Recipes utilizing tumbleweeds evolved in environments where the landscape offered little else, and some of these folkloric culinary traditions are being revived through recent interest in foraging for food. Farmers used young tumbleweeds to feed cattle, while other frontierspeople burned tumbleweed to make soap, and the Navaho found medicinal uses for it ( treating influenza and smallpox). The tumbleweed, however, is not an entirely useless vagabond. Regardless, the tumbleweed traveled quickly across the country (aided by the transportation of cattle in railroad cars,) and, by 1885, sightings of tumbleweeds were being reported in California. A few farmers in the late 1880’s were said to have believed that the introduction of tumbleweeds was a conspiracy designed to sabotage their land. Most sources propose tumbleweed seeds arrived in a shipment of flax a few argue it was embedded in the wool of sheep. The exact passage of the tumbleweed to the United States remains something of a mystery, however. ![]() ![]() In October 1880, the United States Department of Agriculture received its first letter mentioning the tumbleweed, which had been reported in the county of Bon Homme, South Dakota. Tumbleweeds, also known as “Russian thistle” or “wind witches”, originally developed in the arid grasslands near the Ural mountains in Russia, spreading from there across much of Asia and Europe.
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