The Camas Prairie & the camas bloom

The Camas Prairie was one of the great camas-gathering grounds of the Nez Perce and other Plateau tribes, whose women dug the bulbs each spring — a staple food traded across the Rockies; the 1877 war’s aftermath opened the prairie to homestead plowing, and only scattered wetland pockets escaped the plow. The Camas Prairie Railroad — the famous ‘railroad on stilts’ — was built 1907–19 across the prairie’s canyons to reach the wheat, its wooden trestles now a celebrated engineering relic. The prairie’s May bloom in the surviving pockets is a regional event, and the rolling grain-canyon landscape with the Seven Devils on the horizon defines the region. The prairie’s surviving camas pockets lie in shallow wetland depressions too wet to plow, and state and tribal stewardship now protects several of them; the May bloom in these pockets turns whole fields blue for a few weeks, a remnant of the gathering grounds the Nez Perce used for generations, and photographers mark the calendar to it.