Life and Travels of the Osage Orange Tree

Plants are fine strategists. They use roots, stems, branches, bark, flowers, fruit and seed to make the most of local resources; they creatively compete against other species for those resources; they defend against worms and bugs and parasites whose thousand tiny bites might do them in. And when that is not enough, they find ways to move to new fields by making themselves nutritious or tasty enough to hitch a ride for their seed on the fuzz of a bee or in the gut of goat or jay, or else they make themselves beautiful or utilitarian enough to persuade mobile humans to carry them along on their wide journeys.

So it poses something of a puzzle when a homely, thorny tree with inedible fruit and unsuitable lumber spreads itself far and wide, well beyond its early natural home. Such mysteries are bound to conceal a good story, and so it is for an American tree native to a small strip of East Texas called the Osage Orange. This is the story of its remarkable life and travels.

Botanists have called the Osage Orange “graceless” and “more picturesque than beautiful.” Its flowers are mildly interesting but not showy; its large, bulbous, bumpy fruit a curiosity but bitter and inedible to humans, birds and animals; its cuneate leaves are simple and plain, its sap and deeply-creviced bark toxic. It is deciduous, dioecious and thorny. Its bark is gray with tinges of orange, its heartwood yellow turning to deep orange when dried, its roots are covered in a dark orange sheath.

Osage Orange Tree

In tight quarters the branches of an Osage Orange tangle and interlock into an impenetrable thorny thicket. In open space it sends down 25-foot roots in all directions that are mirrored above by sprawling, twisting branches that can spread a canopy 85 feet around. Few of its limbs are straight enough to make a board the length of railroad tie. Its hard, heavy wood admits no nail. It burns very hot, but in unruly fashion, regularly spitting fiery sparks.

Native Range

Without bird or animal dung to move its seed, the Osage Orange remained in the river bottomlands of Oklahoma, Arkansas and East Texas for thousands of years. But then, about two hundred years ago, this graceless, thorny, inedible, toxic tree got its chance to travel and so it did. If you care to look, you can find it now in every state except Alaska (yes, even Hawaii), throughout most of Europe and in parts of Asia. A hardy migrant, it has adapted well to new surroundings, growing just fine in climates wet or dry, hot or cold, in spaces dense or open, in good soil or bad. Bugs, birds and browsing animals have learned to avoid it.

Humans are its mode of transportation and along its journey it has befriended some famous ones – Indian chief Pawhuska, New World explorers De Leon, De Soto and Marquette, founding father Patrick Henry, adventurers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, and maybe even Eddie Rickenbacker. From these and others the Osage Orange picked up many nicknames – The Neches tree, Horse-Apple, Hedge-Apple, Osage Plum, and the Bois D’Arc tree. Naturally there’s a story in each of these.

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The Neches Tree

If you float the southwesterly 416 miles of the Neches River from where it emerges its underground path in Van Zandt county, Texas, to where it empties into Sabine Lake near Port Arthur, your compass point will at various times pass over every possible tic-mark, many of them within the stretch of an hour or two.

Frequently enough you will find yourself doubling back in near-complete circles that someday, if left alone, will create an ox bow lake. Such are the meanderings of a river that falls only 16 inches for every mile traversed.

Orange bark (click to enlarge)

Along its banks you will see a thicket of green trees, vines and shrubs in profuse variety: loblolly pines, blackjack oaks, flowering dogwoods, cottonwood, pecan, hackberry and blackgum trees. The orange-tinged, deeply-creviced bark of one of these stands out from the rest and perhaps for this reason gave its early name to the river. Caddo Indians referred to it as the Nachawi tree. That was their spoken word both for the tree and for the river alongside which it grew.

Legend says that when Spanish explorer Alonso de Leon heard them say “Nachawi,” he wrote it down as “Neches.” But you will not find “neches” in a Spanish dictionary. Perhaps what he wrote was “nichos,” the singular of which refers to a deep recess in a wall – a niche. When Tennesseans moved into Texas in the early 1800s, the name most likely evolved again to Neches. Curiously, this Indian-French-English linguistic morphology, which aptly describes the bark of an Osage Orange, stuck for the river but not for the tree.

The Bois D’arc Tree

For that we need a Frenchman. France explored America from two gateways – the Great Lakes in the north and the mouth of the Mississippi River in the south. Accordingly, in the rough trapezoid cornered by Sault Saint Marie, Minneapolis, Houston, and New Orleans you will find all manner of French-derived place names, including of course the river that bisects it, the Mississippi. Saint Louis is near the center of that trapezoid. Many of these names are French-ified-then-Anglicized versions of words local Indians spoke.

Flower 1

For the most part the French seem to have gotten along quite well with the Indian tribes they encountered, one of which was the Wha-Zha-Zhe tribe who, when the French found them, had been newly chased out of upstate New York by the Iroquois. They settled along the Missouri river and southward into Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.

Flower 2

French Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette translated Wha-Zha-Zhe as Ouchage, which was Anglicized later into Osage, the name of the nation of Indians in northeastern Oklahoma that still exists today. Thomas Jefferson called the Osage people the great Indian nation south of the Missouri river, twin to the great Sioux nation north of it.

The Osage were expert hunters and horsemen, living mostly in the woodlands east of the 98th meridian but annually venturing out to the treeless Great Plains in search of bison. Coming as they did from forested eastern lands, the Osage retained their knowledge of trees, and they found in eastern Oklahoma and northwestern Arkansas the Caddo’s niched, orange-barked tree and discovered that its hard, heavy, flexible wood could be shaped and bent to make very fine bows, indispensable on a buffalo hunt.

Finished Fruit

Osage Bow

These they proudly showed to Pierre Chouteau, a prominent French citizen of Saint Louis in the 1790’s.  Chouteau was impressed and asked that cuttings from the bow-wood tree be brought to Saint Louis. One of these he planted in his garden and christened the Bois D’arc tree – French for the ”bent wood” tree.

That name is still sometimes applied to the Osage Orange tree, but more often it refers today to lakes, creeks, roads, businesses, parks and towns throughout the French trapezoid, and at least one Dixieland band. Again, a name intended for the tree seemed to slide off it and stick instead to its surroundings.

Kansas, Missouri and Texas each have small hamlets called Bois D’Arc, the Texas version of which lies in Anderson County half-way along state highway 19 between Athens and Palestine. In the 2000 census its population of 10 supported a gas/gro/bait shop and a Baptist church whose young pastor in the mid-1950’s – Jack Ridlehoover – made the long drive there from Fort Worth each Sunday with his new wife Betty.

Oranges, Apples, and Plums

Lewis & Clark's Osage
Orange Speciman
(click to enlarge)

Chouteau’s Bois D’Arc tree was destined for other names. For those we turn to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Dispatched in 1804 by President Thomas Jefferson to reconnoiter the cultural, animal and botanical resources of the Missouri river region, Lewis and Clark made Saint Louis their base. They were hosted there by Pierre Chouteau whose home became the trans-shipment point for 134 plant samples assiduously collected throughout the far West and then catalogued, pressed, described and forwarded to Jefferson in Virginia.

One of the samples in this herbarium was cuttings and leaves from the Bois D’Arc tree growing in Chouteau’s garden. Meriwether wrote to Jefferson: “I send you herewith enclosed some slips of the Osages’ plums and apples.” Soon after this correspondence, we don’t know when or how, the term Osage Orange also came into use. Clearly the early explorers and botanists struggled to describe this unusual tree and clung to analogies with the eastern fruit trees they knew. These variant names survive today, though the Osage Orange tree is not related to any sort of citrus, apple or plum variety.

Jefferson had others on the look-out for frontier plants. One of them, physician John Sibley, journeyed up the Red River in 1803 from his home in Louisiana and reported to Jefferson as follows:

[I have found] in almost exhaustless quantities a yellow wood the French call Bois d’arc, or bow wood. It has a beautiful fine grain, takes a polish like a varnish. It is nearly the patent yellow color [and] more elastic than any other wood. The Indians use it for bows and ax helves and handles for other tools. I think it would be highly esteemed by cabinet makers for inlaying and veneering and by turners. But [it also] probably would be valuable as a dye. 

He was right on all counts, even the dye. The khaki uniforms worn by American soldiers in World War I were colored by Osage Orange wood-dye.

Maclura Pomifera

The product of all this botanical fieldwork was sent either to Jefferson in Virginia, or to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, where it was studied and catalogued by botanists and other scientists eager to see and analyze the wide range of exotic (to them) biota. One of these was an eccentric Kentuckian named Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. It is said that though Rafinesque’s personal life was “erratic” he was nonetheless a polymath of the highest order, contributing advances in the fields of zoology, botany, biology, geology, meteorology, linguistics, and malacology (the study of mollusks).

Constantine Rafinesque

In Philadelphia Rafinesque studied Lewis and Clark’s collection extensively, creating the scientific names we use today for the black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus), the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus), and the mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus). Extra points if you can pronounce any of those.

In 1817 Rafinesque gave the Osage Orange tree the Latin designation toxylon pomifera (“poisonous apple”), basing this description not on the cuttings pressed by Lewis and Clark, but on the tree that had been planted in the courtyard of the Philosophical Society’s headquarters. But a year later, allegedly not aware of Rafinesque’s label, Thomas Nuttall, a fellow botanist in Philadelphia, designated the Osage Orange tree as Maclura aurantiaca. The genus name, Maclura, he gave in honor of his friend William Maclure. The specific epithet, aurantiaca, is Latin for “orange-tinged.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Maclure was at the time President of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Nuttall was a crafty one.

Rafinesque was furious. Unmoved, Nuttall refused to yield and the botany establishment sided with him for the next 88 years. But in 1906, German dendrologist Camillo Karl Schneider, came up with a compromise that remains in place today. The official scientific name for the Osage Orange tree is, in its full glory: Maclura Pomifera (Rafinesque) Schneider. 

A word more about Maclure and Nuttall. Though a geologist by training and trade (he produced the first complete geological map of the United States in 1809), William Maclure believed strongly in social experimentation. He helped British social reformer Robert Owen create the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. If you pass through New Harmony today, you can see one of the oldest Osage Orange trees in the U.S., located in that town’s Paul Tillich park, presumably planted there in honor of its namesake, William Maclure.

In later years, perhaps feeling some regret about stealing the naming rights to Maclura Pomifera from Rafinesque, Nuttall named two flowering daisy-plants after him – rafinesquia californica (California chicory) and rafinesquia neomexicana (desert chicory).

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So in its first tentative travels -- to Philadelphia, Virginia and Indiana -- the Osage Orange tree was accompanied and hosted by esteemed scientists, American explorers, and a U.S. President. A good start. But these early and limited migrations were soon to be eclipsed by two massive throngs of Osage Orange trees marching from East Texas to all parts of the upper Midwest and Great Plains. In both cases they were greeted with great anticipation and hope, first by frontier settlers, then by Dust Bowl farmers, who each saw the Osage Orange tree as the solution to a problem they had never before encountered back east.

The Fence Problem

As 19th century Americans moved west they laid out farms and began to transform vast open grasslands into the endless blocks of agricultural fields we see there today. But when they first arrived what they saw were cows and bison – lots of them. The bison herds roamed freely and were “tended” after a fashion by the Indians. The “Cattle Kingdom” was of Spanish origin, by way of Mexico, and was populated by ranchers and cowboys. Both cowboys and Indians were well established on the plains by the 1830’s, and the herds they followed stretched from the Rio Grande to Canada.

Osage Orange leaves

However romantic the cowboy and his life strike us today, the early farmers cared not a bit for them or for their cows. Nor did they wax poetic about bison. Freely roaming herds were unwelcome intruders to a plot of beans and squash or rows of corn. Clearly the early settlers needed fencing to protect their homesteads, but unlike the circumstance they enjoyed back in Pennsylvania or Tennesse, on the Plains there were no trees to cut, plank and stack into orderly barriers, and importing planks from eastern states was out of the question. It was too expensive for two reasons: the shipping distance, and the sheer volume of fencing needed to enclose the much larger acreage required to feed a family compared to the wet, wooded east.

What to do?

The Osage Orange tree came to the rescue, but not in the way you might imagine. Its gnarled trunks and branches were ill-suited to making boards of fence-length, and at any rate its native region in East Texas was still far removed from many plains homesteads. But planted close together and properly pruned, the Osage Orange tree made a dense, thorny, impassable hedge that was “horse high, bull strong and hog tight.”

When the hedge solution became known, the rush was on for Osage Orange seeds and saplings. Bonham, Texas and Peoria, Illinois became seed trading centers. In his book The Great Plains, historian Walter Prescott Webb described the scene this way:

[…] in 1845 Professor J.B. Turner of Jacksonville, Illinois, reported that he had grown an [Osage Orange] hedge for six years and that it was a great success [as a fence]. The following year both seeds and plants were imported into the prairie states. In 1851 from three hundred to five hundred bushels were taken to Illinois, in 1855 one firm purchased a thousand bushels, and in 1868 the trade amounted to eighteen thousand bushels. The price ranged from $8 per bushel to $50. It was estimated that ten thousand bushels planted in the spring of 1860 – producing 300,000,000 plants – sufficient, allowing 30,000 plants to the bushel and 5000 plants to the mile, to make 60,000 miles of hedge!

Three hundred million Osage Orange trees were on the move. The diaspora had begun. The sudden and dramatic surge in demand and price created a brief mania for Osage Orange seeds. Webb again:

Osage Orange seeds rose to fabulous prices…$5 a pound. At such prices it became the object of speculation with the usual tragic results. When William H. Mann, who lived on Bois D’Arc Creek in Fannin County, Texas, hear that bois d’arc seed was bringing eighty dollars a bushel in Peoria, Illinois, he was out thirty bushels of seed, loaded it in the farm wagon, and drove the long distance with optimistic visions of a small fortune. On reaching his destination he learned that the bottom had fallen out of the market, and he sold his seed on credit for twenty dollars a bushel, a price he had refused in Texas. 

The hedge movement lasted about thirty years, during which time the Osage Orange tree traveled in great numbers up and across the Great Plains. But in 1874 the migration suddenly stopped. On November 24 of that year, Joseph Glidden was issued a patent for barbed wire. Instantly the hedge system of fencing on the Plains became obsolete, replaced by strands of wire with Glidden’s patented twisted barb attached to them. Many of the Osage Orange hedges were chopped and used as posts for the new wire. But even this demotion presented no ignominy for the tree – the rot-resistant, hard-wood, Osage Orange posts lasted longer than the wires they held.

Though short-lived, the hedge mania had sprung the Osage Orange from its East Texas confines for good.

The Wind Problem

With the fencing problem solved by economical barbed-wire, the Great Plains filled with ever more farmers from the 1880s until the 1930s, and aside from a brief period of drought in the 1890’s, the weather cooperated, providing good rains for the growing acreage under cultivation.

But during this period dry land farmers of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado practiced what we now would call incredibly foolish farming techniques. They failed to rotate crops or let fields lie fallow for seasons or years, they planted no cover crops, they plowed the soil deeply, and after harvest they burned the stubble in an effort to control weeds and pests.

1930's Dust Storm

Decades of such practice exhausted the soil so that when the drought years of 1930 – 1936 hit, the wind literally picked it up and blew it away. Those were the Dust Bowl years. Over 100 million acres of Plains farmland were rendered useless. Tom Joad and thousands of Okies like him headed to California.

Osage Orange
wind-break row

In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt took office and, among the many issues facing the nation at that time, he turned attention to the Dust Bowl problem. In 1934 the Great Plains Shelterbelt program was launched under the auspices of the Works Projects Administration. The purpose of the program, in addition to giving work to thousands of unemployed people, was to plant trees along roads and fields as a means to reduce soil lost to the wind. Once again, the Osage Orange was pressed into national service. By 1942, 220 million trees covering 18,600 linear miles had been planted.

Did it work? There’s no way to know. The terrible drought ended in 1937 and crops returned to hold the soil in place. But the legacy of that program remains today in some parts of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle where one still can see the occasional long row of Osage Orange trees standing guard over an otherwise flat and endless horizon.

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Osage Orange in
Vietnam

You might guess that once the Osage Orange tree developed a taste for travel within the United States, it soon would look for foreign lands. You would be right. The picture at left shows an Osage Orange in Paris. Perhaps a gift from Jefferson or Choteau? From there of course it’s a short hop to the rest of Europe, where it resides today in England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The photo at right shows the author beside an Osage Orange tree in Vietnam (a French colony if you’ll recall). From there it was relatively easy trip to Australia, where it can be seen in hedge-rows.

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Patrick Henry...

Finally, there’s Patrick Henry’s mysterious Osage Orange tree. The American founding father, governor of Virginia, and famous orator (“Give me liberty, or give me death!”) made his home in Brookneal, Virginia. He died there in 1799 and his estate is now the Red Hill Patrick Henry National Monument. On the Red Hill grounds stands America’s largest and oldest living Osage Orange tree, sixty feet high with a trunk nearly 10 feet around. In 2003 University of Virginia dendrochronologist Carolyn Copenheaver “conservatively” estimated its age at 300 years.

...and his Osage Orange tree

Therein lies a mystery no one has yet solved, for if she is right, the tree sprouted in 1703, presumably at that spot in southwest Virginia, there being no record of its having been transplanted there. It is hard to imagine transportation at any time during the 1700s of a mature tree 1200 miles from East Texas to Virginia. The question stands: how did Patrick Henry’s tree get to Virginia 100 years before Lewis and Clark’s cuttings arrived there? No one knows. The only faintly reasonable conjecture (and it is only conjecture, there being no evidence in its favor) is trade among Indians. I prefer to leave it a mystery.

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The Osage Orange tree has had its moments of fame and the vast diaspora these triggered is still in place in the form of millions of trees across the globe. There they patiently wait their next calling forth.