Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region

Melvin R. Gilmore (1868–1940) ended his distinguished career as curator of ethnology at the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan after serving at the state historical societies of Nebraska and North Dakota and at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation.

"A work extraordinarily modern in spirit, one of the very first to open up the realms of ethnobotany and ecology... But Gilmore's work is not only a treasure of ethnobotanical lore. The intellectual journey covered by the author ... explains his astonishing openness of mind and his capacity, remarkable for the time, of making a synthesis of disciplines and lines of thought which were then kept separated. Gilmore was one of the first to understand at the same time that a wealth of ... resources lay concealed in the botanical knowledge of the Indians ... which the brutal destruction of native cultures would, without his effort, have wiped out irreparably."-Claude Levi-Strauss, L'Homme -- Claude Levi-Strauss L'Homme