Adventure Trails

 

Buffalo Gourds; A Fresh Look at an Ancient Plant

 

If one sees a metate and the mono that goes with it, it is possibly 12,000 years old (plus the millions of years of age of the stone itself), give or take a few millennia.  If it was carried from Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what’s now Alaska), which is a colorfully absurd thought then it might be 25,000 years old because the Beringians lived there, possibly, for 10,000 years; waiting for the ice to melt and forcing them to mosey down to The Land of Enchantment, perhaps looking for and finding ‘greener pastures’.  As they did not yet invent fry bread or even have white or whole wheat flour (as the major grains were brought over by the Europeans by way of the Steppes) and corn was still in South America, then the question becomes: what did they eat?  And, especially, as the centuries wore on and droughts came and went, leaving ancient tree rings proving drought; what did they rely on during those times?  The piñon bumper harvest happens every now and then, so one can’t wait for that, really.  Amaranth wasn’t even around.  There were lots of grasses and because of that there were lots of ‘bison’, or what I think of as ‘buffalo”.  So there was meat.  What about tubers and seeds?  They had a metate and needed something to grind up with it.  I honestly (this time) think it was what scientists call Cucurbita foetidissima or Buffalo Gourd, the common name that mysteriously first appeared in print in 1948 and took.

  I have seen my donkeys occasionally eat the ‘disgusting smelling’ leaves (and then walk up to me and exhale on me, almost rendering me unconscious), so they and just a handful of people sort of like the smell; nonetheless it is called, roughly translated from the Latin, ‘stinking squash’.   Well, lots of plants are named ‘stinking’ this and ‘stinking ‘ that  but some observant person(s) decided on ‘Buffalo Gourds’;  a very powerful thing like a buffalo (…… I am not sure but curious about what a buffalo smells like….aren’t you?) and as the bison tended to roll around on the ground and on their backs and make huge semi-permanent ‘wallows’ of bare ground that, fascinatingly, almost nothing grows on after they are done….except, let’s say, the buffalo gourd which has a huge tuber for a root; sometimes the size and shape! of a human being and  is very capable of surviving almost anything, and I am wondering if, by chance, buffalos liked to roll in the stinking leaves for the special insect and fly repelling properties (one of the uses people are looking into as I write) and maybe the side benefit of it being a cow aphrodisiac or medication (think ‘zoopharmacology’; not my term but perhaps coined by my brother!);  they grew on afterwards, and as the gourds have a distinct resemblance to a bull buffalo piece of anatomy anyway  and so some observant person(s) back in the day decided to call this amazing plant “buffalo gourd”!

 I recently encountered a petroglyph that puzzled me until I ‘realized’ that I probably knew what it was:

 

 

   

The triangle shapes on the left side of the ‘gourd’ circles are the basic shape of the leaves; in fact the rock art clearly, in my mind, celebrates buffalo gourds….and why shouldn’t it because it was a main staple of the native diet; the seeds and hull ground up by the metate into a fine flour to make a tasty sun-baked-on-the back-of-a-rock (or metate) flat bread!

The point is that the buffalo gourd plant, what with its high protein/oil seeds, huge tuber, extreme drought tolerance, insect repellent and medicinal properties and its myriad other colorful aspects ( and great for batting practice!);  I bet a nickel it’ll save the world!