ABSTRACT
The Glades people living on Lake Okeechobee before the Europeans arrived were using Sagittaria (Hogan 1978). Given the rich history of the genus among North American people, they were likely using it for both food and medicine. They had available to them both S. lancifolia and S. latifolia, with the second species being the more useful of the two. Harriot ([1590] 1972) probably gave the earliest name of S. latifolia when he recorded, “Kaishúepenauk, a white kind of root about the bignes of hen egs & nere of that form: their tast was not so good to our seeming as the other.” In his comparison to hen eggs, he did exactly the same as Patrick Gass in 1807 when he recorded the name wappato. Gass’s record was from the opposite side of North America, among the Chinookan people the journal called the Skilloot in the Columbia River region of Oregon.
