Sassafras and Witch Hazel

by DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

AGAINST the Indian-summer sky, a tree lifts up its hands and testifies to glory, the glory of a blue October day. Yellow or orange, or blood-orange, or sometimes softest salmon pink, or blotched with bright vermilion, the leaves of the Sassafras prove that not all autumnal splendor is confined to the Northern forests. Deep into the South, along the snake rail fences, beside the soft wood roads, in old fields where the rusty broom sedge is giving way to the return of forests, the Sassafras carries its splendid banners to vie with the scarlet Black Gum and the yellow Sweet Gum and other trees of which the New Englander may hardly have heard. The deep blue fruits on thick bright red stalks complete a color effect in fall which few trees anywhere surpass.

In spring the leafing out is late—later at least than the inconspicuous pale gold flowers that bloom on the naked wood. But once they burst their buds, the heavy glossy leaves form swiftly. On old boughs they are simple in outline — boat-shaped and rather small; but on young trees and vigorous new growth they grow large and take on their characteristic mitten shape — with one “thumb" lobe and a larger terminal lobe. These Sassafras leaves, when chewed, at once set up a mucilaginous slime in the mouth, like that of Slippery Elm twigs, which country children love to taste; the hot and thirsty botanist, as well, has been known to resort to chewing Sassafras to promote salivation, when no water was to be found on his dusty tramps.

The role of Sassafras in American folklore and early exploration is unique. About it have clung fantastic hopes and promises of gain, and superstitions that have not yet wholly departed. The wood, which has less shrinkage in drying than any other hardwood (10 per cent), not only is durable, so that it appealed to the pioneer for fences (and still is esteemed for small boats), but its odor was reputed to drive away bedbugs; hence many bedsteads were made of it, in a more innocent age and in the more innocent states of Arkansas and Mississippi. Negro cabin floors in Louisiana were often laid in Sassafras for the same reason. In Kentucky, where soap is still sometimes a home product, it is often believed that the kettle must be stirred with a Sassafras stick to make goodquality soap. In West Virginia it is believed that Sassafras hen roosts keep out chicken lice.

But it was the roots of the tree, yielding an oil once prized beyond all reason, that gave the Sassafras its fame. As a demulcent and emollient, oil of Sassafras has never completely ceased to be of some importance in the manufacture of soaps and perfumes; it disguises the bad taste of some medicines and may perhaps still be employed in the flavoring of candy. At one time, however, especially in Virginia, roots were grubbed out by the ton for the production of this essence, thereby clearing cutover land for the farmer and at the same time yielding a paying harvest. But the old credulity in Sassafras as a tonic that would prolong life has yielded place to acceptance of radio advertisers’ claims for vitamins to do the same, and it is probable that Sassafras at the moment is at an all-time low.

Yet no other American tree was ever exalted by such imaginary virtues, in expectation, as Sassafras, or has fallen so far in esteem. Its reputation was launched upon the world in 1574 by Nicholas Monardes, “physician of Seville,” in his work on the resources of the West Indies (translated into English by Frampton), with the delightful title Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde Worlde. And these are some of his glad tidings: —

From the Florida, whiche is the firme Lande of our Occidentall Indias, liying in xxv degrees, thei bryng a woodd and roote of a tree that groweth in those partes, of greate vertues, and great excellencies, that thei heale there with greevous and variable deseases.

It may be three yeres paste, that I had knowledge of this Tree, and a French manne whiche had been in those partes, shewed me a peece of it, and told me merveiles of its vertues. . . .

After that the French menne were destroied,¹ our Spaniards did beginne to waxe sicke, as the Frenche menne had dooen, and some whiche did remaine of them, did shew it to our Spaniardes, and how thei had cured theim selves with the water of this merveilous Tree, and the manner which thei had of usyng of it, shewed to them by the Indians, who used to cur theim selves therewith, when thei were sicke of any grief . . . and it did in theim greate effectes, that it is almoste incredible. . . ,

The name of this Tree, as the Indians dooeth name it, is called Pauame, and the Frenche menne dooeth call it Sassafras.

Monardes goes on to say that Sassafras is a sovereign remedy for “Quotidian Agewes [malaria], large importunate fevers ... it comforteth the liver and the Stomacke ... it dooeth make fatte . . . dooeth cause lust to meate.” It is also good for “Tertian Agewes, griefes of the breast caused of cold humours, griefes of the head,”for “them that bee lame and creepelles and them that are not able to goe.”

Such a panacea as this was certain to raise high hopes in the Europe of that day, when almost no disease was correctly understood in either its origin or its treatment, so that credulity might mount untrammeled. It was the easier to believe in a cure-all that came from the New World and had never failed — because it had never been tried except by the Indians. Indeed, the early Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English were as gullible about “Indian medicine” as the Americans of a later date. The great value of Sassafras to the red men (aside from the undoubtedly soothing effect that the mucilaginous properties of its sap would have on raw mucous membranes) was doubtless in its aromatic nature. A plant with a strong pleasant smell was supposed to ward off evil; and evil, rather than bacteria, is believed still, among the Chinese, Indians, and certain American sects, to be the real cause of sickness.

This conception of the curative, since evil-dispelling, nature of an odor is very ancient; it goes back to Egyptian and Druidical ceremonies, and was strongly believed in by Europeans during the bubonic plague, when doctors wore great nose beaks filled with spices; indeed, it survived to our own times in the only recently abandoned theory of fumigation. The American Indians believed, above all, in the efficacy of tobacco smoke, and it was as a curative that tobacco was first introduced into Europe; Catherine de’ Medici took tobacco for a cold in the head! Such, then, is the background, the psychological preparation, which greeted the first arrivals of Sassafras in Europe. It rated with the spices of Ormuz and Araby as a precious substance.

Impatient to secure adequate supplies of it, the English charged their early explorers to search for it. Thus when Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe dropped anchor in Pamlico Sound, North Carolina, in 1584, they immediately began the search for Sassafras. In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold was sent out to explore what is now the coast of New England for the marvelous tree, for the price of Sassafras in Britain had risen to 336 pounds sterling the ton.

In 1603 the merchants of Bristol, urged thereto by Richard Hakluyt, the celebrated historian and anthologist of early exploration, formed a company to send to Virginia for the sole purpose of gathering Sassafras. They sailed in two vessels “plentifully victualled for eight monethes, and furnished with slight Merchandizes thought fit to trade with the people of the Countrey, as Hats of divers colours, greene, blue and yellow, apparell of coarse Kersie and Canvasse readie made, Stockings and Shooes, Axes, Hatchets, Hookes, Knives, Sizzers, Hammers, Nailes, Chissels, Fishhookes, Bels, Beades, Bugles, Looking-glasses, Thimbles, Pinnes, Needles, Thread and such like.”

After a very long voyage they reached the coast of the present United States in the neighborhood of what is now Old Orchard, Maine. Meeting with no Sassafras there, they continued southward, always hunting for it, and first encountered it on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound. Here they spent a month filling the hold of the bark with Sassafras, and then sent her home to England “to give some contentment to the Adventurers,” that is, satisfy the stockholders.

The remaining company continued to cut Sassafras and load it into the larger ship, but either this aroused the jealousy of the Indians or the redskins decided the foreigners had stayed long enough. Several surprise attacks were made, ambushes were laid and treachery attempted, but the stout banging of a brass “Peece" (cannon) and the fear inspired in them by two mastiffs belonging to the Bristol men drove off the Indians. A fair wind brought the Sassafras cutters away at last in safety to Bristol, and the expedition, we hope, returned great profit to the gentlemen “Adventurers.”

Sassafras was one of the first exports sent by Captain John Smith from the Jamestown colony, and as late as 1610 it was still demanded from Virginia, like tribute, as a condition of ihe charter of the colony. But soon it began to share the fate of wther panaceas. It wasn’t curing all the ailments it was claimed to cure. A disillusioned public lost its faith in Sassafras — but not in panaceas! So, through the years, Sassafras as a medicament sank to the position of a tonic to “purify the blood"— a continuation, of course, of the notion that our ailments originate in some inner evil. Thus for generations it was administered, in connection with black cherry and various other unpleasant ingredients, to pioneer children as the dreaded “spring tonic.” Older people left out the unpleasant ingredients and simply sipped Sassafras tea. Even that placid custom is becoming a part of the past — that long American past in which the Sassafras tree shone boldly forth, just as today when it is only a bright reminder of the time when everything here was wonderful and new.

Growing in much the same roadside or woodland setting is another tree which has become clothed in supposedly magical properties. A strange little understory tree is the Witch Hazel, whose flowers venture forth only when the dull yellow leaves have dropped and the late autumn airs are beginning to grow chill. They have twisted, crinkled petals of pale greenish gold, and the fruits are stranger still, for those of last year are just ripening at the time that this year’s flowers appear. More, they eject their seeds with nothing less than violence; the tree, which seldom grows more than twenty feet high, can send its seeds much farther. Reliable observers, who have kept the pods in the house and could measure the distance of the ejection precisely, report twenty-five and thirty feet. The visibility of these vital little missiles is high, and thus the winterblooming Witch Hazel, of ancient geologic lineage, is still today well able to maintain itself.

The extraction of the essence began with the Indians, who probably had the same mystical faith in it— as an aromatic plant — that they put in Sassafras. High hopes were once entertained of Witch Hazel extract as a curative for all sorts of diseases. But modern chemistry has found that Witch Hazel is quite inert, and any value the extract may have as an astringent and antiseptic may well reside in the alcohol in which the aromatic essence is embodied. The southern Appalachians are the chief source of the dried leaves which supply the material for the extract; in New England, however, the bark, twigs, and sometimes the entire plant are often used.

Witch Hazel is usually said to take its name from a confusion in the minds of the early settlers between this plant and the true Hazel of Europe, which was famous for its magical properties. Some legends say that one can find witches by means of it, and others that with its help witches can find water, or gold, or other desirable subterranean things. Philologists like to dispute this source of the name, saying that it comes from the word wych, which has nothing to do with witches but is related, according to various and sundry authorities, to Anglo-Saxon wican, meaning to bend, or wice, meaning quick or living, or possibly even to the modern word, switch.

However all that may be, it. is certain that in early days in America Witch Hazel was used in local witchery, to find water or even mineral deposits. You took a forked branch, one whose points grew north and south so that they had felt the influence of the sun at its rising and setting, and you carried it with a point in each hand, the stem pointing forward. Any downward tug of the stem was caused by the flow of hidden water or the gleam of buried gold. And if there are people still who believe in water-witching, theirs is one of the most harmless and pleasing of fallacies. We in modern America are not too rich in folklore, and there is a place in our national memory for the innocent old magic that once grew green and promising in the Sassafras tree and the cryptic Witch Hazel.