The Ozette Prairies of Olympic National Park - Natural Resources ...

view identified only as “by Dori,” March 9, 1984, in Quileute tribal archives. p.1]
…..they camp overnight, them old ladies, three or four of them old ladies used to camp over there and get
some of this. Lacamas. Then everybody had big eats when they come home, invite everybody…Yeah,
and I know they used to have some kind of seal oil, too, they dig, you know, when they eat it, some of
them use it, they use that seal oil for it…and us, we used to dip it in the sugar. We used sugar to make it
sweet…I bet it’d be good with syrup. Dip it in the syrup…
Wahlgren, Iva Hosack [n.d.] “Memories of a Quillayute and Sol Duc Country Pioneer,” unpub. interview
notes prepared by the Forks Logging Museum staff.
Iva tells of moving to the old log cabin on the west end of the Quillayute Prairie (probably in the 1870s),
and of the Indian women gathering camas there when she was young; she also mentions cow parsnips
and horsetail (scouring rush) and the way they were prepared by Quileute in traditional cookery.
This was the homestead cabin of John Hagadorn on the west end of Quillayute Prairie. The walls had
so much ivy growing on them they couldn’t fall down. There was no window or door and no floor. I
don’t know if it ever had a floor in it or not. There were several bushy trees close by and several vines of
little white roses, which I call the Old Homestead rose, and a row of gooseberry bushes….
We used to enjoy watching the Indian women gather camas bulbs in the spring. When the farmers
plowed, there would be five or six women follow behind picking up and digging out the camas bulbs,
which are not much bigger than onion sets. The soil on Quillayute Prairie is black loam and the little
white bulbs were easy to see.
They worked all day and would get, I would guess, twelve or fifteen pounds apiece. Then they had to
walk back to Mora and from there they took their canoe down the Quillayute River to LaPush.
The Camas blooms in May and June around here and have from 10 to 30 flowers on a stem like a hyacinth.
They open from the bottom and only have four or five open flowers at one time. Most of them are
blue, but you may find a white one once in awhile. They like damp ground but flourish on the prairie in
the West End. They are also thick in the peat moss bogs between Forks and the Hoh River. In the earlier
days the Indians used the camas in place of bread. They dug a little pit and lined it with flat stone(s) and
made a fire in it. When the stones were red hot, they took the fire out, then lined the hole with a special
kind of grass they gathered in the mountains. Then, they put in the camas bulbs and put more grass over
the bulbs. Then they covered it up tight with hot sand and built a fire on top. They had to keep the fire
going steady for about 36 hours. They couldn’t open the pit before the bulbs were done or they would
be spoiled. I suppose they would go flat like a dumpling goes when you take the lid off before they are
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