Despite long hours of work, enslaved people were able to make time for family and religion and further develop their own culture. Plants used on the Underground Railroad are as little known as the secret routes that remain to be researched, and in this area they included shallots, garlic, pepper grass, camphor, dandelion, turnip, mustard, mint, and pecan. Recollections from Louisiana speak of pepper grass, of eating corn, potatoes, and alligator without weapons, and of surviving for four days on sassafras leaves and water after fleeing into the pines. Sweet potatoes, popular in the American South, were used in different varieties, and their leaves were used to treat diabetes, hookworm, hemorrhage, and abscesses, while the tuber was used to treat asthma. Sassafras was valued for its aromatic leaves, bark, and roots, for tea and root beer in early America, as an astringent, pain reliever, and treatment for rheumatism, and in Choctaw use as filé to thicken gumbo. Elderberry, native to North America, was called the medicine chest of the common people and was used in teas, beverages, remedies for colds, asthma, bronchitis, sore throat, and the flu, to induce perspiration against chills, and in poultices and ointments for burns, swelling, cuts, and scrapes.