Roberta McKern
While reading through Lois Rice’s notes at the East Linn Museum, a couple of newspaper clippings caught my attention. One, from July 1904, dealt with collecting chittem bark. The other, from September 1930, also had collecting in mind, this time of fir cones for their seed.
The first brought to mind an early experience with chittem. Two 4-year-old sisters became attracted to the clusters of small purplish berries growing outside the kitchen window on their grandparents’ farm. Being warned several times not to touch them made the forbidden fruit look better, so, surreptitiously, they sampled a few. But they were very bitter and the girls learned the consequences of not listening.
Chittem acts as a laxative. It grows as a shrub or small tree and can be called chittem, cascara sagrada and western buckthorn. A tree book says it’s poisonous, but at least from the 1880s, the bark has been used in preparing laxatives gussied up to enhance appeal by the addition of sugar, alcohol and anise and wintergreen flavorings.
According to an elderly encyclopedia, it wasn’t really used in the United States until the 1870s, but the little newspaper clipping suggests that chittem bark found a ready market. The late-19th-century diet as we now judge it relied greatly on starches, bacon fat and lard. Fried potatoes, fried pies and pie in general, bread and pastries still all attract attention.
The sisters’ little tree may have been planted so its bark could be used to abet an earlier farm family’s digestive tracts. Berries, as the girls discovered, worked, too.
By 1904 and the newspaper clipping, the chittem bark market had become glutted, or “slightly demoralized,” as the paper called it. A local buyer (probably in Albany) had received orders from an Eastern firm to hold off and buy no more until further notified. The price of 5 to 5½ cents per pound would likely drop.In 1903. About 98 cars (boxcars, we assume) had been shipped out and only 50 carloads were needed for a year of U.S. consumption, leaving only about 48 needed in 1904.
At this point, the chittem market article found enough local interest for the Lebanon Express-Advance to copy it from the Albany Herald and run it for its subscribers. And by no means did the excess collecting of chittem bark in 1904 end further action in that direction.
A special in the Portland Oregonian written by Sweet Home’s own Mrs. Ole Feigum highlighted the importance of a different kind of collecting, that of fir seeds, in September 1930. Mrs. Feigum frequently entertained readers of the city paper with accounts of the doings in rural Sweet Home. She gained much of her information, she said, by rubbernecking, listening in on the telephone party line.
As she reported, collecting fir cones for seed greatly benefitted area residents. Farmers, their wives and children numbered among those responding to a money-making opportunity. Women as well as men worked on the drag saws and got appropriately sticky with black pitch from the cones. Their fingers stuck together, but “get the cones out they would.”
At the time Mrs. Feigum wrote, 4,000 sacks of cones were wanted, and there were still 1,000 more to go. Sewn sacks of cones went at $1.75; tied ones were $1.50. Both cone-pickers and merchants benefited from the rush, and stores were even staying open as late as 11 p.m. for the cone-pickers’ convenience. One farmer reportedly picked 75 sacks in a day. Trucks kept busy hauling them to the train depot in Lebanon.
The cone-picking had a real drawback, however, that Mrs. Feigum lamented. Large, healthy firs were being felled just so their cones could be harvested. Mrs. Feigum tried to look on the bright side. New vistas had opened up, letting neighbors see neighbors and giving views of schoolhouses.
“Many people,” she noted, “can now look into door yards in Pleasant Valley and see the women putting out their washing.” Also, the felled trees would supply firewood for the winter and fine lumber for the railroad should it arrive. All in all, she concluded, the fir cone frenzy had been “a god-send to the foot hills.”
Reading this article reminds us that 1930 was the first really rolling year of the Great Depression that shaped much of the 1930s. To give young men jobs and to aid their families, the government sponsored the Civilian Conservation Corps. One of their primary tasks was to replant deforested parts of the country left fairly denuded by past logging practices and forest fires.
Those 1930 fir seeds may well have provided seedlings for a forest logged off as second growth in the past 92 years. The railroad did reach Sweet Home in 1931, bringing an accelerated logging industry and changing our area’s economic dynamic, but cone-collecting continued.
Constipation and conservation might then be said to have stimulated the continued need of cascara sagrada/chittem bark and conifer seeds, and many of us have known people who once harvested bark or seed cones or both.
Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, Nadine Jackson, a valuable museum volunteer, would go near the woods and into them to peel chittem bark on the one hand and collect cones on the other with her late husband, Gerald.
An intelligent and adventuresome man, Gerald worked primarily as a logger. He’s represented at the museum by his filing gear. When an earlier saw filer decided to retire, Gerald asked if he could be taught the craft. He then became a filer of crosscut saws used in logging tournaments.
In the earlier years of their marriage, to augment his logger’s pay including and during seasonal layoffs, he and Nadine set forth to collect chittem bark or cones from different conifers depending on the cone species was wanted. “So, what was gathering chittem bark like?” we asked Nadine.
One thing was to find a good patch of chittem, little trees or shrubs. All day could be spent working in the same area. In the spring, the chittem sap was up. A special knife, referred to as a chittem spud, was used and could be purchased, but Gerald usually made his own out of an old table or similar knife by breaking its blade and leaving about an inch, which he honed very sharp.
Sometimes the cutting edge had a bend to one side. A line cut down the chittem trunk allowed the bark to be eased loose by the cutter’s fingers. If the sap wasn’t up, this did not work. A foot and a half above the plant’s roots, peeling was supposed to stop. This allowed the plant to grow up again for the following year. However, just above the root, the best bark grew, and many collectors succumbed to the temptation to collect it, dooming the plant.
Then the bark had to be dried and pulverized. Gerald used an old corn husker shredder to pulverize what he and Nadine had collected and dried on their patio. Sacked in burlap bags, chittem bark went to a dealer in Albany. Many feed stores, among them our own Santiam Feed and Garden and some mercantiles, once bought chittem. Old photos of such places may show a sign reading “We buy chittem.”
In their book “Sweet Home in the Oregon Cascades,” Patricia Hoy Hainline and Margaret Standish Carey mention stove-piping regarding the bagging of chittem cascara bark. Like cutting the bark from the plants down to their roots, this was another unscrupulous way of cheating, in this case, the dealer. This involved taking a length of stove pipe full of sand, rocks or dirt and filling the bag with bark around it. Once the bark was at the top of the stove pipe, the pipe was removed and covered with more bark, thus concealing the foreign filling in the bag’s center.
When asked about this, Nadine said that when she and Gerald collected, it wasn’t happening, because if a dealer felt the bag weighed too much or that something was amiss, it would be emptied and its contents scrutinized.
At the time Nadine and Gerald cut chittem bark, no permits were needed. The same was true of collecting conifer cones. First, the couple had to see which type of cone was in demand and what seed count per cone.
Nadine called Gerald her tall, lanky Arkie. He’d grown up in Arkansas, in the Ozarks hunting squirrels, raccoons and opossums for food. Squirrel stew or pie was much appreciated, but the family drew the line at possum because it was a scavenger, and possum featured less often on the menu depending on their hunger scale.
Gerald, therefore, was attuned to what happened in the woods, which had great importance because most of their cones came from robbing caches made by squirrels preparing for the winter. When Gerald heard a cone drop, he could follow the harvesting squirrel to its storage place in a pile of rocks or under a log. Robbing squirrels had an advantage. Squirrels knew when the cones were ripe and ready for picking.
On one occasion, maybe on the other side of the mountain, Nadine and Gerald came upon the wreckage of a World War II plane. Nadine didn’t want to go near it, fearing human remains inside, but Gerald followed the squirrel. The plane was its storage bin. Later, Nadine and Gerald stopped to turn in a report regarding the plane and they learned it had been reported years before. It was a fighter plane, and mainly the fuselage remained.
Since Nadine and Gerald collected chittem bark and conifer seeds, those old free-wheeling days are gone. When people peeled chittem right down to the roots, killing the plant, or cut down prime firs simply to collect cones, they worked against their own interests. And we are now dealing with commercialization and population growth in our area, which puts increasing abuse on the forests and its products. Therefore, regulations come in.
Chittem can still be peeled, but it takes a permit and has to be done on private land. At the same time, now better known by its other name, cascara sagrada, it appeals still to those following natural cures, especially as its use hearkens back to West Coast Indians.
Nadine repeated what is surely chittem bark folklore as old as peeling the bark itself. Supposedly, the Chinook Indians called it chittem with the soft sound of the “ch”–or “sh:–in honor of its efficacy. We won’t do that here.
Using Google, we discover that we can order cascara sagrada plants from a nursery and grow our own home remedy supply outside our kitchen windows. As for conifer seeds, the business has grown remarkably, what with Christmas tree farms and replanting logged areas. Dealers have to be certified and many cones are harvested from select stands of trees. Machines and specialists are in play. And regulations have increased, especially as our human population growth puts more stress on the forests.
At the East Linn Museum, peeling chittem bark and picking fir cones join the rest of our social past. Much of it has been forgotten, but sometimes in the research room we find keys to i,t as with Lois Rice’s scrapbook.
The museum remains closed until February. Then it will reopen on the first Thursday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., the number of volunteers permitting. Volunteers are always needed. May we all stay healthy.