Part 44
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 grass 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 principally 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 circumference 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 grass 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 circumstances 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 luster 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 class 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 substitute 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 LEUCÆNA (_Leucæna 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.
LEUCÆNA (_Leucæna 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.
[Illustration]
SWEET BIRCH
[Illustration: SWEET BIRCH]
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.
[8] The eastern species, which do not extend west of the continental divide, are, Sweet Birch (_Betula lenta_), Yellow Birch (_Betula lutea_), River Birch (_Betula nigra_), Paper Birch (_Betula papyrifera_), White Birch (_Betula populifolia_) and Blue Birch (_Betula cærulea_). The western birches, none of which are known to extend much east of the continental divide, are: Western Birch (_Betula occidentalis_), Mountain Birch (_Betula fontinalis_), White Alaska Birch (_Betula alaskana_), and Kenai Birch (_Betula kenaica_). The last two occur in Alaska, but not in United States proper.
It attains a height of seventy or eighty feet, and a diameter of two or three. It prefers deep, moist, rich soil, but will grow in comparatively dry, rocky ground. Its seeds are produced in large numbers and are scattered by the wind a hundred feet or more from the parent tree. They lack the wing power and the buoyancy of the seeds of some of the other birches, but they manage to get themselves sown in sufficient numbers, and their powers of germination are good.
The young seedling comes into existence with smooth bark, but it does not keep it through life. As age increases, the bark becomes rough and black. It is not shed in papery rolls and flakes as is the bark of river birch, yellow birch, and paper birch, with which it is associated in some parts of its range. It is generally an easy tree to identify and the black, rough bark is generally a sufficient guide.
The sweet birch is tapped like sugar maple, but not for the same purpose or to the same extent--only an occasional tree. Immense quantities of sap will flow from it during the two or three weeks when the buds are swelling in the spring. It is said that as much as two tons has been known to flow from a medium sized birch in a single season. The sap is made into a beer which has some commercial value, but is chiefly used locally. One of the ways of making it, employed by farmers and woodsmen, is to jug the sap, put in a handful of shelled corn, and let fermentation do the rest.
A substance known in commerce as oil of wintergreen is procured almost exclusively from this birch, though occasionally it is made from the small wintergreen plant (_Gaultheria procumbens_). The product is manufactured in very crude stills made by mountaineers in Pennsylvania and southward along the mountains where sweet birch is abundant. Frequently the woodsman’s whole family go into the business, chopping down birch bushes and hacking them with hatchets into chips of the desired sizes. The oil is extracted from the hogged mass by a steaming and roasting process. It is sold by the quart to country storekeepers who ship it to wholesale druggists where it is refined and used to flavor candy, medicine, and drugs. The woodsman who manufactures the oil prefers young birches from half an inch to two or three inches in diameter, and he usually procures them in old logging grounds where seedlings have sprung up. It is said that on an average one hundred small birch trees are destroyed for each quart of oil that goes to market. It is a process wasteful in the extreme.
In the open ground, sweet birch develops a full crown, short trunk, abundance of limbs, with numerous slender, graceful twigs and small branches. Its leaves form a dense mass, and they are so free from attacks by insects and worms that diseased foliage is unusual. That cannot be said, however, of the trunk. It is not particularly liable to disease, but many old trees show the results of decay. It is of slow growth, and a small tree may be much older than its size indicates. The sapwood is generally thick, heartwood forms slowly, and the contrast in color between sap and heart is strong.
The wood of sweet birch had few uses in early times, except fuel. The pioneer sawmill had little to do with it. Lumber was hard to saw and was seasoned with difficulty. Its tendency to warp was too great a tax on the lumberman’s patience and ingenuity. The only way he could hold it straight was to cob a few layers in the bottom of a pile, and stack thousands of feet of other lumber on top, and leave it a year or two. That was generally too much trouble, particularly when the wood had slow sale, and the price was low. Birch reached market in large quantities only when modern mills and improved drykilns came into existence.
The wood is heavy, strong, hard, in color dark brown tinged with red. The light brown or yellow sapwood generally makes up seventy or eighty annual rings. The difference between springwood and that of the later season is not clearly marked, and consequently the rings are often indistinct. The wood is very porous, and the pores are diffused through all parts of the ring. They are too small to be seen with the naked eye, except under the most favorable conditions. The medullary rays are numerous but so small that they appear on the quartered wood merely as a gloss, which, however, gives the surface a rich appearance.
Forms known as curly and wavy birch are highly esteemed. They are accidents of growth, well developed in birch, and occurring in several other woods. Difficulties are encountered in assigning sweet birch its individual place in the industrial world. As a tree it is well known, but that is not the case when its lumber goes to market. The sweet birch log goes into the sawmill, but when the lumber goes out at the other end of the mill, it is often simply birch having lost the adjective “sweet” somewhere in the operation. The reason is that sweet birch and yellow birch, quite distinct in the forest, are often mixed and become one, to all intents and purposes, when they reach the market. That is not always the case, but it frequently is. Something depends on the region. The yellow birch’s range is more extensive, and in areas where it is abundant, and sweet birch is not, it prevails in the lumber markets. But south and southeast of the great lakes, as well as in the northeastern part of the country, the two species mingle, and they are apt to go to market simply as birch. The woods may be distinguished by a microscopic examination, but the ordinary observer would make many mistakes if he attempted to tell one from the other in the lumber yard.
The two woods are different in several physical properties. Both are heavy, but sweet birch weighs 47.47 pounds per cubic foot, while yellow birch weighs only 40.84 pounds, according to tests averaged by Sargent. Yellow birch rates a little above the other in breaking strength. Both are very stiff, but yellow birch rates superior. In most respects the two woods are put to similar uses--flooring, interior finish, furniture--but for some purposes sweet birch is preferred. It is substituted oftener for cherry and mahogany, and for that reason is known as cherry birch or mahogany birch. Its color makes the substitution easy, and the appearance of the grain, with a little doctoring with stains and fillers, helps in the deception. The buyer may be deceived as to the exact kind of wood he is getting, but he is not cheated in the quality. Birch is substituted where strength is required, as in the rails of beds, the frames of sofas, davenports, large chairs, and certain parts of large musical instruments. It is much stronger, and fully as hard as cherry or mahogany, and as its appearance is so much like them, the article is actually better on account of the substitution. Sweet birch is largely employed for various parts of vehicle manufacture, particularly for wagon hubs and frames of automobiles. It is also much used in the manufacture of sleds, boats, and handles.
The demand is heavy and the supply is diminishing. The tree is of such slow growth that few timber owners will be inclined to wait for a second crop, after the old trees have been cut, since 150 years are necessary under forest conditions to produce a merchantable tree.
SONORA IRONWOOD (_Olneya tesota_) is a desert tree, and the only representative of the genus. It takes its name from the Mexican state where it is most abundant and where it was discovered in 1852. It grows in southern California and Arizona, and there it thrives in gulches and depressions in the desert, frequently associated with mesquite. It is so heavy that perfectly dry wood will sink in water. The heartwood is deep chocolate-brown, mottled with red, the thin sapwood is lemon-yellow. Its hardness renders it difficult to work, and it can scarcely be split. The wood is made into canes and other small articles of great beauty. It is not abundant, and the small supply is remote from manufacturing centers; otherwise it would be more valuable. It is excellent fuel, but it is burned chiefly by stockmen and miners in their camps. The largest trees are thirty feet high and eighteen inches in diameter. It is an evergreen, and its pea-like flowers brighten many a remote desert place.
WILD TAMARIND (_Lysiloma latisiliqua_) is forty or fifty feet high, two or three in diameter, grows in southern Florida, and has double-compound leaves, four or five inches long. The fruit is a pod one inch wide and five or less in length. The wood weighs forty pounds to the cubic foot, is neither strong nor tough, very low in elasticity, is rich dark brown tinged with red, the sapwood white. It has been reported for boatbuilding, and claims have been made that it is equal to mahogany for that purpose, but the claim is of doubtful validity, in view of the rather poor showing it makes in several physical properties, though it takes good polish.
[Illustration]
YELLOW BIRCH
[Illustration: YELLOW BIRCH]
YELLOW BIRCH
(_Betula Lutea_)
There is little likelihood of mistaking the yellow birch for any other as it stands in the woods. Its points of individuality may be discovered on slight acquaintance, and there is little need of studying leaves, flowers, and fruit to find ways of distinguishing this birch from other members of the family. Its tattered, yellow and gray bark fixes it in the memory of all who have seen it a few times. Two other eastern birches have tattered, curling bark also, but they do not look like this. They are the paper birch and the river birch. The former is too white to be mistaken for yellow birch, and the river birch is too much the color of bronze or copper. Yellow birch is named from the color of its bark, the part which shows when the outer layers break and roll back, disclosing the fresh, smooth, satiny layers below. Sometimes the tree is called silver birch, gray birch, or swamp birch.
Its geographic range is bounded by a line drawn from Newfoundland to northern Minnesota, southward through the Lake States, and along the Atlantic coast to Delaware. It follows the Appalachian ranges of mountains to eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Generally the tree is small near the southern limit of its range. The best grows in Michigan and Wisconsin, but it is of considerable importance in Minnesota.
Few trees are better equipped than yellow birch to perpetuate their species. It is an abundant seeder, and the seeds are light, winged, and they are scattered by wind over long distances. Sometimes they are carried miles. Of course, most of them fall in unfavorable places, and either do not germinate or perish soon after; but they are not
## particularly choice in situations, and will grow on bare mineral soil,
even in old fields, where they are flooded with sunshine, or they will grow in deep shade where a beam of sunlight seldom touches them. They often germinate without touching mineral soil, and take root quickly and grow vigorously.
It is not unusual in the northern part of the tree’s range, and on high mountains farther south, to see yellow birches standing on high, spreading roots, two, three, or four feet above the ground. That peculiar attitude is brought about by the manner in which the seed begins to grow. It falls on moss which occupies the top of a log or a stump. The moss in the deep shade retains much moisture, and the seed germinates, grows, sends roots down the sides of the log or the stump until they strike mineral soil, and become firmly fixed. In course of time the log or stump decays, and the spreading roots continue to sustain the trunk, high above the ground. This attitude of the yellow birch tree is very common in damp woods. Occasionally the seed finds lodgment in the moss on top of a large rock. The roots descend the sides until they reach the ground, and as the rock does not decay, the tree grows to maturity on the rock. The most favorable seed bed for this species is a mass of rotten wood where a log has decayed and fallen to pieces. Frequently such a plot is covered with yellow birch seedlings. They have the space all to themselves, because the seeds of few trees or plants will grow in rotten wood, unmixed with mineral soil.