Further Light on “Wooden Tubes” from Oregon

Abstract

In American Antiquity for July, 1940, there appears a short article by Robin Drews, of the University of Oregon, entitled “Peculiar Wooden Tubes from Southeastern Oregon,” in which the author asks if these tubes may be “beads, gambling pieces, pipe stems, or what?” Recently I noted a scrap of ethnobotanical information which reminded me of this query and which, I feel, may throw some light on the subject.Frederick V. Coville, in his “Notes on Plants Used by the Klamath Indians of Oregon,”1 has the following to say of. the Blueberry Elder (Sambucus caerulea): “ One curious use of the plant, now rarely resorted to, but formerly common among the Snake Indians, consists in punching out the pith from sections of the stem, ramming them full of large crickets, Anabrus simplex Hald., and plugging the ends. The contents of the stems were used for food in the winter” (p. 104).