Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-08-24
What Is EIecampainee

I enclose q paragraph that 1 find going the
rounds of near all the Texas papers for the pur-
pose of inquiring what plant is meant. If as
good as represented where could seed be had
HIVE you any knowledge OF its now being culti-
waited at any point in Texas?
MRS. JOHN L. HARDING.
Floyd county, Tex.
The paragraph enclosed says "Ele-
campaine root is quite an article of ex-
port In Schoharie, n. Y. One firm in
Cobleskill had orders last season for
seventy-five tons more tnan it could fill.
One farmer sold over 5000 pounds of the
root. Would il not be worth while for
Texas farmers to give this and similar
drug plants some attention and have a
variegated crop?' We have ourself seen
the same paragraph in several papers,
and we have also seen another on the
same subject but varying little in its
phraseology. We are strongly of the
opinion that we know exactly what it
means-some fellow has saved up lot of
elecampaine seed that he wishes to sell at
high figures, and he is now trying to
work up an interest in the plant prior to
advertising his stock. 1t is, in our opln-
ion simply a trick of q peculiar kind of
trade entirely too common in this coun-
try at the present time, Where seed
you just now, but wait with patience a
few weeks-if you rend the papers you
will be very apt to hear of some before
you are much older.
We have never heard of eleoampaine
being cultivated in Texas, or in any
other state for that matter. 1t is wild
plant, growing abundantly in the noun
tain regions of Kentucky, Tennessee and
the Carolinas. Chapman in his "Flora
of the Southern States puts 1t down as
an introduced plant, but from our
knowledge of its great abundance in the
almost inaccessible wilds of the noun
tain regions named we are inclined TO
regard this as q mistake. 1t is coarse
growing weed, looking something like
the plant we call ''rosin weed' in
Texas, aud since it bears seed in great
profusion one might go into the woods
and gather bushels of il in q short time
exactly what somebody has done, no
ooubt. The botanical name of the plant
is Inula uelelium. 1t belongs to the
sunfiower family, and is quite closely re-
lated to the well-known Jerusalem arti-
choke.
What the people about Schoharie, N.
Y. intend to do with elecampaine must
for the present remain mystery. There
was a time when the old wise
women of the country made con-
siderable use of it In their domes-
tic practice. Combining it with sulphur
and hogs lard they made of it an ONT
ment thought to be ''sovereign cure
all'' for a certain cutaneous malady that
got very troublesome in the
country schools, but scien-
tifio people of nowadays would be apt
to look upon the Office It filled in that
ointment about the same as that filled by
the quartz pebble in the tramp's soup.
The tramp, when he wanted dish of
soup, furnished the soup rock, while the
good housewife where he stopped fur
nished the trimmings.
In a word. elecampaine has no medical
properties worthy of consideration. A
starchy substance called inuline has been
made from the roots OF the plant, but it
has never figured as being of any special
value. The same substance 10 Welded
by tubers of the Jerusalem artichoke
and dahlia