PAT NEAL: The camas is blooming
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, May 27, 2026
THE CAMAS IS blooming. This small member of the lily family, with a blue, hyacinth-shaped flower and an edible bulb about the size of a small onion, used to be the most important carbohydrate throughout the Pacific Northwest.
That was until 1791, when the Spanish introduced the potato to Neah Bay. This South American tuber eventually replaced camas and was grown by Native Americans in gardens across the Olympic Peninsula, but that’s another story.
Native American stories say the camas was a gift of “The Great Changer.” This was a legendary hero to many tribes of the Northwest, who believed the Changer brought balance to the world by using his power to transform people, animals and landscapes into what we see today.
These transformers or changers were called Docuebatl, Kumsnootl and Kwati, (Q’waati) by various tribes. Kwati turned wolves into the Quileute people, caused the trees to spring up out of the ground and spread camas throughout the region, where it has been growing ever since.
To harvest the camas, the sod would be peeled back in sections, the larger bulbs removed and the sod replaced so the remaining bulbs could grow larger.
Piles of camas bulbs were steamed a hundred pounds at a time in stone ovens.
In 1999, a highway construction project near Sequim unearthed the remains of a stone camas oven that was used to cook the bulbs 6,000 years ago. The camas bulbs were baked into loaves that were dried and wrapped in maple leaves for future use.
Captain George Vancouver was the first European to describe a camas garden. On April 30, 1792, he anchored in Dungeness Bay and was so taken with the beauty of the scene with its “lawns and cleared areas,” that he named the area after his home in Dungeness on the English Channel.
On June 10, 1806, William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition described a field of blooming camas as “a perfect resemblance of lakes of clear water.”
Unfortunately, when the Corps of Discovery had tried eating camas after emerging from the Bitteroot Mountains the previous fall, where they had survived on horse meat, the debilitating effects of a new diet of dried fish and roots supplied by the Nez Perce stopped the expedition in its tracks with a perfect storm of vomiting, diarrhea and flatulence.
After supper, Meriweather Lewis was “filled so full of wind, that we were scarcely able to breathe all night.”
This miserable malady was unaffected by the expedition’s pharmacy that consisted largely of laudanum, mercury and calomel.
In 1841, Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition was charting the Strait of Juan de Fuca when he observed the camas “all seeming in the utmost order as if man had been ever watchful over its beauty and cultivation.”
Historians have long held that Natives of the Pacific Northwest practiced no form of agriculture, but camas was one of an estimated 80 species of plants used for food, fiber and medicines that grew on prairies maintained by the Native American practice of burning the land every three to five years. The fires spurred the growth of useful plants, killed the weeds and kept the trees from taking over the prairie.
Eventually, European homesteaders took over the land and turned the hogs loose on the camas. Native Americans couldn’t homestead their own land because they were not considered American citizens at the time.
The hogs eliminated the camas except in small, isolated prairies, like the one south of Forks along U.S. Highway 101, where the camas still blooms “like a perfect resemblance to lakes of clear water.”
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
