Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage, Visible Bones and The Collector.

David Douglas at Timberline
December 2009

Scottish naturalist David Douglas, usually known as a prolific collector and scientific namer -- see Douglas's squirrel, Douglas's onion, Douglas's iris, and Douglas fir, among many others -- was also a mountain climber of some ambition. On his first run up the Columbia from Fort Vancouver in the summer of 1825, he hired the brother of a local tribal headman to lead him onto the rugged slopes of Table Mountain above what is now Bonneville Dam. After a three-day trip that required another full day's recuperation, the collector ascended high enough on the Mount Hood side of the river to collect cones from the elegant noble fir.

In early spring of 1827, while crossing Athabasca Pass with a fur trade brigade, Douglas took time off to snowshoe onto the shoulder of massive Mount Brown. In 1833 he had his eye on Mount St. Helens before steam from the active volcano turned him south for another foray up the north slope of Mount Hood. On the big island of Hawaii in 1834, he ascended both Mauna Kea (elevation 13,796 feet) and Mauna Loa (13,680), the two tallest peaks in the chain.

When Douglas spent much of the spring and summer of 1826 in the neighborhood of Kettle Falls, his restless curiosity and stout legs carried him on daily treks covering 20 to 30 miles at a time. Judging from the plants he collected, such jaunts probably took him not only along Pingston Creek and the lower Kettle River, but also to higher ground such as Kelly Hill and Bisbee and Mingo mountains (note that Douglas Falls and Old Douglas Mountain appear to be named after a homesteader who arrived decades later). Each of these vantage points would have offered new collecting opportunities and provided wonderful views of the Colville, Kettle, and Columbia drainages, but none of the easy peaks around Kettle Falls rose above timberline into true alpine habitats.

Douglas's ambitious climbing habits make it all the more unfortunate that he did not take up the invitation of Hudson's Bay Company agent John Work in the late summer of 1826. When the two men met at Fort Colvile, Work offered to let Douglas tag along to his fall fur trade posting in Montana's Flathead country. Douglas, fearful that tribal unrest might keep him stuck inside the post stockade, politely declined, thus depriving the Clark Fork drainage of a wealth of baseline natural history data.

If the collector had accompanied Work, they would have followed one of the standard fur trade routes from Kettle Falls to the Pend Oreille River, then picked up the ancient tribal Road to the Buffalo that ran along the north shore of Pend Oreille Lake. If they switched to canoes there, the mountain known today as Scotchman's Peak, tallest of the Cabinet Range in today's north Idaho, would have soon slid into view.

When the traders stopped at the annual summer tribal encampment in the meadows around the Clark Fork Delta, Douglas would probably have followed his customary habit of asking for a guide who could lead him on an excursion. He was looking for a peak that combined good plant habitats with a view of the surrounding countryside, and Scotchman's Peak would have been the most obvious answer.

These days, the meadow below the Scotchman's Peak trailhead still abounds with three of David Douglas's favorite plants -- a bracken fern familiar from his childhood in the Scottish heath, a purple lupine that he introduced into the gardens of Great Britain, and Indian hemp, Apocynum cannibinum, an important source of tribal cordage that fascinated him for they way native peoples used it to weave everything from fish nets to water-tight hats to flat twined bags. It's hard not to wonder whether Douglas would have seen this same mixture of lupine, hemp, and bracken growing in the same meadow two hundred years ago. How different, in fact, would the whole hike up the mountain have looked to him?

Even though forest management, fire scars, and introduced weeds have altered the makeup and density of the woods along Scotchman's flanks, Douglas would have experienced the higher-elevation plants, trees, birds, and animals much as we see them now. Certainly he could have seen the same cornucopia of edible berries along the way -- Douglas snacked on strawberries, serviceberries, currants, gooseberries, thimbleberries, buffalo-berries, raspberries, rose hips, kinnikinick, Oregon grape, and huckleberries throughout his Northwest travels. He had a special eye for the lilies and penstemons of our region, and would have been delighted with the abundance of three-spot mariposa lily and elegant blue penstemon on the way up Scotchman -- new species that he surely would have collected seeds from to propagate back in England.

As Douglas approached timberline, he also would have been intrigued by a small yellow flower that began to appear in steep rocky meadows. The plant has finely cut leaves and carries its flowers in umbrella-like whorls, which mark it as a member of the Lomatium genus -- a bewildering complex of plants often called desert parsleys or biscuitroots. Douglas had watched Plateau tribal women dig the tubers of several different desert parsleys, then bake them in underground ovens or string them on Indian hemp thread to dry. He had noted the strong caraway scent of the seeds of some members of this genus, and seen how tribal members chewed on them for medicine or refreshment. Like many modern botanists, he had trouble separating the different species of Lomatium that he encountered -- they sprouted quickly in the spring, seemed to change aspects as they grew, then faded quickly in the summer heat. But he would have known this one was new, because he had never encountered a Lomatium so high on a mountain before.

The little yellow flower growing on Scotchman's Peak is called Lomatium sandbergii, after the botanist who first officially described it in the 1890s. There are only a few scattered accounts of Sandberg's biscuitroot occurring in north Idaho, and only a single lonely record for northeastern Washington, collected almost half a century ago from Round Top Mountain above the Pend Oreille River. But the plant is fairly common through the high country between Glacier National Park and the Bitterroot Range, and tribal women walking after huckleberries long before David Douglas may well have been familiar with it.

Many of the biscuitroots have a crunchy tuber at the base of their root. Some are difficult to dig up, but Sandberg's is very accessible to a digging stick. Peter Lescia, a botanist with wide experience in western Montana, has seen evidence of bears clawing out the tubers for food, and if David Douglas had made it a few miles up Scotchman's Peak, it would be interesting to know whether his guide would have paused to dig a few of them as a snack.

Douglas worked for the London Horticultural Society. His job was to collect flowers that showed promise as garden ornamentals. If he had taken up John Work's gracious invitation and ascended Scotchman's Peak in late summer of 1826, the view from the top would have revealed seemingly limitless new places to explore. If he had managed to come back with some seeds and tubers, Sandberg's biscuitroot might today be a dainty addition to the blooms of British rock gardens. And right here, we might have a better idea of how it and other plants used to fit into the high mountain landscapes of the North Columbia country.

Illustration: Lomatium sandbergii by Emily Nisbet.

Note: Tribal use of other Lomatiums was explored in the July 2008 column, available here.

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