was considered a miracle cure and so a lot of people began experimenting with it as a cancer cure and some people believed—others believed that they cured cancer. In extended research, it was found that long term use of it caused liver tumors and it was—it was in a lot of herb shops for a while under the trade name chaparral. And it’s now—it’s been taken off of any approved list by the FDA. So any—any internal use is considered risky. What external use is still valid, though? Infections. It’s a real good antibiotic. It’s one of the best in the desert. Same—same preparation only it’s applied externally, okay? Any other use?
Varnish and soap.
00:48:24 – 2146
SC: Varnish and soap. It’s an additive. What?
(inaudible)
SC: Sorry, I didn’t understand you.
(inaudible)
00:48:32 – 2146
SC: Dieting, mmm hmm.
(inaudible)
00:48:35 – 2146
SC: Okay, what about the food industry? It’s got an application; it’s got a commercial application that’s actually quite valid and very good. Contains nordihydroguaiaretic acid acid. NDGA.
(inaudible)
00:48:48 – 2146
SC: Exactly. Exactly. So it’s used as food—for food preservation and it—very effectively at that. It’s not the big item in commercial trade yet, but it definitely—it definitely has potential for that.
(inaudible)
00:49:05 – 2146
SC: It—it’s more used—yeah, it’s—it’s used in—in—usually in circumstances where the food isn’t going to be in—ingested in that particular way. What—what else about it?
(inaudible)
00:49:31 – 2146
SC: Off of boilers, mmm hmm.
M: A lot of fruit and (inaudible)
SC: Mmm hmm. What about its contribution to the desert as a whole?
(inaudible)
00:49:54 – 2146
SC: Yeah, it’s not a cooperator. It’s not a cooperator. But what about its—oh—let’s talk about its aesthetic qualities. What about that?
(inaudible)
00:50:05 – 2146
SC: It’s the smell of the desert. It’s the smell you get after you pass (?) that lets you know you’re in the Trans-Pecos. It’s that kind of pungent scent. Okay. I think that’s enough for chaparral. Let’s—does anybody have anything else they want to talk about? Let’s go on and look at some other things.
(walking)
00:50:33 – 2146
SC: There’s a lot of this in here, relatively speaking. We saw one of these yesterday. We just saw an echinocereus, cactus of the genus Echinocereus and we’ve seen an Opuntia. This is another one. What’s this, from ye—from yesterday?
(inaudible)
00:50:57 – 2146
SC: Echinocactus horizonthalonius. And it’s about—w—we’re starting to see the little cottony fibers rise up in the center, which means it’s going to flower pretty soon. And it has a great big beautiful lavender flower also, of which the petals are also edible. And—and an edible fruit. What else about it that—what is—what is the use applied for this plant that’s un—kind of unfortunate use?
(inaudible)
00:51:24 – 2146
SC: It’s used a lot in—particularly in—around Juarez and El Paso to make a candy called “biznaga.” And really, all it is is the carrier for sugar. And they—what they do is they take the pulp out and they cook the pulp and they slice it and then they cook it in a sugar syrup. And so some of the biznaga candy that you might buy in Juarez comes from this and (?) cactus, (inaudible), which don’t grow very fast and it’s one of the—it’s one of the commercial activities that’s wiping this cactus out, so we’re not happy about that.
(inaudible)
00:51:55 – 2146
SC: Yeah, they’re just making candy with it and they could use something else to—as a carrier for the sugar. It’s just they use this. It is a real nice, kind of mild pulp, yeah, which is a good thing to know, I guess, if you’re in a survival situation. But there are not enough of this—there’s not enough of this around so we don’t want—we don’t—that’s not a use that we’re happy about. Okay. Let’s keep moving.
00:52:37 – 2146
SC: Okay, here’s another little—this is another cactus. Mmm hmm. That’s probably a tarantula hole.
(inaudible)
SC: What is this?
(inaudible)
[Laughs]
00:52:58 – 2146
SC: What does Lynn call it?
F: Lynn…
M: She wouldn’t tell us.
(inaudible)
00:53:06 – 2146
SC: Yeah, it’s a…
M: Oh, oh, oh. It’s called a (inaudible)
(inaudible)
00:53:18 – 2146
SC: Yeah, all those little…
F: Yeah.
(inaudible)
00:53:22 – 2146
SC: Horse gripper, yeah, yeah. It has a beautiful yellow flower and the stems are edible, too. The stems are edible on all the cacti. And look, it’s getting ready to flower right here, see? Yeah. And the—the thing about it is, it’s well known—cowboys hate it because these little stems break off when the horses walk across it and it kicks up real easily like that. It just pops up and it’ll stick in their bellies and usually send the cowboys catapulting fifteen or twenty feet in the air. And we had an experience yesterday that—where that—how did that get into your leg?
F: I have no idea, but it (inaudible)
00:54:03 – 2146
SC: There wasn’t anybody behind you.
F: Nobody behind me (inaudible)
SC: Somehow a little chunk of that—uh huh. Just flew up and stuck her in the back of the leg.
(inaudible)
00:54:12 – 2146
SC: Yeah. Opuntia schottii. The real shot.
(walking)
00:54:37 – 2146
SC: This is a volume two plant right here. We saw the (inaudible) above and this kind of wooley stemmed, what is this thing here? Saw it yesterday. Baileya. It’s in volume two. Baileya multiradiata. And it’s toxic, right? Okay.
(walking)
00:55:12 – 2146
SC: Whew. Here’s a nice find. What we got? Review—review time. We saw it yesterday.
(inaudible)
00:55:39 – 2146
SC: Mormon tea. Ephedra aspera. It’s a really good drink. All of the Texas ephedras make a good tea except antisyphillitica, which tastes kind of medicinal-like. It’s not—not very good, but this makes a really nice tea. What is the thing that we’re walking through here, the little gray plant that’s just all over?
(inaudible)
SC: What?
(inaudible)
00:56:09 – 2146
SC: No. No, it’s not tunesia. The little low growing thing here. It’s not in flower, which may give you some difficulty, but it’s—we talked about it yesterday. Parthenium. Indeed. Parthenium incanum. mariola, and it contains—the sap contains hydrocarbons but not enough yet to warrant commercial interest. This is the commonest parthenium in the Big Bend area. We also have Parthenium argentatum, which has been grown up around Fort Stockton and Plantation (?) for what?
M: Rubber.
00:56:40 – 2146
SC: Rubber. What kind of rubber?
(inaudible)
00:56:43 – 2146
SC: Makes a very hard rubber that is used in such applications as airplane tires, to re—to resist friction. Much harder than hevea rubber, which is the imported rubber. It’s also got another application, I don’t know that—if we talked about it yesterday or not, but oh—with the rise of AIDS, the industries that produce protective gloves and protective devices has risen greatly over the last ten or fifteen years. And as it turns out, when people use latex gloves a lot, a certain par—part of the population has a sensitivity to latex. They become allergic to it and they can’t use it, so a lot of nurses and doctors can’t
00:57:20 – 2146
use latex gloves anymore. So there’s a special kind of rubber glove made from parthenium that al—that counteracts that problem and allows them to have protective gloves. And that’s one of the new big applications for guayule—this is guayule. The common name for this is guayule. But this is not—this one here has not been used much yet because the har—hydrocarbon content is much lower than Parthenium argentatum.
(walking)
00:58:02 – 2146
SC: Okay. Let’s go. Come on down, y’all. All right. And squeeze the leaf of that there, or the flowers or the leaves and take a—smell that.
F: I just got fuzz up my nose.
[Laughs]
00:58:27 – 2146
SC: David, you got to smell this. Just squeeze it. All the dahlias have a real nice—real nice scent, which has—some of them have potential for perfume, others probably don’t. But it’s a real—it’s a real interesting scent. Dalea greggii. All—the daleas are recognized for their an—antibiotic properties. Okay, now here’s one with a flower on it. Here’s one that’s lost its flowers. Kay’s been looking at this. Does this look familiar to anybody? Thelesperma megapotamicum. Yeah, it’s a—it’s a—one of the species used as Navajo tea. We have (inaudible) back in Austin, but it makes a real good tea and a real good strong dye for red—reds and reddish browns. Hmm? And that’s a nice plant. Not that one, it’s this one. (inaudible) I don’t know what it…
(inaudible)
SC: Megapotamicum.
M: We haven’t seen this in Austin.
00:59:23 – 2146
SC: You won’t see it in Austin. You can see it in the kind of central Texas—north central Texas, though. Up above Abilene. Notice how all the mint (inaudible) have slammed shut now. All the flowers are closed.
(misc.)
[End of Reel 2146]
0:00:01 – 2147
SC: Casa Grande area, so many believe that the Amana were the eastern most extension of the Puebloan culture. Then—then various other Spaniards came through the same area again in the 1600’s and by 1700, they weren’t—they were gone and there were lots of reasons lot—lots of explanations given about why the Amana disappeared. One is that the Lipan Apache raided through and sort of finished off the already kind of socially disturbed group because a lot of them were traveling over to—to hunt buffalo and they’d come back and beat up on the agriculture folks, sedentary people. But there are a lot of remnants of features like this and there were never—no one has ever sighted Umano over in this area as—as far as I know. But these bedrock mortars are a feature of that particular culture and they were using it for grinding, we think using it for grinding seeds
0:00:54 – 2147
and corn. And they also make really good cooking pots, if you clean them out really well and put your vegetable material in water and drop hot stones in they cook and make stews, make delicious stews. So it’s—it’s one of the ways of solving the container problem in the desert. The important thing is that this area, at that time, and really up until the early 1900’s was much greener, had much more grass, had much more water. We’ve really dropped the water table in west Texas so substantially that areas become desertified that weren’t before. And there’s a series of photographs taken in the teens, I
0:01:39 – 2147
think like in 1916, 1917, large format camera photographs black and white, of various spots in Big Bend area. And the same area was photographed again in exactly the same position in the 40’s and the change by then is already just incredible, dramatic. It’s like if you’re looking at this, it would be really richly covered with grasses and such things as that, not very much creosote bush at all. And my guess is that this stream was at least intermittent because there’s not another reason to be out here in the middle of the desert if there’s not water nearby. And the ne—the nearest water is so far away that yeah, to spend the time to be grinding mortars and there are other places—there’s some—there’s lots of lithic debutage which indicates the same kind of thing. You don’t expect to find that unless you’ve got more resources. So I think this is one of the signs of—of sort of the—the passing of the rich produce of this region. And I just think it’s the neatest feature anyway, take a look at these mortars. There are another couple of plants we want
0:02:44 – 2147
to look at up here. I found a Streptanthus the other day over here; let me see if I can find it again. Oh here’s our tobacco again. Which one is this? Rabbit tobacco, Nicotiana, what? Criganofila, um hm and what about it? Lola, will you help me look for that Streptanthus while we’re looking at this. I only saw one plant.
(Other people talking)
0:03:22 – 2147
SC: Yeah—yeah, it’s just another—another—it has all the features of the commercial tobacco. It’s been used especially in the the—the manufacture of cigars and such things as that.
(misc.)
0:03:40 – 147
SC: See if I can spot that Streptanthus.
(misc.)
0:03:52 – 2147
SC: There’s some better flowers on the—if we’re lucky and they haven’t bulldozed too much of the river along the Lama Lajitas area, we’ll find the tree tobacco down there, the great big one. Um hm. All of the—all of the desert cacti produce edible fruits too.
(misc.)
0:04:24 – 2147
SC: Hedioma. Yeah it had the—had those really (tape keeps speeding up) good distinctive flowers on it. That’s it. Okay, ya’ll come take a look. This is kind of the end for Streptanthus, looks like. This particular one—this is kind of odd because I think a Streptanthus cordatus is a—is a May thing but this one here is already—it’s just about flowered out and is in pod. Streptan—Streptanthus cordatus is the plant in the desert that
0:05:11 – 2147
gives us our cabbage flavor you know. We’ve found other things that give us tart flavors and peppery flavors. This is a cabbage flavored plant here. Streptanthus cordatus, and it’s a little bit far along to eat. And so we want to catch it when it was younger. Usually I think a Streptanthus is something that you’d find in these canyons around here in about the right stage in late April and May and if we were back here then I would—I would expect to see more of it.
Question: The pod?
0:05:40 – 2147
SC: The leaves, there’s a cabbage flavor. Caronatus, yeah. Could call it desert cabbage if you wanted to use a common name. Okay, I think that’s enough. Let’s go on.
(misc.)
0:06:28 – 147
SC: This is some much better flowers. (tape speeds up) What is this? (tape speeds up) Aloisia Gratisima, yeah, Aloisia Gratisima and bees really work their flowers and it’s one of the thing—it’s called white brush and white brush honey is considered a really good honey. And this is just coming in, it’s a little bit late. It’s starting—starting to come out and what else about it? What about the leafy tips? Anybody smell the leafy tips? Smell the leafy branches. A lot of Hispanic people make—make tea from the leafy branches. Aloisia Gratisima.
(misc.)
0:10:43 – 2147
SC: And this is not very strong actually. This is not the best material. If you were in a pinch, you could do it. But this will be coming back from the base soon and it matures in late summer and early fall. So it’s at its strongest I want to say September, October. This also grows on the coast, so we harvested this on the coast near Winnie and let it season out while we were harvesting. We harvested all the materials to build the house in October and November and we built the house from the last part of November through Christmas. By the time we got the walls, this was a thirty foot house with four levels in it and by the time we got the walls up, we were starting to have these really cold wet northers when we were working. And as soon as we got—as soon as we got the first layer, the first one or two feet thick of phragmites thatching on the base, all of a sudden
0:11:39 – 2147
nobody wanted to work outside anymore because the house started getting really warm right away. By the time we got it finished, the house was just snug as a bug. I mean, it was really a well-insulated house. Also, the Caddo apparently used it not just for winter, but it also made a real nice shade structure in the summer time. So it was a real cool house in the summer. And they didn’t have a smoke hole or anything, you just let the smoke go up and percolate through the thatching and that would keep the varmints out, the rats and things like that that (inaudible).
DT: (inaudible)
0:12:12 – 2147
SC: Burned carbonized remains. We have carbonized remains of the old structures, collected by (?) people, the archeologists who work the site.
DT: (inaudible)
0:12:23 – 2147
SC: Well, where the—what we had for that was not—we didn’t have carbonized wood, what we had is post molds and over a period of twenty-five or thirty years (?) had many, many crews go out and do excavations. And what they would find is stains in the sand where, you know, you could see where the base of the poles were. You could see what angle the polls were. So we took one of those which she called a domas, so I—I would call it a suburban home. She called it a domas, so it was twenty-five feet wide and estimated to be about thirty feet tall and everything else was up to us. It would be kinda like finding a—coming upon a city and having all the city, everything blown down but the foundation and you say well, looks like there was a column there and it looked like it would have carried about this amount of load and it was this span. So there may have been a second story. So we took that and the early ethnographic accounts of the first French and Spanish explorers that traveled through that area, who witnessed the
0:13:20 – 2147
construction of these houses and described them and combining that, of course, that was several hundred years after the Caddo confederacy was in this area near Alto, but it sort of extrapolated from that. So we had the foundation, definition, we had carbonized remains of some of the materials that were used and we had ethnographic accounts. So we had to invent the rest to create the house, and we did it by using methods. Oh, ad I left out the tools. In the burials we had celts, stone celts, many of them from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, which was apparently part of there trade route. So we made stone celts for cutting wood and some of the bone tools, awls and things like that. Then we had to invent other tools and our approach was, if you’re gonna do it, it had to be something that was available to the Caddo, like we made giant levers to pull the poles
0:14:19 – 2147
together. We don’t know if they did that, but they could have. We made a big tamping bar out of a great big Oak trunk to tamp the base of the poles in. There’s no evidence that they had those, but they could have. So, I think that’s the work of experimental archeology is to take the archeological record, look at the holes and then set out to accomplish a goal and see if you can offer one of the alternatives for the way some things could have been done. Otherwise, we’ll never be known again, unless we develop time travel. You know, then—then they can make fun of all these theories. Anyway, it—it—it worked. We built a house, it was very serviceable. Anyway, that’s a long, that’s an awful long tangent off of Pragmatist Australus, but this is a very important element in the—in the construction project.
0:15:08 – 2147
SC: Okay, where’s my notes here? I’m trying to think of other things they want to cover. The seeds of this are supposed to be edible, there’s a lot of documentation, I’ve collected them, they’re awfully tiny and there’s not much to them. There’s something I’ve done wrong apparently but, it’s—the documentation indicates that the seeds are—they’re real valuable. Also, another use made of it, especially along the banks where the roots can be broken out. The roots are heated, particularly at this time of the year, in the spring when the plants storing up, they’re storing up sugar, you can cook sugar out of the
0:15:43 – 2147
roots. The roots are real sweet. So it’s a—it’s a source of sweet material. I won’t say sugar like cane sugar but very good nevertheless. We talked about baccaras a little bit, which is this thing—which is this—it’s the fore-shaft here, it’s this material and did we talk about the Hispanics in New Mexico chewing the leaves for stomach pain? Anybody have stomach pain? Sarah used a—used a leaf—used a leaf to (inaudible) induce vomiting—I don’t think any of us need to do that. We were talking about the aphrodisiacs just a few minutes ago. The—the Seri drink, a leaf tea is a contraceptive—maybe it’s important for you know about those two things. And we talked about it having fat juices. Anybody want this as a souvenir? You can make more. This is not a—I don’t—I think this is—this is a place where it’s safe to take a few things. Are you going to be the enforcer? The class enforcer? Maybe the prod to keep everybody together so we can. Okay as far as I’m concerned, we can go to lunch.
DT: We’re here with Scooter Cheatham at the Barton Warnock Environmental Education Center just outside of Lajitas and (inaudible). I thought you might be able to start with where you began. (inaudible)
0:17:58 – 2147
SC: Yeah, well where I became conscious of it maybe. When I attended architecture school in the late 60’s, early 70’s, it was a time where the architecture program was sort of opening up and looking beyond buildings and Alan Taniguchi was the dean at that time. And Alan had broad interests and thought the architects needed to think beyond just designing buildings. We needed to think about really creating a building, how that affects, the ripple effect on the rest of the culture, the rest of the urban environment, so forth and so on, so there’s a strong planning component. And almost unconsciously I think some of us dropped into that—that interest and became interested in sort of problem solving on a larger level. And I—I guess the first conservation project I worked on was an analysis of the the Bull Creek watershed before they built route 360. And at that
0:19:00 – 2147
particular time, interdisciplinary was the—was the big term, you know, it was new and what it meant was that you brought lots of disciplines, people with different kinds of abilities together, to so—solve problems together, so that each discipline could instruct others and—and there was some really nice synchronous, creative discoveries during that period. So the Bull Creek study had that, it had a component of geology and hydrology, soil types and also looking for sort of this structural appropriateness of building on
0:19:43 – 2147
certain kinds of soils and also looking at the kind of fragile and precious environments within the Bull Creek watershed. And using—and the social component, to sort of what–what people were looking for who might use the land—land—land use interests. So, taking all that together, we were looking for suggested land uses and you know, appropriate places to put structures and inappropriate places to do—produce highways or other kinds of architecture. So, that led to people who saw that project to kind of pass the word along to Bob Armstrong and some other people in the planning department and general land office. So I got—one of my first jobs out of school was with the general land office as a planner. We put together a much bigger study that we called the
0:20:41 – 2147
Matagorda Bay Estuarine Resource Management Study and that brought together the Bureau of Economic Geology, Ray Parkins studying Port Lavaca and the various people that lived in the area and Botanist Marshall Johnston was involved in that. And the Water Development Board at that time was involved. So we had, I guess, ten or eleven disciplines involved in that study. And the idea was to look at the fragile environments in the bay because the bay in in estuarine areas are—are the—are the places where life really formed. It’s where the most interactive area is in—in—in our oceans and lands, where fish and mammals of amphibians mix together and breed and so forth and so on. So—so keeping that healthy is a very important part of our eco system. And some interesting things came out of that. That study was not finished, Bob Armstrong had real good intentions, I think, at that time, but there were some political factors that made it difficult to complete in its entirety. So from that, at the same time, you—you were
0:21:58 – 2147
asking me earlier about the—how the project itself got started. At the same time, I was working on the general land office study and practicing on architecture, I developed an interest in—in anthropology that I guess it really began with a research project that another colleague and did in 1971 where we studied a primitive culture and were looking at some of the enigmas and mysteries. And I think archeologists and anthropologists have more questions than they have answers. And they’ve got interesting tools and they’ve got theories, but often they—they just kind of leave it at that, they don’t test it out. And another new term at that time was experimental archeology. That implies that you take what you know and you try something, you do something with it. If you have a fireboard and a drill and you wonder about it, then you try to make a fire with a similar
0:22:58 – 2147
fireboard and drill and see if you can do it and see how long it takes and what you can learn from that. So we—we did that and we did it with a culture on my grandmother’s place at concrete and we felt we were going to solve some—we were going to solve some of these riddles and what we ended up with was a great many more questions. Because Glen and I got down there, we had this wonderful tool set, these really nice stone tools and bone tools and—and we were supposed to be down there for a week. We even had, wore deerskin clothes and we got down there and we had nice—nice tools and didn’t have anything to eat. And over a week’s time, I think we—we harvested a possum and an armadillo. And I didn’t eat all the possum, it was pretty greasy. So, we were pretty hungry and we were asking lots of questions that we didn’t have answers for. And, of course, one of the questions was, what, you know, how would you, given these wonderful
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tools that archeologists had been focusing on for a long time, where does everything else come from? If we were starting over, you don’t often get put in that situation, but we—here we were in this wilderness and you—and you have to say, well, what if? I mean, what if we—what if we went back and there wasn’t anything there? I mean, what if there was some, you know, some terrible disaster, how would you start over? And we kept asking that question over that week and what became clear, that might not have ever happened otherwise, is that, you know, we—we sort of give lip service to the fact that planting is important, you know, carbon this and carbon that. It became very clear to us
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that civilization is entirely driven by the plant kingdom. Almost everything they do has a carbon product involved with it. You—you may have stone, but you had to cut it with something, if you go back and look at what you cut it with, it may have been steel or a chisel. If it was steel, it had to be pig iron with carbon. And so, you just start looking more carefully at everything and you find that there’s a carbon—there’s carbon behind it all, which means plants are behind it all. So Glen came back to Austin
DT: Glen?
SC: Goude, maybe I didn’t—I should’ve identified Glen earlier. Glen Goude, the colleague that did this with me, came back to Austin and became an archeologist. And I came back to Austin and continued what I was doing, taught in the architecture department for a while, but I also began a dialogue with Marshall Johnston, which later
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led to me hiring him on the land office project, this actually happened earlier than the land office project. And we engaged in a project that was—that is what we now call the Useful Wild Plants Project. And the way that came about is I approached Marshall and I said to him, you know, we’ve spent this time doing this experimental project and—down in—on the Guadalupe river and I became aware for the first time how important the plant kingdom is. And I want a reference to explain to me the uses of all these plants that we have down there. I just think it would be very interesting. There may be something I would want to explore in that and he said, there’s no such thing.
DT: What year was this?
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SC: ‘71, sometime back. So, we explored that topic for a while and I—I—Marshall had just finished the Manual of Vascular Plants of Texas with Don Correll. Don Correll had left town and the Manual of Vascular plants is what most botanists consider still the “bible”. It—it’s the first work that put together all the species in Texas and their descriptions and their—and keys for those. And people criticized the keys and some have improved the keys and there are several other plants lists out now, but that’s still considered the “bible”. So I—I encouraged Marshall to—to maybe take that on as his next project, that I would be very supportive of that. And he said; “Oh, no, no, no, you’re interested in the uses, you do it, we’ll—you know, I’m not a botanist at this point, you do it.” And so we jockeyed that back and forth for a while and then we kind of agreed we
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were going to take off on it together. And we looked at why we would do Texas as an eco—economic botany region at that time. And if you—if you took away political boundaries and you looked only at biological boundaries, there are eleven zones that come together here. And so if you did something like Texas as a template, then you’re really addressing a large part of Northern Mexico. I mean we’re—we’re really—if we didn’t have the—the Rio Grande right over here, this might be considered part of Mexico. I mean, the zones are about the same, we went over to lunch a few minutes ago and we saw the same species in the Mexican side as we were seeing on the Texas side. So really this is the same zone. And so by treating these plants here, we are treating a large part of
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Northern Mexico, straight right—right straight here. And in South Texas we have the Grand Plains that extends all the way down to Monterrey. So, and we got the same thing there, and we’ve got the planes, we’ve got the Rocky Mountains come through. Remember the chief showed us yesterday, that’s a little piece of the Rocky Mountains. So we’re representing a great part of North America by doing Texas. So, the other thing is, carrying this interdisciplinary interest over to this subject, I thought it was very important to bring together all of sciences that might relate to a plant, species at a time. Chemistry, Phyto-Chemistry, Medicine, Pharmaceutics—Pharmaceutical interests, domestic applications, food uses, utilitarian, and economic—eco—you know, economic botany on a—on a broader scale and the—anything we can find out about sort of primitive technology and how plants are involved with that. So, we also decided that it would be important, thinking ahead that this work might be the first piece in a—in a
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larger work to cover the entire world. That we—if we had a plant, we would treat the uses, all of the uses where they occurred all around the world. So if we had a species that occurs in Texas, it occurs in Cuba, maybe even China, we’d—we’d cover all those uses everywhere. So, when this is done, anybody, anywhere in the world can find anything they want to know about this plant as it occurs. We were—we were talking earlier about phragmites and we talked about, you know, the creosote came and how it’s used in England and Africa, lots of other countries. So that’s an example of that. So we embarked on that in ‘71 and we didn’t know, we kinda cast the net and we didn’t know how big it was going to be, but we—what we pulled in was a 12 volume, 600 page per volume work for this region. You know, you’ve got a couple of copies of the volumes, so.
DT: What were some of the sources of the information that you compiled for this encyclopedia?
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SC: Well, everything from many interviews, our own experiments and you’ve already been a part of some of those experiments today. What do I want to call it? Those are sort of “soft science” to “hard science”, we—we engaged Eugene Rippiger to test a number of fibers of Texas plants for tensile strength for potential use in the textile industry and for other kinds of (?) and that’s—that’s sort of—that’s a hard science research example of something we’ve done. And, hundred and thousands of references of all kinds. From Phyto-Chemical journals, Anthropology journals. All the on-going research about these plants around the world.
DT: Can you talk about some of the sort of non-traditional sources you mentioned that you interviewed some of the local people who had some oral credentials and who had (inaudible)
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SC: Lot’s, lot’s. And we have a—it’s just not us doing it now. We’ve got students at the University of Texas doing it. We’ve got an independent studies program that students can take with—with us. And we’ve had four or five semesters of students and some have inter—interviewed people out here at Marfa, Alpine and we had some people go into Mexico and interview the Black Seminole.
DT: Could you talk about that?
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SC: Yeah, that’s been—that’s been—an article about that’s been put in one of our, I think it was in one of our newsletters. (?) help me with the lady’s name who did that.
0:32:20 – 2147
SC: Okay, another time. Yeah, we had a student go down several times and I’m trying to think of the new use that we got. Yeah, I guess I’m just having a hard time recalling right off the top of my head. A lot—I’m thinking about peppers and a lot of the uses were similar to what we’ve gotten, just corroborated other domestic uses. I can’t think of an example…
DT: What sort of people keep these traditions alive?
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SC: Fewer and fewer all the time. The traditional knowledge is quickly passing as each new generation comes along. Most of the new—new kids want—want to come to America and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. And—and they sort of give all that up and they—and they sort of turn their back on it. And we—we’re seeing some, particularly among Southwestern Indians who abandoned traditional uses for the last couple of generations coming back to them, trying to figure out what their now dead grandparents did with plants. And so some other colleagues of ours in New Mexico and Arizona who got some of that information worked by (?) and people like that are going back and sort of teaching the nex—next generations what their ancestors did with plants. But, we’re in
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a critical period where, especially with the notion of global economy, where we’re sort of forcing capitalism on lot’ s of traditional cultures and they’re abandoning what they—what they’ve known. Kind of like we did before we became civilized. And I—I think that information is very, very important, can be vital.
DT: Maybe you could talk a little about how you would like this encyclopedia to be used.
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SC: Well, I see the encyclopedia as—as—the kind of information that’s in it, it—it—I would think would—would appeal to landowners and some small business people on one hand who are looking for some ways to maybe not bulldoze their property and find some way to get some economic value from it, sustainable economic value that doesn’t damage the land. At the same time, we hope we’re educating people about the—besides the intrinsic value of each species, just exist for its own right, its great contribution and value to human beings, you know, each—each of these species is in its own sense a self-sustaining factor that produces chemicals and alkaloids and—and, in many cases, we’ve found out how to use those and ninety-eight percent of the cases, we really have just begun to understand these factories that produce for us, produce carbon products. So, I guess we’re hoping that—that—we can get that knowledge out there, and that’s one of the reasons we do these classes, because we want—we want—we’re trying to create emissaries to go out and talk about how important plants are. We’re hoping that there will be a strong conservation bent to recognize the importance of these plants and make sure their safety and future is secured.
DT: Do you feel like it would be more sustainable for a farmer or a rancher to grow some of these alternative, native plants rather than traditional monoculture…
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SC: In some cases—the big—the big problem with utilizing native plants for other than traditional uses are that a new use requires marketing. And so there may be lots of things that we—there’s—there are a hundred thousand, we’ve estimated a hundred thousand new uses in the encyclopedia, but the problem is, you may know what the use is, you may know how to make this new perfume, but how do you get anybody wanting to buy it? How do you get interest in it? So—so in our culture marketing is such a big factor. Distribution and marketing. So—so it’s not so simple as just saying, you know, here’s a new use and somebody ought to do something about that. It requires a whole economic structure, it could bring a market, to create the market to bring a product into existence.
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So—so for now, I would say to the, you know, farmer like you’re talking about, the safest thing would be to go with something that already is well marketed. And an example I think I was giving you would be something like milkweed fiber. There’s already a company called, Ogalalla now that makes hypoallergenic pillows and life jackets that are lighter than—lighter than kapok and comforters and such things as that using milkweed fiber. And companies in—in Nebraska and local farmers there, I’m told by the president, make more money growing milkweed than they do on trad—from growing traditional crops. And they’re not able to grow traditional crops in a lot of cases because we’re on a surplus and they don’t have anything to grow. So economically they’re coming out much better off.
DT: Do you find that the traditional crops are more locally suited so you don’t have to use as much fertilizer, herbicide to grow them?
0:38:01 – 2147
SC: Now, you’re saying—you said traditional crops, you mean—you mean native crops? Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. If you grow milkweed that’s—that’s local to your area it requires very little, no fertilizer, very little extra water or anything except to get it established. Yeah, so there’s no question that it’s—it’s much more energy efficient to use these things.
DT: You mentioned the (inaudible). Are there other ways that you’re trying to educate people about these alternative uses for plants?
0:38:48 – 2147
SC: Well, we have the newsletter and the newsletter is sort of intended to make botany accessible and fun and not seem like such an esoteric thing. And you’ve gotten some copies of my—I don’t know if they’re successful or not, we try. We also are doing some classes with high school students, some science classes now.
DT: Talk about that.
0:39:11 – 2147
SC: Yeah, we got a—we started a project last fall with Tim Finnell at LBJ and that’s—he has—he teaches a science class called—it’s not Earth First but something like. They have a field project. They have a site that they work on. And we came into the classroom with—with a two-part project. The first part and—and I think it’s important to start this way if you can, it’s important to start where people already have some emotional direction, emotional interest. We ask them all to bring something to class that was a commodity, you know, whatever, watch, pocketknife, something they really liked, a favorite commodity. Something not too big, you know, something that could probably fit in a shoe box. And then we asked the class to take a look at these commodities in certain ways and the first thing we asked them to do was to take the commodity and to
0:40:18 – 2147
deconstruct it. As an example, some—someone had scissors, had some fiscar scissors and the fiscar scissors were made of steel and plastic and they had a plastic handle. And actually, a group worked on this one and they told us later that they picked scissors because they thought scissors wouldn’t have anything to do with the plant kingdom. And once they got into it, what they realized was that you can’t have steel without carbon. Carbon is mixed with steel, that’s what keeps it—that’s what separates it from pig iron. And plastic, of course, is a petroleum product and petroleum is a six million year old plant juice, so that’s a carbon product too. And so—so they—they did this project and
0:41:03 – 2147
they took a look at all of the carbon processes that are related to each of these commodities. They looked at the lifecycle of the commodity to determine whether it was a energy efficient life cycle. Whether it was something that could be re-used or was going to get thrown away into a dump. And—and so they had to evaluate the efficiency of the item. Then they sort of looked at the impact that all of the items like this in their
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own lives had and there’s a formula that you can run, Lynn ran it for herself and most of the students did the same thing. And it sort of looks at your food, where you get your food, how you—what kind of transportation you use, what kind of home you live in, what kind of energy efficient your lifestyle is in many ways then calculates that out and applies it to the whole globe. And Lynn lives a very modest lifestyle in many ways, but hers came out, if everybody on the planet lived like Lynn, it would take seven planets to supply it. So as Americans in general, we use an awful lot of the world’s resources. So, that—there were a lot of other questions they had to answer along those lines and they
0:42:13 – 2147
had to compare our lifestyle to primitive cultures. It was very—very useful and enlightening for them I think. Then we had a second part where we took—part B is to take one plant, you know, like one of the plants we’ve looked at today and then look at that plant as a unique factory, just what we know about it now and all the things it produces and offers to human beings. And, in many cases, if you took something like mesquite, which we looked at today, there are two hundred and fifty different uses for mesquite alone. So that was an eye-opener as well. So—so that’s—that’s an example of something else we’re doing to educate the next generation, so hopefully they’ll be smarter than we’ve been.
DT: You talked a little bit about your efforts to educate people about plants and their importance in our lives and opportunities there are for using a variety of different plants. Could you talk about the trends in non-native plants?
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SC: Well, we do, actually in—in—in our work, since we have a lot of non-natives becoming established in Texas and naturalizing, we treat—we treat naturalizing plants in—in the work. And, in some ways, so much has changed because we’ve allowed a lot of plants to naturalize in North America. It’s—it’s—in a lot of cases, botanists can’t even tell you which plants were brought in and whether they were here before. I mean, certain things we can tell by examining rat middens, you know, that are fifty thousand years old and you can confirm some, but a lot of plants, for example, Yarrow Achillea Millefolium, botanists are still arguing about how long that’s been—been here. So our
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landscape has been forever altered by naturalizing ornamentals. In the hill country, if you go to hill country in—in the winter, you can see lots and lots of lugustrum sort of scattered around through the woods now and Nandinas where the—all the rest of the leaves have fallen off. They—they don’t fit—they don’t, you know, and they’re—they’re kind of aggressive—aggressively taking over the habitats of other, their natives. We’re losing some natives to aggressive naturalization of the plants too. Not good.
DT: Speaking of things that are not good, can you focus a little bit on the plant kingdom but maybe also talk about other issues and problems that have an environmental side to what you think we’re faced with?
0:45:18 – 2147
SC: Maybe, for example, I’m not sure.
DT: Well you mentioned earlier about this consumption, the rate of consumption (inaudible). Is that something that concerns you or…
0:45:36 – 147
SC: Yeah, I think it’s a market—market driven kind of greed that we’ve all become accustomed to. And it’s—the—the—the level of consumption in our culture, of course, is—greatly exceeds that of all third world countries, who tend to not cause as much damage to the environment. There are kind of—I guess there are two factors. One is the—the level of consumption of each individual and the other one is just the number of individuals and population is rapidly growing. We’re about to really undertake global economy. And if we get everybody on the earth is consumptive as we are, we don’t—don’t have much margin left for our natural resources. And, you know, we’ve talked in the past about how many civilizations have sort of overdone it. All of the crops that we have now that—sort of came out of Europe, in the—the period where Europe really expanded and grew. In many of the—the mammals that were domesticated the ungulates that were cattle and horses that were domesticated came out of the Fertile Crescent region. And the Fertile Crescent, was really—many consider it the Garden of Eden. That’s where the big grasses came from that led to wheat and these things. If you go look at the fertile crescent now it’s a vast desert. It’s like what was once a lush and wonderful place is a desert now and that was caused by civilization basically, agriculture and civilization. So once that area was destroyed, then the people moved on and they kind of left.
DT: How was it destroyed?
0:47:32 – 2147
SC: Overuse of the soil. Poor soil control erosion practices. Reduction of the water table, same kinds of things we’re doing now. Used up the—I—I guess the best way to think about it is that what separates, I mean, if we didn’t have plants, everything would be like this. Now what distinguishes what we have from that is that we’ve had millions of years of living creatures, living and dying. And so they’ve cre—you know, we’ve created a layer of basically organic dirt on the surface of—on the surface of the planet. And dirt is the—is the equivalent of millions of deaths and that’s what contains all the organic substances that our plants used to—to grow and to grow that we get food from. And so if you take what it’s taken millions of years to produce and you let it run off into the ocean, throw it away, then you’re back to rock. And that’s the simplest explanation I can give for it. And it’s very hard to come by a good dirt. It takes a lot of deaths to create good dirt. And so we—we all benefit from this, you know, great period of life that came before us and—and we’re pretty wasteful with it now.
DT: Aside from the valuable organic matter, you’ve also talked about the value of water.
0:49:10 – 2147
SC: Water tables dropped.
DT: Can you talk a little bit about that?
0:49:13 – 147
SC: Yeah, we looked at a site this morning that was once a—obviously from the mortar holes, it was once a big food industry site for some primitive people several thousand years ago. And for that to have been that important a site, that—that would have had to have been a fairly fertile area with water nearby. And as we saw this morning, it’s desert now and what was once a creek, there’s a creek right near it, former creek, but it’s a dry creek now and has been for a long time now, it’s only a run-off creek. For someone to have lived there, they would have had to have had water and other kind of plant resources near—nearby, otherwise they’d have had to travel on foot for about twenty miles to get to the Ri—to the Rio Grande and that just wouldn’t have worked. As an example, and I
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think I also mentioned that there was a series of studies done back in about 1917, where photographs were taken all around the Big Bend area and the West Texas area and then the same site was photographed again in the 40’s and the water table had dropped in that period, in the last century so much that what was—what was in one case, great grasses and all kind of lush environment became what you see now, basically rocks with a few forbs. So, just in the last century, we’ve—we’ve lowered the Ogallala so much that certain kinds of species can’t ever come back here without, you know, enormous changes in the way we practice water conservation.
DT: Considering the difficulty of these problems, do you have advice that you give people who come to your classes, about how to deal with (?)
0:51:08 – 2147
SC: Yeah, well some things are hard to deal with, like I don’t know how you convince the rest of the world to—to cut back on the population expansion. The other is to live more frugally, but make qualitative choices. I think we need to develop some kind of resistance to the way products and commodities are marketed in this country and to look for things that can be easily recycled or they can last many generations, that have a much greater commodity efficiency and maybe learn not to—not to have to have storage buildings and lots of other stuff. Learn to cut back on our—the way we consume and make choices in our lives that lead us to more creative projects, so our energy, our excitement comes from our creations maybe and not so much from ownership of lots and lots of useless crap.
DW: A lot of people say to me, you can’t turn back the clock, you romanticize the past. How do you answer those people who throw that argument out?
0:52:40 – 2147
SC: I do have an answer to that. I guess you could imagine that you’re having a conversation with that same person in a car seat and it’s a—it’s a Rolls Royce and you’re talking to each other and you’re sitting there holding your hand on the steering wheel and you’re having a very nice conversation and the person is saying, well, I don’t really think you can turn back the clock and you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And you’re in that car seat and that has a cer—all the—all the symbols that are around you have a certain meaning, but if you take that same sit—same set of symbols, put yourself in that Rolls
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Royce and you imagine that instead of sitting on a road, you’re falling from ten thousand feet in the air toward the ground, it’s kinda moot, isn’t it? I mean, so, I guess what I’m saying is that we’re all kind of living in this capsule of consuming, saying, well everybody’s consuming and you know—you know, we’re all going to the movies and we’re all gettin’ lots of stuff and everybody’s, he’s getting it, so why shouldn’t I get it? And, you know, that’s just the way we do things now, we can’t turn the clock back. Well, at some point, it may not matter. You know, at impact, it doesn’t matter. If we’re all kind of running toward the edge of an ecological cliff, when you’re over the edge of the cliff, it really doesn’t matter. You either turn the clock back, or you just don’t exist.
0:53:57 – 2147
So I guess that’s what we have to decide, is if that’s really true then we—we better figure something out. And I’m not saying go back to making mortars, I’m just saying look for ways to capture all the qualities, all the electronic benefits and do it in a simpler, more efficient way, more—a more energy efficient way and do it—do it in a—in a dramatic way, not—not, well, we’ll get around to it sometime. I—I don’t think we have that much time.
DW: Do you think that answer is going to be a political solution?
0:54:30 – 2147
SC: No, no, I don’t think it can be—I don’t think so. I mean, Ralph Nader probably came as close to that platform as anybody could and I think there are a lot of people, a lot of—there’s a large component that support that. I just—I still think that, as a culture as a whole, we haven’t grasped that we’re hurdling through the air in a Rolls Royce toward the ground. I just don’t think we’ve gotten it. I don’t know if we will in time. Most cultures don’t.
(misc.)
DT: Tells us about a place outdoors that inspires you to work on these problems.
0:55:22 – 2147
SC: Hmmm, well, you know, I got a lot of my original inspiration from that—from the kind of discard land, the—the land that wasn’t farmed and wasn’t ranched in Cuero when I grew up on those ranches around there. Now I draw it from many, many parts of Texas that have—I—I found that, you know, I used to, when we first started the project and we had to go up to the plains to photograph, I go, oh gosh, I can’t stand to go up to the plains, it’s so flat and East Texas is, you know, it’s so many mosquitoes and it’s, you know, it’s all on trees and it’s so shady it’s kind of claustrophobic. The truth though is that over the course of the project and the course of thirty years, I can think of a place, an inspirational place in just about every part of Texas. I love the plains now. It’s—plains has some special places, special plants. I love East Texas, South Texas. I can find an inspirational spot everywhere.
DT: Is their one in particular that is extremely unlikely? That most people would pass by…
0:56:37 – 2147
SC: Well, yeah there are a lot of those. One would be some aspects of the plains that appears windy and desolate, but you happen to know about a certain unique population of something, like some opturus, biscuit root that settlers used when they were traveling through and you get there and you find it and you’re kinda like, oooh, wow, look at that, you know. Then you kind of stop and look back and look across the vast plains and you see it in a whole different way. So—so all parts of the state, the most desolate, the most seemingly boring offer rich experiences once you—from—from our perspective.
DT: Thanks for explaining some of this to us, so that we may see things a little bit differently.
0:57:25 – 2147
SC: Okay.
[End of Reel 2147]
[End of Scooter Cheatham Interview]