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Useful Wild Plants Of The United States And Canada by Charles Francis Saunders (1920)

Illustrated By Photographs, And By Numerous Line Drawings by Lucy Hamilton Aring

 

Although little known these days, Saunders (1859-1941) cast a large shadow in the first several decades of the 20th Century, writing many widely read books on western wildflowers, the Anasazi, edible plants, and the Indian, Spanish and Anglo folklore and culture of California, the Sierras and the Southwest. He was also a major and influential contributer to Sunset Magazine in its salad years. Although couched in a genteel "Revisionist Manifest Destiny" tone with echoes of "White-Man's Burden", his folksy non-threatening style helped humanize the dimished remnants of the First Americans to the growing middle class of white Americans, and were firmly founded in a voracious curiosity about the usability of fast-vanishing traditions. Without using the ersatz Injun fables of E.T. Seton or the austere fake-machismo of Zane Grey, Saunders introduced much of the American public of his era to a person-sized understanding of the remnant "Old West".

 

This is a 273-page book and, in response to a few complaints about the size of several of my Acrobat files elsewhere, I am offering it up in subject slices, adding them as I go. A good book, filled with personal observations. Several of my books have been lumped into the limbo of "Popular Ethnobotany", and this is a similar type of work, much of it written from first-hand experience. Some form of this book has been reprinted and is currently available...I haven't seen it so I don't know if it's the same book (check Amazon.com)...I just know this original edition from 1920.

 

Wild Plants With Edible Tubers, Bulbs Or Roots (T.O.C., Intro, Chapters 1 and 2) Acrobat File (.pdf), 45 pages, 16 illustrations, 448K

Wild Seeds of Food Value (Chapter 3) Acrobat File (.pdf), 27 pages, 7 illustrations, 296K

The Acorn and Some Other Wild Nuts (Chapter 4) Acrobat File (.pdf), 18 pages, 3 illustrations, 376K

Little Regarded Wild Fruits and Berries (Chapter 5) Acrobat File (.pdf), 35 pages, 14 illustrations, 820K

Wild Plants with Edible Stems and Leaves (Chapter 6) Acrobat File (.pdf), 28 pages, 17 illustrations, 540K

Beverage Plants (Chapter 7) Acrobat File (.pdf), 27 pages, 8 illustrations, 488K

Vegetable Substitutes for Soap (Chapter 8) Acrobat File (.pdf), 18 pages, 7 illustrations, 368K

Some Medicinal Wildings (Chapter 9) Acrobat File (.pdf), 27 pages, 11 illustrations, 700K

Miscellaneous Uses of Wild Plants (Chapter 10) Acrobat File (.pdf), 29 pages, 9 illustrations, 800K

Certain Poisonous Plants (Chapter 11) Acrobat File (.pdf), 22 pages, 9 illustrations, 532K

 

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