As it turned out, most of the Pasqueflower had bloomed out, but we found a few in bloom, and we found a lot more a couple weeks later at Yellowstone National Park.
Pasqueflowers (Pulsatilla patens) are members of the Buttercup Family (Ranunculaceae). The plants are hairy, with one to many stems, and each of those ends in a flower. Flowers vary in color from pale to marginally darker shades of blue, purple and lavender. The flowers get up to about two inches across, with five to seven hairy, petal-like sepals. There are no petals. Numerous yellow stamens fill up the middle of the flower.
They can be found in well-drained soil, from mountain slopes down to prairies. Their range includes Alaska into eastern Canada, and south to central Washington, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, and east across the central plains to Illinois and Michigan.
In Britain, the similar P. vulgaris was known as Passelflower; in 1597 the herbalist Gerard began calling it Pasqueflower: "They floure for the most part about Easter, which has moved me to name it Pasque Floure, or Easter floure." Pasque was from the Old French for Easter.
The Blackfoot Indians called it Napi. Alex Johnson wrote in 1970, in Economic Botany, "The grayish, silky seed heads of the species reminded the Indians of the gray heads of old men hence the name (Napi).
In 1914 Melvin R. Gilmore wrote in Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region, "When an old Dakota first finds one of these flowers in the springtime it reminds him of his childhood, when he wandered over prairie hills at play, as free from care and sorrow as the flowers and the birds. He sits down near the flower on the lap of Mother Earth, takes out his pipe and fills it with tobacco. The he
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