Home » Plants & Animals » North American Wildflowers » Myth and Folklore: Jack-in-the-Pulpit

Myth and Folklore: Jack-in-the-Pulpit

© Gregg Pasterick

If anything looks like something the deserves some myth and folklore, it's Jack-in-the-Pulpit. It's got that mythical, otherworldly thing going on, what with its spike of small flowers stuck in the middle of that greenish-purple spathe. It doesn't look like a flowery thing at all, but a hiding place for little tree frogs and small pixies. But little tree frogs and pixies are not part of the folklore of this plant. This one has death in its lore.

Also known as Indian turnip, it was used as a diagnostic medicine by the Meskwaki people of Wisconsin, the Potawatomi, and other plains Indians. The inner seed was dropped in a cup of water, if it floated around the cup four times in a clockwise direction, it was a sign the patient would get well. If the seed sank at any time before completing its four revolutions around the cup, the patient would die. (No word on what happened if the seed floated in the other direction, or just sat there, bobbing in the water. I'm imagining it didn't bode well for the patient, if anything could be worse than the sinking seed.)

The Meskwaki also used Jack-in-the-Pulpit to hoodwink their enemies, and not in a practical joke sort of way, but in that, gee, the seed sank kind of way. They would chop up the root of the plant, mix it with meat, and leave it out for their enemies, who were the Sioux, with whom they were warring. Evidently the Sioux fell for this trick again and again, eating this tainted meat, and then dying a painful, cramping, agonizing death a few hours later. (This doesn't say much for the intelligence of the Sioux, not only falling for the ol' Jack-in-the-Pulpit root in the meat trick repeatedly; but that they would eat any meat they found left lying around. Sometimes all you're doing is asking for it.)

Based upon this painfully fatal property of Jack-in-the-Pulpit, the Meskwaki called the plant tcika'-tape, which meant bad sick, proving to the world these people had a real flare for understatement.

Interestingly, our native peoples also recognized that one of the chief constituents of this dangerous root was starch, and they eventually learned that roasting the roots, or drying for them for at least six months, removed the harmful acridity. The roots could then be peeled and ground into flour, from which bread was made.

Jack-in-the-Pulpit had a variety of folk names. Some of these were Bog Onion, Brown Dragon, Cooter-Wampee, Devil's Ear, Dragonroot, Iroquois-Breadroot, Lords-and-Ladies, Marsh Turnip, Memory Root, and Plant-of-Peace.

The copyright of the article Myth and Folklore: Jack-in-the-Pulpit in North American Wildflowers is owned by Gregg Pasterick. Permission to republish Myth and Folklore: Jack-in-the-Pulpit in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.