Part 45 (2/2)
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.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
SWEET BIRCH
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.
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