Soap Weed

Grew up on it, in fact, long before the primary ingredient for flavor began to be soap-weed. ❋ Homesick Texan (2006)

Moreover, while the soap-weed wash at the fisherman's hut had whitened his skin, his face and hands still retained a smoky pallor which would take some time to wear off. ❋ Francis Rolt-Wheeler (1918)

Each excrescence on the plain his half-squinted eyes noticed, and with instant skill relegated to its proper category of soap-weed, mesquite, cactus. ❋ Stewart Edward White (1909)

At length he swung Button in an easy lope toward what looked to be a bunch of soap-weed in the middle distance. ❋ Stewart Edward White (1909)

She shrank, too, when the buckboard passed the skeleton of a steer, its bleached bones ghastly in the sunlight, but she smiled when she saw a sea of soap-weed with yellow blossoms already unfolding, and she looked long at a mile-wide section of mesquite, dark and inviting in the distance. ❋ Charles Alden Seltzer (1908)

She had dismounted to gather some yellow blossoms of soap-weed that had looked particularly inviting from the saddle, and too late she had become aware of the belligerent actions of the steer. ❋ Charles Alden Seltzer (1908)

On the broad levels were the yellow tinted lines that told of the presence of soap-weed, the dark lines that betrayed the mesquite, the saccatone belts that marked the little guillies. ❋ Charles Alden Seltzer (1908)

To the flower-lover it is the yucca; to the cultivator, or whosoever meddles with its leaves, it is the Spanish-bayonet; to the utilitarian, who values a thing only as it is of use to him, it is the soap-weed -- ignoble name, referring to certain qualities pertaining to its roots. ❋ Olive Thorne Miller (1874)

"Sometimes folks call it Indian soap-weed," explained the brakeman in her ear, "because if you break the leaves they'll lather in water. ❋ Mary Ellen Chase (1930)