American Forest Trees Part 45

The leaves are compound, but have no resemblance to those of locust and the acacias. They are eight or twelve inches long, with five or seven leaflets. In autumn before falling they change to a clear yellow, but adhere to the branches until rather late in the season. The fruit, which consists of small pods hanging in cl.u.s.ters, is ripe in September.

Yellow-wood is a little below white oak in strength and seven pounds per cubic foot under it in weight; is hard, compact, and susceptible of a beautiful polish. Rings of yearly growth are clearly marked by rows of open ducts, and contain many evenly-distributed smaller ducts. The wood is bright, clear yellow, changing to brown on exposure; sapwood nearly white. Trunks of largest size are generally hollow or otherwise defective.

The uses of yellow-wood have been few. In the days when families in remote regions were under the necessity of manufacturing, growing, or otherwise producing nearly every commodity that entered into daily life, the settlers among the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee discovered that the wood of this tree, particularly the roots, yielded a clear, yellow dye. The process of manufacture was simple. The wood was reduced to chips with an ordinary ax, and the chips were boiled until the yellow coloring matter was extracted. The resulting liquor was the dye, and it gave the yellow stripe to many a piece of home-made cloth in the cabins of mountaineers.

The women usually attended to the dye making and the manufacture of yarn and cloth; but the men found a way to utilize yellow-wood in producing an article once so common in Tennessee and Kentucky that no cabin was without it--the trusty rifle. The gunsmith, a.s.sisted by the blacksmith, made the barrel and the other metal parts, but the hunter generally was able to whittle out the wooden stock. Yellow-wood's lightness, strength, and color suited the gun stock maker's purpose, and he slowly hewed and whittled the article, fitted it to the barrel, adjusted it to his shoulder, and completed a weapon which never failed the owner in time of need.

FRIJOLITO (_Sophora secundiflora_) is found in Texas, New Mexico, and southward in Mexico. The name is Spanish and means "little bean." A common name for it in English is coral bean. Sophora is said to be an Arabic word of uncertain meaning, except that it refers to some kind of a tree that bears pods. It is a species, therefore, which draws its names from four languages, while the name applied to it by Comanche Indians is translated "sleep-bush." The bright scarlet seeds, as large as beans, but in shape like door-k.n.o.bs, grow from one to eight in a pod, and contain a narcotic poison, "sophorin." It is probable that Indians discovered that the beans, if eaten, produced sleep, hence the name. The tree is from twenty-five to thirty-five feet high, and from six to ten inches in diameter. The leaves are compound, and consist of seven or nine leaflets. The small, violet-blue flowers appear in early spring.

They are not conspicuous, but their presence cannot escape the notice of a traveler in the dry, semi-barren canyons and on the bluffs where the tree holds its ground. Their odor calls attention to their presence. The perfume is powerful but pleasant, unless the contact is too close. The pods are from one to seven inches long, and hang on the boughs until late winter. It is not believed that birds or mammals distribute the seeds, as their poison renders them unfit for food. Running water appears to be the princ.i.p.al agent of distribution. The tree reaches its largest size in the vicinity of Metagorda bay, Texas. Among the dry western canyons it is usually a shrub. The small size of this tree stands in the way of extensive use of the wood. It burns well and its princ.i.p.al importance is as fuel. The weight is 61.34 pounds per cubic foot; it is hard, compact, susceptible of a beautiful polish; medullary rays are numerous and thin; color is orange, streaked with red, the sapwood brown or yellow. The wood is worked into a few small articles.

SOPHORA (_Sophora affinis_) ranges through portions of Arkansas and Texas. It is popularly supposed to be a locust, and is called pink locust or beaded locust, the first name based on the color of the wood, the last on the appearance of the pod which looks like a short string of beads, sometimes three inches in length, but usually shorter. In early times the pioneers manufactured ink from the pods. It was a fairly serviceable article, but was never sold, each family making its own.

This tree's flowers appear in early spring with the leaves. Trunks reach a height of twenty feet and a diameter of eight or ten inches; but the habit of separating into several stems a few feet above the ground lessens the use of the wood, even as posts, for the stems are usually very crooked. The tree's preferred habitat is on limestone bluffs, or along the borders of streams, or in depressions in the prairie where small groves often occur. The wood weighs fifty-three pounds per cubic foot, and is very hard and strong. The annual rings are clearly marked with bands of large, open pores; medullary rays are thin and inconspicuous; color of the heartwood light red, the sapwood yellow. The wood is not sawed into lumber, but is whittled into canes and tool handles.

GREENBARK ACACIA (_Cercidium floridum_) is properly named. Its green bark makes up for its scarcity of leaves, and answers the purpose of foliage. The manufacture of the tree's food goes on in the bark, because the leaves are too small to do the work. The foliage resembles that of locust and acacia in form, but the compound leaves are about an inch in length, and the leaflets are one-sixteenth of an inch long. Flowers are small, but the tree puts on three or four crops of them in a single summer. The pods are two inches long. The tree is found in the United States only in the south and west of Texas, where it is occasionally called palo verde. It attains a height of twenty feet and a diameter of ten inches when at its best. The wood is pale yellow tinged with green, and, because of small size, is of little importance.

PALO VERDE (_Cercidium torreyanum_) sheds its leaves and its pods so early in the season that its branches are bare most of the year. Trees are from fifteen to thirty feet high, and some are considerably more than a foot in diameter. Its range covers a portion of southern California, the lower part of the Gila valley in Arizona, and extends southward into Mexico. It is a typical tree of the desert, and its extreme poverty of foliage enables it to live in a dry, hot climate. It clings to the sides of desert gulches and canyons, ekes out a dreary life in depressions among desolate dunes and hills of sand and gravel, and spends its allotted period of years in solitude, growing either singly or in small groups where the full foliage at the best time of year is insufficient to offer much obstruction to the full glare of the sun from a cloudless sky. The small flowers have little beauty or sweetness, but what they have is wasted on the desert air. Wayfarers in the barren country use the wood for camp fires.

INDIGO THORN (_Dalea spinosa_) receives its name from the color of its flowers which appear in June. The tree has few leaves and they fall in a short time. This appears to be a provision of nature to enable the tree to endure the heat and dryness of its desert home.

Its range covers the lower Gila valley in Arizona, and extends into the Colorado desert in southern California. It is not abundant, and if it were, it is of a size so small that it is practically valueless for commercial purposes. Some trees are a foot in diameter and twenty feet high. The wood is light, soft, and of a rich chocolate-brown color. It is known also as indigo bush and dalea.

EYSENHARDTIA (_Eysenhardtia orthocarpa_) is so little known that it has no English name. It grows from western Texas to southern Arizona, but reaches tree size only near the summit of Santa Catalina mountains in Arizona where it is twenty feet or less in height and seldom more than eight inches in diameter. It inhabits an arid region, and bears fruit sparingly, with usually a single seed in a pod. The wood is heavy and hard, light reddish-brown in color, with thin yellow sap. It is not of commercial importance and probably never will be.

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MESQUITE

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MESQUITE

(_Prosopis Juliflora_)

There are known to be sixteen species at least of mesquite in the world, in Asia, Africa, and North and South America. The one here considered has a geographical range of at least seven thousand miles north and south, from Kansas to Patagonia, and an east and west range of four thousand miles, if the naturalized growth in Hawaii may be considered the western outpost of the species.[7]

[7] Botanists have had much controversy among themselves concerning mesquite, particularly as to what is its correct name. In giving in these pages some of the important facts concerning this interesting tree, or group of species and varieties, it is not necessary to touch the points in dispute.

The generic name _prosopis_ is a Greek word meaning "burdock;" the rest of the botanical name is Latin, meaning "July flower." Mesquite is an Aztec word (mezquitl), coming down through the Spanish. Other names for the tree are algaroba, honey locust, honey pod, and ironwood.

The largest size of mesquite is found along the Rio Grande in southern Texas where trees three feet in diameter and fifty feet high are found, but individuals of that size are rare. The species is supposed not to extend west of New Mexico, but varieties grow farther west.

The leaves are compound, with twenty or more leaflets. The foliage is thin and casts a penumbrous shadow; trees generally occur wide apart, and there is enough suns.h.i.+ne reaching the ground to satisfy gra.s.s and other plants growing there. The pods are from four to nine inches long, and each contains from ten to twenty seeds. The princ.i.p.al growth of this tree in the United States is in Texas. It has been planted in Hawaii and has run wild in some of the islands of the group. It is of slow growth, but of remarkable vitality, holds its own, and gains ground in the face of obstacles.

Persons well acquainted with conditions in Texas, both past and present, say that the mesquite area is at least double now what it was when the state came into the Union. Old stands were scattered here and there, but hundreds of square miles which were in gra.s.s only, and little of that, half a century ago, now support forests of mesquite. It is perhaps a misnomer to designate some of these stands as forests, for they present a rather ragged and sorry appearance, but they are forests in the process of forming. The old growth, which is found princ.i.p.ally in the counties bordering on the lower Rio Grande, is made up of trunks of large size, but the stands that have come on within the past fifty or sixty years are of smaller trees. A large mesquite trunk is from one to three feet in diameter; a small one from one foot down to an inch or two. A person would need to hunt from center to circ.u.mference of Texas to find many mesquite trunks that would make a straight sawlog twelve feet long. The tree is generally one of the most crooked, deformed and unpromising in the whole country; and its habit of dividing into forks near the ground, like a peach tree, makes it still more difficult to make use of. In fact, in winter when mesquite trees are bare of leaves the appearance of a forest reminds the observer of an old, neglected, diseased, moss-grown peach orchard in the eastern states; but in summer the leaves conceal much of the trunk scaliness and deformity, and there is something positively restful and attractive in the prospect of a wide range of these trees, covering hills and prairies. The leaves are compound like the acacias, and are delicate and graceful.

The spread of mesquite in the last fifty or seventy-five years has been attributed to the checking of gra.s.s fires which Indians once set yearly to keep the prairies open. The dispersion of the trees is facilitated by the scattering of seeds by cattle which feed on the pods. It is a tree hard to kill. Roots send up sprouts year after year during long periods.

Sometimes, but not often in Texas, when adverse circ.u.mstances become so severe that the mesquite tree can no longer survive above the surface, it grows beneath the ground, sending only a few sprouts up for air. "Dig for wood" is a term applied to trees of that kind, when fuel is dragged out with mattocks, grab hooks, and oxen.

The roots of the mesquite penetrate farther beneath the surface for water than any other known tree in this country. Depths of fifty or sixty feet are occasionally reached. Well diggers on the frontiers learned to go to the mesquite for water. Large trunks never develop unless their roots are abundantly supplied with moisture. Railroad engineers on the "Staked Plains" of northwestern Texas turned that knowledge to account in boring wells.

Though mesquite is seldom or never mentioned in the lumber business, it is and has been one of the most important trees of the region. Its fuel value is very great. It has cooked more food, warmed more buildings, burned more bricks, than any other wood in Texas. The tannic acid in it injures boilers and it is not much used for steam purposes. It is very high in ash. A cord of mesquite wood when burned leaves from ninety to one hundred pounds of ashes. This exceeds five fold the ashes left when white oak is burned.

Mesquite is a high-grade furniture material, though it is difficult to work because of its exceeding hardness. Ordinary wood-working tools and machinery will not stand it. Suites of nine pieces are sold in some southwestern cities at $200 or $300. The merchants find difficulty in getting mesquite furniture made. Factories do not want to handle it, though the articles sell higher than mahogany. Large, heavy tables, deeply carved, are sold in some of the cities, but all seem to be made to order and largely by hand. The appearance of the polished and finished wood is a little lighter in color than mahogany. It is not uniform in color, but shades from tone to tone in the same piece. A little of the lighter colored sapwood is worked in with pleasing effect.

Some of the tones resemble black walnut, and some suggest the l.u.s.ter of polished cherry.

Mesquite is brittle. Pieces of large size may be broken by a few blows with an ax. It has about half the strength of white oak, and is very low in elasticity. The wood has been used for two hundred years--possibly for thousands of years--as beams and sills for adobe houses; but it is not required to carry much weight. Spaniards employed it in building their churches and forts within its range. A timber taken from the Alamo, at San Antonio, Texas, in 1912, was said to have served more than 190 years with no sign of decay. Fence posts survive the men who set them. Paving blocks outlast sandstone subjected to the same use.

Railroads in southern Texas employ this wood for crossties, but it is so hard that holes must be bored for the spikes.

Mesquite baskets are made by hand of splits the size of knitting needles, some of white sapwood, others of dark heartwood. Such baskets, large enough to contain five quarts, sell in the curio shops at San Antonio for $1.25 each. Some wagon makers insist that mesquite is in the same cla.s.s with Osage orange for wagon felloes in hot, dry regions; but it does not appear that much of it is so used. The brittleness of the wood is against it, in use as felloes, except for vehicles of the heaviest sort where large pieces are demanded.

Among the uses of mesquite, by-products are an important consideration.

The pods are food for farm stock. Before the first railroad reached San Antonio mesquite pods were a regular market commodity. The Mexicans know how to make bread and brew beer from the fruit; tan leather with the resin; dye leather, cloth, and crockery with the tree's sap; make ropes and baskets of the bark. Parched pods are a subst.i.tute for coffee; bees store honey from the bloom which remains two months on the trees; riled water is purified with a decoction of mesquite chips; vinegar is made from the fermented juice of the legumes; tomales of mesquite bean meal, pepper, chicken, and cornshucks; mucilage from the gum; and candy and gum drops from the dried sap.

One of the most promising uses for this wood is in turnery. Short lengths can be utilized to advantage. The artistic color fits it for the manufacture of lodge gavels, curtain rings, goblets, plaques, trays, and numerous kinds of novelties. Spindles for grills and stairways do not suffer in comparison with black walnut, mahogany, cherry, and teak.

The wood is porous, annual rings narrow and indistinct, and the medullary rays thin and inconspicuous.

A variety (_Prosopis juliflora glandulosa_) is found from Kansas to eastern Texas, and also in Arizona and California. It is the common mesquite of eastern Texas. Another variety (_Prosopis juliflora velutina_) occurs in some of the hot valleys of southern Arizona and southward in Mexico.

SCREWBEAN (_Prosopis odorata_) is known also as screwpod mesquite, and tornillo. The name is due to the pod's habit of growing in spiral form, there being a dozen or more tight twists. The flowers appear in early spring and new crops follow until summer. The pods ripen early in autumn or late in summer, and many become infested with grubs. The tree is from twenty-five to thirty feet high, and a foot or less in diameter. Its range extends from western Texas and Utah and Nevada through New Mexico and Arizona to southern California. The wood is stronger and stiffer than common mesquite, but a little lighter. Its uses are much the same, and it has the same habits of growth, including its disposition to develop enormous roots. The name might lead to the conclusion that the flower is rich in perfume, but such is not the case. The tree grows slowly and lives to old age, if it escapes fire and other accidents.

CHALKY LEUCaeNA (_Leucaena pulverulenta_), commonly called mimosa, occurs in the United States only in southern Texas, but is somewhat abundant in Mexico, where trees sixty feet high and nearly two feet in diameter are sometimes manufactured into lumber. Along the Rio Grande it is called "tepeguaja" by Mexicans. This name is said to be equivalent to "hardwood," which is an appropriate name. It is very smooth and handsome when finished, and is used for tool handles, small spindles, grills, and other small articles, particularly products of the lathe. In color it resembles the lighter shades of mahogany; weighs about forty-two pounds per cubic foot; foliage extremely delicate and the tree is highly valuable for ornamental purposes. It has been planted outside of its natural range. The pods sometimes exceed a foot in length.

LEUCaeNA (_Leucaena glauca_) is small and probably will never be of much importance. Trunks are seldom more than five inches in diameter and twenty feet high. The tree grows in canyons and ravines in western Texas. The compound leaves are six or seven inches long, with thirty or less pairs of leaflets; fruit is a pod six or eight inches long. The rich brown wood is streaked with red.

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SWEET BIRCH

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SWEET BIRCH

(_Betula Lenta_)

Ten species of birch occur in the United States, including Alaska. Six are eastern and four western.[8] Sweet birch is known by that name in many localities, but in others as black birch, cherry birch, river birch, mahogany birch, and mountain mahogany. Its range extends from Newfoundland to northwestern Ontario, south to southern Indiana, Kentucky, and along the Appalachian mountains to Tennessee and North Carolina. Probably the best development of the species is found in the Adirondack region of northern New York, in the northern peninsula of Michigan, through southern Ontario, and along the mountain ranges southward through Pennsylvania and West Virginia.