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Found along the hiking trail that used to be the EJ&E Railroad.
This stuff is poisonous. When cattle eat white snakeroot, their milk and meat become tainted by its toxin, tremetol. Since it is native to North America, European settlers were not aware of its properties; as they moved into the Midwest where it flourished, they encountered it unknowingly through the mysterious and deadly disease called "milk sickness" — tremetol poisoning caused by drinking the milk of cattle that had foraged on white snakeroot. Milk sickness is credited with killing thousands of people early in the 19th century, including Nancy Hanks Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's mother. Sometime in the 1830s, according to legend, Dr. Anna Pierce Hobbs of Illinois traced the disease to white snakeroot. The story goes that an elder Shawnee woman (name unknown) who knew all about local plants told the doctor that white snakeroot was poisonous; the doctor's own observations and experiments confirmed the link between white snakeroot and milk sickness. Once that link was understood, of course, farmers could take steps to minimize the chance of their cattle eating the poisonous plant.
Jack Sanders tells us that while dairy cattle may even today sometimes eat white snakeroot, modern dairy practices result in the milk of any one cow being so thoroughly diluted with other cows' milk by the time it reaches the consumer that milk sickness is no longer a danger.
White snakeroot blossoms:
White snakeroot leaf:
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