And that lichen has a distinctive smell, as well. I wouldn’t call it a bad small, just distinctive.
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Oh it was definitely Canadian, not French. It was French-speaking Canadians and Metis in the Lewis & Clark era, 1790 - 1840.
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Table 2 on this page shows plants commonly used for dyes: https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/ethnobotany/dyes.shtml.
the only plants from this list that i can see that grow in the PNW and produce a yellow dye and are bad smelling are:
- Rhus trilobata (Skunkbrush sumac)
- Rhus glabra (Smooth sumac)
- Ericameria nauseosa (Rubber rabbitbrush)
these are all shrubs, though the last one is less tree-like and more forby. just based on what i’m reading on the internet, the sumac dyes are supposed to be relatively versatile and durable, and different parts of the plants can yield different colors, too. so i still think that some sort of Rhus is probably the top contender.
i can’t imagine folks cutting down big trees just to spite annoying neighbors. it takes much less effort and it makes more sense to cut down shrubs, and then that wood can be stored for dye or basketmaking later.
Table 3 shows some additional plants and the dyes they can produce by color. i scanned through that list, too, and i don’t see any additional plants that fit the criteria noted above. (Catalpa, Cottonwood, and Willow can have bad smelling wood, but they don’t grow up in the PNW.)
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Since the wolf lichen is epiphytic, perhaps the “white men” thought that it was part of the tree it grew on.
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I just wanted to say that I am really enjoying this thread.
If Ms. Marple was still here, I’m sure she would too!
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one interesting note about Rhus trilobata is that apparently folks familiar with the plant know / knew that if you cut or burn down the plant, the new growth will come back straighter and more useful for making things. so rather than simply eliminating a resource for everyone, maybe cutting down the plants could have actually been an action that improved the resource in the long run, while perhaps having a side benefit of making outsiders think that the resource had been destroyed.
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The idea that it could have been the dye vat that was smelly rather than the tree seems worth considering. Blues (weld, later indigo) are rather infamous for this, since the pigment requires ammonia (i.e. urine) for extraction, which is one reason why, in Europe, the dyers were often relegated to the edge of town along with the tanners and other stinky trades. Yellows don’t tend to be as fussy, but a wood- or lichen-based dye may well have required some kind of fermentation process.
However: would foreigners who clearly are not on speaking terms with the locals have had the ethnobotanical knowledge to consider such a complex/smelly dye source to be a valuable resource?
The source text seems to be available here: https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/48003309.pdf (p. 329 ff)
A couple of things occur to me after reading it: the account is essentially third-hand – Le Page du Pratz is recounting what he was told by Moncacht-Apé, who in turn is recollecting a long-past interaction with the locals – so there is definitely some potential for telephone-type distortion of what was actually going on. It seems to me that we don’t actually know what the bearded white men wanted the trees for; the locals describe it as having wood which makes a beautiful yellow dye, but that doesn’t necessarily mean this is why the foreigners valued it.
The author of the linked article seems to think that the bearded men were likely from “one of the islands of Japan” rather than being Europeans.
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At least one of Japanese nations had regular beard growth, not sure, how possible for them to appear in Americas.
if the White Men were Europeans, they probably would have been familiar with Rhus coriaria, which would have been well-known as a dye plant from the Romans. or if the Europeans knew about making leather, they would likely have heard of Rhus coriaria (aka tanner’s Sumac) as a rich source of tannins (which also makes Sumac dye a direct dye – one that can be used without a mordant – or which can be used as a mordant for other dyes).
Rhus coriaria looks a lot like Rhus glabra. so i would think that any European familiar with Rhus coriaria, upon seeing Rhus glabra, would have given the latter a try as a dye, if so inclined. Rhus trilobata looks a bit different, but the flowers and fruit look similar. so they may have given that a shot, too, based on that.
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Sorry, I made a logical jump there – this was based on a case like the lichens, where the dye extraction process is difficult/complex because the pigment isn’t water-soluble or requires fermentation; from there, I was exploring the implications of hypothesizing that the smelliness was connected with the dye vat rather than the tree itself.
If the source was something very different than anything the foreigners had experience with and wasn’t otherwise an obvious dye source (doesn’t leave a bright stain when crushed, for example), then it seems a bit unlikely that they would have concluded that the tree was desirable specifically as a dye without some form of access to local knowledge. And given that these foreigners are described as mainly concerned with stealing children and shooting the locals in addition to cutting down trees, there doesn’t seem to be much opportunity for exchange of knowledge. So, following this logic, the tree in question may have either been something less difficult to extract dye from, or of interest to the foreigners as something other than a dye source.
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The pdf I linked to above is an article from 1883 analyzing Le Page du Pratz’s account of Moncacht-Apé from 1758. It seems that this detail about the trees that produce a yellow dye has been puzzling people for quite some time:
It remains for us to ask, what about the bearded men who came habitually to the coast with such regularity that their arrival could be predicted within a few days; whose purpose was simply to get a cargo of dye-wood arid who had no expectation of traffic on these annual visits? … if we submit the tale to a careful scrutiny, it is not an easy one to believe. … There is no known wood upon our coast of particular value as a dye-wood, and there is no part of the North Pacific coast where the extermination of a particular species of tree would leave the inhabitants without wood. The collection of a cargo of dye-wood in a country which has no valuable woods for that purpose, is not a sufficient reason for an annual visit, and if, correcting the story to make it more probable, we admit that the vessels came for purposes of trade as indicated in the Indian legends, then we must insist upon flnding traces of that trade along the coast.
…
We come then practically to the conclusion that there is nothing in the story to tax our credulity if we are not called upon to believe in the annual visits of the bearded men and the various doubtful incidents which their presence involves. We have not been able to trace to the historian a knowledge, or a possibility of knowledge of all the details of the Indian’s story which subsequent discovery has verified, and this adds to the probability that the journey was actually accomplished, and the story of it related to Le Page du Pratz. We are not, however, able to relieve him from responsibility for the double endings, and although the general tone and character of his work justify the high esteem in which Mr. Stuart held it, we are nevertheless forced to the unwilling conclusion that the original story of the savage suffered changes at his hands.
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ok. i read some of the relevant parts of this text, and it seems to provide a little more context. assuming everything in the accounts are relatively accurate, here’s how i’m interpreting the whole situation…
it seems like just before Moncacht-Apé goes with the local warriors to battle the foreigners, he’s probably staying somewhere near modern-day Portland, OR. they travel a few days to where the foreigners come in from the ocean, and i assume this is somewhere between present-day Brookfield, WA and Oak Point, WA. there are a few small waterways near cliffs there, and i assume one of these could be where the foreign sailors stopped to collect fresh water and switched over to their smaller boat. apparently the yellow wood tree was growing along the shore of one of these smaller waterways (and also along the smaller waterways near Portland, where it was mostly cut down by the locals there).
it sounds like the foreigners were visiting in late spring or early summer. just based on Moncacht-Apé’s age and the time of the recounting of events, it sounds like the encounter would have happened in the late 1600s or early 1700s. this would have been before any major European settlements on the West Coast of present-day Canada and the USA. Spain would have been mostly down in Mexico. Francis Drake claimed the area around present-day California and northward for England back in the late 1500s, but England never really came back and made any settlements there, concentrating instead on the East Coast of modern-day USA and Canada. Russia wouldn’t send ships to Alaska until the early 1700s.
i assume that random European ships could have sailed near the PNW during this time, or the random ship from East Asia could have gotten lost in a storm, but generally it wouldn’t make economic sense to send an expensive expedition here unless you had a settlement or had established trade route somewhere where ships could reach reasonably. so for repeated visits to the same spot, i assume the foreigners would have been Spanish sailors traveling from present-day Mexico, and exploring the coast, looking for good harbors and waterways to the interior of the continent. i’m guessing that Spanish crews were visiting the PNW periodically, and on one of these trips, they must have gone up the Columbia River and noted the yellow wood plants as being valuable. thereafter, future exploratory missions would make it a point to go and collect some of these plants on their way back to Mexico.
when i read the text, it seems like it’s the locals who are describing the plant as a dye plant, not that they actually knew that the foreigners were planning to use the plants for dye. i suspect that the foreigners would have valued the plant for a different purpose. it seems like there would have been plenty of good timber trees along the coast. so i doubt it would have been for timber. an incense tree might be valuable, but that doesn’t match description of the bad-smelling wood.
assuming the foreigners were Spanish, i think that a logical use for the wood would have been for leather-making. whereas the locals would have been more accustomed to brain tanning, which would produce a soft leather, the Spanish would have been familiar with and would have preferred vegetable tanning for more durable leathers.
so then there are two potential plants which are bad-smelling, yellow woods that make a yellow dye and that i think would have made sense for vegetable tanning – Salix (Willow) and Rhus (Sumac). these both would have had recognizable counterparts growing in Europe, and they are also easy to recognize from a distance. (earlier, i made a note that Willow did not grow in the PNW, and i was actually thinking there specifically of Salix nigra. but there are other Salix species that grow in the PNW.) Salix seems to be a little more common along the West Coast, and because of that, i think it’s unlikely that Salix would have been the plant the foreigners would have returned to this particular area for.
looking at today’s distribution of Rhus glabra, there are pockets of it growing along the Cascades, not near the ocean. so if one of these pockets happened to be along the Columbia River where Moncacht-Apé’s hosts were living, then it would make sense for the foreigners to return to this specific spot year after year to harvest the trees, since that would have been one of the few places they would have encountered them. and the best time to harvest the trees for leather-making would be when the leaves are the greenest – so early summer (which coincides with the annual visits).
just for reference, there are lots of plants that grow down in Mexico, too, which would be good for vegetable tanning. but the special thing about Rhus coriaria and its American counterparts is that they produce leathers that have many desirable qualities which are apparently hard to achieve together – high durability, softness, and light color. during at period, Rhus coriaria was actually one of the few plants that was cultivated specifically for leather tanning, and there was apparently a relatively large and valuable market in Europe for Sumac products. (During this period, Portugal apparently was the premier producer of quality Sumac, but over time, the production shifted to Spain and Sicily.)
i didn’t have figures for the exact period, but in the late 1800s, i saw a figure that 1 ton of Sumac fetched roughly 14 pounds in London. translated to 2017 currency, that’s roughly $2000 USD per ton. for comparison, coffee was going for roughly $2000 per ton in 2018, and rice was going for roughly $450 per ton. it’s not that i think that the foreigners would have taken the American Sumac to sell in London, but if you have a large colony in Mexico, which would mean that it would be useful to be able to make good leather in Mexico, then it would be welcome to have a good new source of Sumac that only you have access to. (the English apparently ended up harvesting various American Sumacs from their East Coast colonies later on.)
here are a couple of good sources if you really want to dig into historical (vegetable-based) leather tanning:
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Fascinating! Your research was much more thorough than mine and seems much more probable. I had never heard of “brain tanning” - first thought it was a typo or a paraphrase, but no, you really used the brain of the animal!
https://www.leather-dictionary.com/index.php/Brain_tanning
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echoing others’ thoughts about this being a little puzzle / mystery, i thought this was fun to try to solve, especially since it involves thinking / learning about ancient technologies (like brain tanning vs vegetable tanning) and their context in different ways of living, and also taking different character’s perspectives to think about how they would have understood / described the world and each other.
if anyone’s interested in solving more puzzles from Moncacht-Apé’s account of the lifestyle of his PNW hosts and their flora / fauna, here are a couple of passages that i thought were quite interesting:
The next day he taught me those things that I wished to know, and assured me that all the nations on the shores of the Great Water would receive me well on telling them that I was the friend of Big Roebuck. I remained there only two days, during which he caused to be made some gruel from certain small grains, smaller than French peas, which are very good, which pleased me all the more that it was so long that I had eaten only meat.
I was received in this nation as if I had arrived in my family, and I had there good cheer of all sorts, for they have in this country an abundance of that grain of which Big Roebuck had made me a gruel, and although it springs up without being sowed, it is better than any grain that I have ever eaten. Some large blue birds come to eat this grain, but they kill them because they are very good. The water also furnishes this people with meat. There is an animal which comes ashore to eat grass, which has a head shaped like a young buffalo, but not of the same color. They eat also many flsh from the Great Water, which are larger than our large brills and much better, as well as a great variety of shell-fish, amongst which some are very beautiful. But if they live well in this country it is necessary always to be on the watch against the bearded men, who do all that they can to carry away the young persons, for they never have taken any men, although they could have done so.
what i thought was interesting here was that animals like roebuck, buffalo, brills, (and otter, elsewhere in the text) were named / translated specifically, as were French peas, but then some of these other things were not.
i would have thought that Moncacht-Apé would have known exactly what all of these things were (other than possibly the big fish), including the yellow wood described in the original post, since he likely would have encountered the same or similar animals and plants where he originally came from (roughly Northwest Mississippi state, i think).
so to me, it seems like the specifically-named animals and the peas are things that the Frenchman would have been familiar with and could name. and the other things would have been things that the European documentarian was not personally familiar with and so were described based on Moncacht-Apé’s own understanding of these things, if that makes sense.
anyway, what do you think those things are?
click each of the items below to see my best guess of what they are:
grain that is smaller than a French pea and which makes a gruel
this sounds like some sort of Barley (Hordeum sp.)
big blue bird that eats the above grain and is very good
people tell me that Sandhill Cranes are very tasty
the meat animal with a head like a young buffalo that comes ashore to eat grass
i can’t think of anything that would come ashore to eat grass other than a muskrat, though it doesn’t look much like a buffalo calf to me.
many fish which are larger and tastier than our large brills
i thought it was odd that since he was not originally from a place near the ocean that his reference fish would have been a brill, which i interpret as some sort of flatfish, but i suppose it’s possible that the PNW locals may have fed him a Pacific Halibut, which would have been a tasty flatfish of impressive size. or even if not a Halibut, maybe the many other flatfishes in the PNW are just bigger than the flatfishes in the Gulf of Mexico?
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This is just to let everyone know that I love all your input. I have many new leads to follow thanks to you all. Unfortunately, I have a new mystery I need to help solve and this one pays. I will get back to Moncacht-Apé and the plants and animals he came across as soon as I can.
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