My granddad Elmer learned a lot from the Five Civilized Tribes…medicine, ceremonial dancing and how to survive.
After his mother died giving birth to him and his twin sister, his sister was sent to live with relatives in the Pacific Northwest. Elmer headed to Indian Territory, Oklahoma, in a covered wagon with his mother’s brother and his wife. He was two weeks old, and the year was 1884.
Native American Ways
Indian Territory consisted of the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles, along with twenty-two other tribes.
Elmer got along well with his Native American neighbors. They trusted him enough to let him dance with them whenever he wanted. They taught him their secrets of survival, like how to use roots, leaves, bark and plants to make medicines.
He used that knowledge for his family, and for others, his whole life. The longevity his eleven children enjoyed speaks for the wisdom of those natural preventives.
Case in point – my mother. She’s 86 years young and still bakes the best pies you ever tasted, does her own grocery shopping, drives thousands of miles by herself and can still cut a rug when she really wants to.
She’s Elmer’s eighth child, and one of the tonics she grew up on was sassafras tea.
Thinning (purifying) the blood
Elmer insisted that his family members drink sassafras tea liberally every spring to thin their blood after the long, harsh Oklahoma and Missouri winters.
Sassafras trees, with their irregular lobed leaves and aromatic bark, grew wild and plentiful in the woods. Elmer gathered roots every spring. After thoroughly cleaning a root, or hunks of
root, he placed it in a pot of water to boil. Soon, the water turned a beautiful clear pink. When the family was fortunate enough to buy sugar, they added it to the spicy tea, along with fresh cow cream.
It didn’t take much persuasion for eleven little country kids to want to start thinning their blood and ridding themselves of their sluggish winter bodies!
As a very young child, I remember seeing a pan on my grandma’s stove with a big tree root poking out of the top. That was fascinating! The tea tasted wonderful, and I wanted lots and lots.
Later on, when I was a teenager and more snooty sophisticated, I doubted my granddad’s theory about sassafras tea thinning the blood.
How ridiculous, I thought.
Pure folklore.
Dumb.
Then I grew enough brain cells to check it out for myself.
I found out that sassafras tea is recognized as a natural anticoagulant.
Anticoagulant = blood thinner. Fancy that.
Ever notice how much smarter grownups got after our teen years?
In early America, sassafras and tobacco were the main exports from the colonies to England. Sassafras was revered for its medicinal qualities, as well as for the beauty of its wood.
Alas, sassafras tree byproducts, including sassafras tea, are controversial these days, which is why it isn’t the main ingredient in root beer anymore.
The dried and ground sassafras leaves are still used to make filé powder for certain types of gumbo.
And lots of people just go right on using the mysterious tree’s bark, leaves and roots.
A good argument in favor of doing that might be my granddad. He lived into his eighties with no medicines other than the natural ones he learned from The Five Civilized Tribes. He hand-delivered all of his eleven children, survived total economic depression with nothing but his two hands to make a living and played a mean banjo and fiddle with no lessons.
Maybe there really is something to “thinning the blood” with sassafras tea every spring. You think?
Have you ever tasted sassafras tea? Did you know it was the main flavoring in root beer at one time, or that some people thought of the sassafras tree as the root beer tree? Did your family use any old-timey “medicines” that didn’t come from a pharmacy? Tell us about it. We’d love to hear about it!
Of course, a visit isn’t a visit without a two-way conversation. I really want to hear from you.
I truly hope you’ll pick up a copy of my novel Silki, the Girl of Many Scarves: SUMMER OF THE ANCIENT. The print version is on sale at Amazon for only $11.21!!! For your convenience, it’s also available for Kindle, the Nook and for most other eBook readers. If you love the Southwest and kooky little characters that make you laugh aloud as authentic danger and mystery swirl at every turn, you’ll love this novel! The second book in the series, CANYON OF DOOM, debuts in early 2013.
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Doodles was eight years younger than me and my responsibility. Truth is, I was so glad to get another girl in this family, I didn’t mind doing anything for that skinny little baby. I had two older sisters, but they was already married.
Mom counted our heads to see if we was all there. After the last head, her usual serious face broke out in a smile bigger than the whole of Oklahoma. She stepped away from the iron-post bed where her and Dad, and sometimes a few young’uns, slept. I tell you, us kids scampered under that bed like rabbits running from a pack of slobbery hound dogs! When we came back out, we was holding on to one of Dad’s long grey and white wintertime socks. Those socks looked like they got the mumps, they was so full. Doodles laughed right out loud at us holding our fat socks in both our arms like someone would steal them.
The bottom of our socks sagged with every kind of hard candy. Oh, them colors and shapes just made us nutty. Some of the candies was square with dimples all in them. Other kinds was round with flat ends and little drawings like Christmas trees and holly inside. Best of all was the big hunks of folded over ribbon candy. That was our mom’s favorite, too.
After making them banana pies, Mom got out a hammer and put a big peppermint stick and some of them ribbon candies inside a dishtowel. We all gathered around her to watch. Every time she swung that hammer in the air and brung it down to crush the candy, we made saucer eyes at each other. I can’t swear if it’s true or not, but I think God Himself must have gave my mom that recipe for the Christmas cake.