The English, who were cautious latecomers to the game of colonization, were cautious latecomers to the native nut as well. They never ventured far enough into the North American interior before the French and Indian War (1754–1763) to discover pecan trees in their indigenous environment. It is most likely the case that pecans never traveled to the Atlantic seaboard before 1760, when fur traders finally began transporting pecan nuts from the Mississippi Valley to New York (if for no other reason than to show them off as exotic curiosities from the frontier). Colonial British America’s notably eccentric and impassioned naturalist John Bartram was the most eager of any colonial American to introduce the pecan into the English botanical establishment. Bartram laid out his plans in 1761 in a letter to his London counterpart, Peter Collinson. “I have not been to Ohio,” he wrote. “But in two weeks I hope to set out to search myself if the barbarous Indians don’t hinder me (and if I die a martyr to botany, God’s will be done).”15
His exploratory plan was simple enough. With the Ohio River Valley finally open to unimpeded British exploration and settlement (the French had been decisively routed at the Battle of Quebec in 1760), Bartram would hike west in search of floral novelties and send his most prized discoveries back to his friend, mentor, and devout Quaker Collinson. This he did as scheduled. However, when Collinson unwrapped the pecans that Bartram had gathered during his “ramblings on the Ohio,” he delivered the first recorded English review of the pecan. He panned it. “I really believe my honest John is a great wag,” he explained, “and has sent me seven hard, stony seeds, something shaped like an acorn, to puzzle us.”16 As it turned out, Collinson’s remark more or less summed up what would be the reaction of British Americans to the pecan. It was indeed a puzzling nut to the British colonists—odd-looking, not exactly a walnut, and, as they quickly realized, stubbornly difficult to propagate in the eastern portion of North America and, even more so, in English soil. Bartram’s eventual response to Collinson hardly pushed Collinson’s opinion in a more enthusiastic direction. He dutifully praised the kernel for being “very sweet” but added of the nuts he had sent: “I am afraid they won’t sprout.”17
Bartram’s dud samples notwithstanding, a trickle of pecans continued to flow to the east coast from the Ohio River Valley, traveling in the worn pockets of wayward traders, land developers, and tireless surveyors. By 1772 William Prince, colonial America’s first commercial nurseryman, planted thirty pecan nuts at his fruit orchard in Flushing, Long Island. Ten saplings sprouted, eight of which Prince packed tightly in sand and shipped to England, where they sold for ten guineas apiece. Two he left rooted in Long Island soil for the purposes of someday gathering nuts for the occasional snack. Bartram himself planted a few pecans in his Philadelphia garden—how many we do not know, but we do know that at least one survived. A newspaper report from 1886 mentioned a pecan tree “on the Bartram estate . . . over 90 feet high.” This was, however, more of a novelty than a trend, an exception that proved the rule of the pecan’s absence on the eastern seaboard of North America.18
The rest of the pecan’s history in British North America is spotty. English botanist Humphry Marshall included the pecan in his 1773 book, Arbustrum Americanum: The American Grove, a quirky compendium of New World trees. Another planting of a pecan tree in British America happened in 1774, when William Hamilton, the keeper of a respected colonial garden outside of Philadelphia, planted an “Illinois hickory” (which the pecan was often called by the English). On March 25, 1775, George Washington planted, as he described them, “25 Mississippi Nuts—something like the pig nut—but longer, thinner shelld and fuller of meat.” Given Washington’s elevated status, March 25, according to Chase’s Calendar of Events, is now officially “Pecan Day” in the United States. In 1781, Captain Wangenheim, a Hessian soldier employed by the British army in the Revolutionary War, published a thumbnail sketch of the pecan tree in a short book he wrote on American forests. In 1786 Washington sowed “21 of the Illinois nuts,” using yet another moniker for the pecan. Two of those specimens survived into the twenty-first century, one of which had to be taken down in 2004 after being damaged by Hurricane Isabel. As for the fate of the aforementioned Long Island trees, we do not know when they fell. But we know that by 1799 Hamilton, the Philadelphia gardener, lamented the following effect of a heavy frost: “A tree, too, the only one I had of Juglans Pacane, or Illinois hickory, which I raised twenty-five years ago from seed, is entirely killed.”19
If the pecan inspired only periodic bursts of enthusiasm on the east coast of colonial and early America, this general lack of interest could not be blamed on Thomas Jefferson, the man who succeeded Bartram as the tree’s most enthusiastic advocate. Writing from Paris in January 1786, just as the young republic was languishing under the Articles of Confederation, he ended a lengthy letter to his friend Archibald Stuart with the following request: “I must add a prayer for some Paccan nuts, 100, if possible, to be packed in a box of sand and sent to me.” We have no idea what happened to these nuts once they made it to France (or if they ever even made it to France, for that matter). What we do know is that Jefferson’s curiosity about the pecan followed him back to America, where, on March 17, 1794, he recorded this accomplishment in his Garden Book: “Planted 200 paccan nuts.” By 1802, while serving as president of the United States, he still found time to cultivate pecans. On May 26 he recorded how he “planted a great row of Paccan nuts, in the same rows as those planted in the last two years.” In March 1812 he placed “25 paccans” into Monticello soil. Jefferson, who has been called “the father of American forestry,” mostly stuck to landscaping Monticello with trees native to his “country,” Virginia. However, the exotic pecan became one of his “pet trees,” a specimen for which he maintained deep affection. None of the Monticello samples survive, but Jefferson’s historical commitment to the tree remains admirably unimpeachable.20
Thomas Jefferson was as antimonarchist as any citizen on the planet. It thus comes as something of a surprise to hear that he once allegedly said, “I wish I was a despot.” It was not people that Jefferson wanted to rule with an iron fist, but trees. “I wish I was a despot,” he said, “that I might save the noble, beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners.” Felling a tree unnecessarily, he added, “seems to me a crime little short of murder.” Strong words from the Sage of Monticello. But Jefferson would have been pleased with the nineteenth-century fate of pecan trees, even if that fate would have to play out in a region far from the sacred soils of Virginia. Whereas the pecan never found a home along the east coast during the colonial and early American periods, it would go on to thrive as a passively cultivated “crop” throughout the American South. Perhaps more surprisingly, it would do so in a relatively wild state for most of the nineteenth and some of the twentieth centuries. Indeed, unlike any other fruit-bearing tree in the age of cultivation, the pecan managed to evade the cultivating hand of man for centuries after humans began exploiting it for food. Even in the early twentieth century, the “pecan industry” was nowhere near becoming a full-fledged commercial entity that treated trees as commodities. Rather, trees were still viewed as indigenous but generous members of a native habitat. It was the kind of habitat that Jefferson deeply valued, even as the events of a rapidly expanding nation were proving it to be a quaint relic of a bygone era.
CHAPTER 3
“. . . the Forest into an Orchard”
PASSIVE CULTIVATION ON THE TEXAS FRONTIER
Jefferson might have been pleased with the fate of the pecan, but his hopeful vision of forest preservation was otherwise dashed throughout the nineteenth century. Nowhere was the disregard more intense than in those very regions where native pecan groves traditionally thrived: the American South. A scene from William Faulkner’s novella The Bear captures the specter of rampant deforestation as well as any work of historical scholarship. With quiet poignancy, protagonist Ike McCaslin observes Yoknapatawpha County’s “new planing mill
already half completed which would cover two or three acres.” He notes its “light bright rust of newness and of piled crossties sharp with creosote.” McCaslin elaborates on this scene, wistfully observing a logging train “vanish into the wilderness” like a “harmless snake vanishing into weeds.”
It is a fine literary account. However, as far as native trees were concerned, this snake was far from harmless. The east coast had undergone massive deforestation back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now, as McCaslin presciently forewarned, it was the South’s turn to have its forests fall to the steady march of population and progress. In relatively short order, forests were transformed into fields, pioneers into industrialists. The American South excelled at these transformations as well as the North had ever done. However—and this is the critical point—the pecan escaped this nineteenth-century swath of destruction. Understanding the reasons for this escape and the implications of it is the goal of this chapter. Indeed, knowing how and why Texas pecan trees avoided the destructive environmental transformations that accompanied the nineteenth-century commercialization of Texas is an important part of explaining how Texas, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become, however temporarily, the world’s epicenter of pecan production, harvesting, and exportation.1
Ike McCaslin mentioned only trains and mills. A perfect storm of other factors, however, converged to precipitate the demise of southern forests. Mainline carriers, extensive tramway systems, big-wheeled carts, commercial sawmills, virtually no environmental restrictions, and the concentrated ownership of lumber outfits all combined to establish the preconditions for the systematic removal of southeastern trees. This process came to bear especially hard on east Texas and Louisiana. By 1880 several prominent companies had constructed dozens of mill towns throughout these regions. These companies—including the Texas Delta Land Company, Kirby Lumber Company, and Long-Bell Lumber Company—collectively milled and treated hundreds of millions of board feet of local lumber every year. Americans wanted wood. Lots of it.2
The work was relentless and the destruction was undis-criminating. The depletion of white pines and hemlocks in Pennsylvania eventually drove logging companies into east Texas, where cypresses and loblolly pines grew in abundance. Timber harvested in regions as distant as San Augustine, Texas, was sent downriver to towns as far south as Beaumont and Orange; from there it was shipped by schooner or rail to construction sites throughout the United States. Northern Texas counties expanded the reach of the industry by felling large copses of shortleaf pines, gum trees, and cedar. Much of this wood was turned into a green lumber called “rawhide”—so named because it looked like untanned buffalo or cattle hide. By 1880 Texas ranked seventh in the nation in logging, having produced $3.5 million from “300,000,000 board feet of lumber, 14,000,000 laths, 100,000,000 shingles,” and a variety of other products. Much of this raw material left the state in boxcars, but a considerable amount of it was used in Texas shipyards, as well as by regional carriage makers, coopers, and furniture manufacturers.3
One might reasonably conclude that this largely unfettered assault on southern forests would have spelled sheer disaster for the wild pecan groves that both Native American and (as we will see) white pioneers passively cultivated throughout the tree’s native region. Indeed, there is every reason to speculate that in an era devoid of a powerful conservation ethic, the pecan should have fallen victim to the steady process of deforestation. However, that was not the case. For several reasons—all of them somewhat haphazard—the pecan tree yet again ran counter to the dominant flow of botanical history. With rare exception, the pecan avoided late-nineteenth-century deforestation in Texas and Louisiana and went on to thrive in the river bottoms that were so conducive to the growth of pecan trees. Given the trends of deforestation, it shouldn’t have survived. But it did.
The most obvious explanation for the pecan’s gritty persistence was, oddly enough, the pine tree. Pines offered better, faster-growing, and more accessible wood. Every pine tree in sight—loblolly, yellow, pitch, and longleaf—was quickly transformed by modern technology into plywood, planks, and sawdust. These products were then replaced with faster-growing pine seedlings (“slash pines”) with the express intention of repeating the cycle within a couple of decades. Lumber companies built their empires on this tedious and nutrient-sucking process. The pecan, though, was not conducive to such clear-cutting and repropagation. As the pecan had a way of doing, it held its ground, thriving in the dense nooks of its native habitat and continuing to produce nuts, all the while immune to the fact that the South, much less the nation, was industrializing the American landscape with unprecedented speed. Indeed, the pecan paid little attention as the logging industry turned east Texas, as well as much of the American Southeast, into the veritable patchwork of a landscape that our current age has inherited—a region that bears witness to anyone who drives through it today to miles and miles of sclerotic slash pines separated by recently cleared patches of land.4
Lumber was not the only industry threatening the pecan’s extensive presence in the American Southeast. Other commercial developments could just as easily have made things so a visit to an arboretum would be the only way to see a pecan tree today. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Southeast as a whole, and Texas in particular, was in the midst of an economic and physical transformation of historic magnitude. Forests and grasslands were yielding to vast networks of intensive cotton and sugar plantations, corn and wheat fields. Livestock ranches of heroic proportions started to sprawl across the American South, reaching new orders of magnitude in south, central, and north Texas. “Early Texas settlers,” writes one historian, “created, developed, and expanded agricultural landscapes and instituted a system of land ownership that allowed them to barter or sell plants, animals, and other resources from the land.” The landscape, in essence, came to be seen and treated as “an assemblage of useful material objects.”5
An 1858 report from New Braunfels, Texas, published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, highlighted the hopeful promises these endeavors offered to white Americans willing to exploit resources on the Texas frontier. Noting with evident exasperation that Texas was “larger than New-York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio put together,” G. W. Kendall, a lawyer from back east, proceeded to nonetheless lionize the Lone Star State as a remarkable land of opportunity. Although Texas was poorly suited for raising sheep, with “the grass growing too rank and rich,” there was no question that “for cattle and horses it cannot be surpassed.” Especially helpful were the advantageous and abundant “cedar breaks,” which blocked those “chilling blasts which scatter stock.” Listing a dozen rivers, Kendall explained that “with proper tillage we shall always be able to raise more than corn and wheat enough for our wants.” Cotton was not yet king in Texas, but even so, “heavy crops of it [are] made.” The message couldn’t have been more in tune with the prevailing spirit and rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. As one New York visitor to Texas in 1840 wrote to potential Texas immigrants: “Come on! As many as you wish. We will have enough for you all.”6
The idyllic implication of western expansion rang crystal clear to many Americans seeking opportunity elsewhere: this distant part of the world was a yeoman’s paradise. The water was clean, the borders were secure, the air was pure, the environment was “as healthy as any in the wide world,” and even the children were said to be above average. Kendall and the anonymous New York transplant quoted above were hardly alone in promoting—mythologizing, really—Texas as midcentury America’s promised land. Calls for migration echoed throughout not only the United States but the world. Tens of thousands—coming from locations as far away as Tennessee and Poland—migrated and, suffering and hardship and exploitation notwithstanding, attempted to do what the proponents of migration instructed them to do. Although plagued by disease, poor infrastructure, and hostile Native Americans, they worked to transform the land, carve out their space, and look toward a better future. Economic
endeavors developed out of this passion, and with that development the landscape of Texas continued to change.7
As the South developed, cotton eventually did become king. It also became the second-largest potential threat, behind timber, to indigenous pecan trees in Texas. Cotton planters throughout most of the northern Mississippi River Valley typically extended their plantations all the way to the banks of rivers and streams—that is to say, to the very places that were so conducive to pecan propagation. A Little Rock, Arkansas, newspaper warned settlers against such relentless clear-cutting, espousing a balance between the quest for cotton and the preservation of native pecans. “A man who has ‘cotton on the brain,’” it warned, too often cuts down all his pecan trees because “the trees take up too much good cotton land.” At “ten cents a quart,” the article (somewhat dubiously) continued, “pecans will bring twice the money that cotton would, and with no trouble of cultivating.” The editors noted that pecans scattered along the Arkansas River were “bearing well” and, solely for economic interests, should be left alone by any landowner hoping to leave his children a modest but relatively labor-free inheritance.8
It appears, though, that few planters were willing to heed this advice—especially in the northern regions of the pecan’s native habitat, where restraint was a rare commodity. Cotton was too tempting, too much in need of constant expansion, and potentially too profitable to leave room for even the thinnest fringes of dense pecan groves, however sensible the newspapers said it was to do so. As the Arkansas Daily Gazette lamented in 1870, “Only a few years ago our river bottoms were filled with fine pecan trees, which bore annually several bushels of nuts.” Since then, however, “nearly all [have] been destroyed to make way for plantations.” Other naturally productive and genetically diverse groves were allegedly “cut down by boys and negroes for the purpose of securing the yield of a single year” and then planting cotton.9
The Pecan Page 4