Rabbit Chew

    I have walked the fields around here and all the way to Chicot and back practically, and I do not ever see rabbit tobacco. The indigenous women and biologists that visited me agree that it's unusual for this plant to pop up "in someone's yard". My back field is not exactly my yard, but I see what they mean. 

 

    Just last week at another visit with Big Bill, he reiterated how strange he found it all. He said that usually you see this plant along highways and clearings where the roadside has been cut or sprayed. Here it grew among all of the prairie competitors, in high coton jaune. I found that this plant rose to the competition around her. Bill suggested that I document her companion plants and geolocate individual plants.  

    We had not exactly cleared, but burned the prairie in Fall 2022. Prairie fire is medicine for the land and the burned sections are where the most rabbit tobacco popped up, though not the largest. The largest ones were 3-4 feet high and grew in the eastern yard in the rows of coton jaune we never gathered.

    One of my wishes is to find another patch here in the prairie. No luck there yet, but I think it must exist. Another wish is to find the nearest place beyond this prairie where it survives. I know it is north of here, but how far north? My answer came this week by way of a bow hunter. He said "rabbit chew" is what the old people drink for cough, and that it grows today in the clear cuts and after-burns in Thistlewaite and Kitsatche Forest.

To read more on rabbit chew, click here.