Clematis ligusticifolia is a climbing, spreading vine

Vine

A vine in the narrowest sense is the grapevine , but more generally it can refer to any plant with a growth habit of trailing or scandent, that is to say climbing, stems or runners...

 with showy flowers. It is also known as Old-man's Beard and Yerba de Chiva, and Virgin's bower, (though Old-man's Beard may also refer to C. vitalba

Clematis vitalba

Clematis vitalba is a shrub of the Ranunculaceae family.-Description:Clematis vitalba is a climbing shrub with branched, grooved stems, deciduous leaves, and scented greeny-white flowers with fluffy underlying sepals...

, and Virgin's bower may also refer to C. lasiantha). It is native to North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 where it is widespread across the western United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 in streamside thickets, wooded hillsides, and coniferous forests up to 4,000 feet.

It was called "pepper vine" by early travelers and pioneers of the American Old West

American Old West

The American Old West, or the Wild West, comprises the history, geography, people, lore, and cultural expression of life in the Western United States, most often referring to the latter half of the 19th century, between the American Civil War and the end of the century...

. They used it as a pepper substitute to spice up food since real black pepper (Piper nigrum) was a costly and rarely obtainable spice. Like the rest of the Clematis genus, it contains essential oils and compounds which are extremely irritating to the skin and mucous membrames. Unlike Black Pepper

Black pepper

Black pepper is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is approximately in diameter, dark red when fully mature, and, like all drupes, contains a single seed...

 or Capsicum

Capsicum

Capsicum is a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family, Solanaceae. Its species are native to the Americas where they have been cultivated for thousands of years, but they are now also cultivated worldwide, used as spices, vegetables, and medicines - and have become are a key element in...

, however, the compounds in clematis cause internal bleeding of the digestive tract if ingested internally in large amounts. The plants are essentially toxic. Despite its toxicity, Native American

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

s used very small amounts of clematis as an effective treatment for migraine headaches and nervous disorders. It was also used as an effective treatment of skin infections.
A whole-plant hot water extraction was used to treat eczema

Eczema

Eczema is a form of dermatitis, or inflammation of the epidermis . In England, an estimated 5.7 million or about one in every nine people have been diagnosed with the disease by a clinician at some point in their lives.The term eczema is broadly applied to a range of persistent skin conditions...

, and a leaf compress

Compress

Compress is a UNIX compression program based on the LZC compression method, which is an LZW implementation using variable size pointers as in LZ78.- Description of program :Files compressed by compress are typically given the extension .Z...

is used to treat chest pain, sores, and boils.