Page 1 of 2 here is a great abundance of a species of bear-grass
which grows on every part of these mountains," wrote Lewis on 15
June 1806. "It's growth is luxouriant and continues green all
winter but the horses will not eat it." He and his men must have
seen it the previous autumn as they walked or rode horseback
through the Bitterroot Mountains between Lost Trail Pass and
Weippe Prairie, but this was the first time he had seen it in
bloom, and the first time he could have compared it with the
species he had known near his boyhood homes in the southern
Appalachian Mountains.1 A clump of beargrass with flower-tipped
stalks rising from offshoots, on a ridge in the Bitterroot
Mountains where the Corps of Discovery could have seen it in
June of 1806. About that name leven other plant species share
the common name, beargrass.2 The ten in the genus Nolina more
closely resemble the Spanish bayonet, or Yucca glauca, of the
West. The eastern species, Xerophyllum asphodeloides (L.) Nutt.
is locally known as turkeybe