PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Referring to it as Osage apple, Meriwether Lewis wrote the first description of bow wood in a March 1804 letter to Thomas Jefferson that accompanied some slips from a tree in the St. Louis garden of the famous Indian trader Pierre Chouteau, who had grown them from seeds obtained five years earlier from an Osage man who had carried them three hundred miles; there is evidence that many of the Osage orange trees now growing in the Northeast descend from those in Chouteau’s garden, a place visited by several early travelers, including the botanists John Bradbury and Thomas Nuttall, who both wrote about it in their journals. In a message to Congress two years after Lewis’ letter, Jefferson mentioned the possible use of the plant as hedge fencing; since it was from his mind that came the township-and-range system—the great American grid, an expression of eighteenth-century rationalism if ever there was one—it seems that he understood the importance Osage orange could have in establishing agricultural and political dominion and in enforcing it on the face of America west of the Appalachians. Once Jefferson read the reports of the Lewis and Clark expedition, he knew his system would require in the plains something like Maclura, a living embodiment of the gridwork of the new civilization; it would be what a constitution is to a government, what a police patrol is to a neighborhood: a thing defining, delimiting, enforcing.

  Thomas Nuttall, the so-called father of western American botany, gave an account of the plant in 1811 and named it after his wealthy friend William Maclure, a philanthropist and geologist who lived for some time in that nidus of early western science, New Harmony, Indiana, home then of the Geological Survey, the agency responsible for laying the national grid over the land. This chain of linkings from Maclura to William Maclure to Jefferson’s grid is, I assume, largely chance, yet the overall interweavings of connections from Osage bows to township-and-range are a result of the nature of the tree itself.

  Maclura pomifera is a monotype, the sole member of its genus in all the world, although in preglacial times it had many close relatives. Like Indian breadroot, its several comparative popular names are misleading, for it is neither an orange (sometimes called mock orange) nor an apple (sometimes called horse apple) but rather a distant relative of the breadfruit and mulberry. (During nineteenth-century attempts to introduce silk culture into eastern Kansas, farmers fed Maclura leaves to caterpillars, but the worms spun out inferior silk.) While the leaves resemble those of an orange tree, its fruit, so intriguing to anyone seeing it for the first time—or any ten-year-old needing a softball—is typically about the size of a grapefruit, its ripened color between that of a lemon and a lime; but the heartwood is a wonderfully grained ocher that provides another name, yellow wood. Hedgeballs seem to repel insects (countians place them in basements and under kitchen counters), yet quail, squirrels, and pack rats will gnaw through the thick flesh, heavily charged with a milky and resinous sap, to eat the nutlets. On Stephen Long’s great western expedition of 1819 and 1820, the botanist Edwin James wrote of the sap, We were tempted to apply it to our skin, where it formed a thin and flexible varnish, affording us, as we thought, some protection from the ticks. Timothy Flint in 1828 probably explained the effectiveness of the sap as a repellent when he said of the fruit, Tempting as it is in aspect, it is the apple of Sodom to the taste. So, I conclude, to say a hedgeball is quite useless is to ignore keeping time, feeding wildlife, repelling roaches, warding off tick-borne fevers—not to mention procreating trees for Indian bows and Jefferson’s grid. But, as for providing softballs, I concur: a hedge apple is as worthless as old Jack So-and-so.

  It is, of course, the wood of Maclura that men have for several thousand years admired: one of the heaviest on the continent, a cubic foot of it in a natural state weighs more than half that of an equal size chunk of limestone, and it is nearly as hard, taking the edge off a lathe chisel or saw blade immediately; yet the wood is two and a half times stronger than white oak while still marvelously flexible: an Osage orange bow made from a good sapling properly seasoned and strung with bison sinew could drive a dogwood arrow up to the fletching into a buffalo, and to this day some archers believe the wood superior to yew, the stuff of the famed English longbow. On his 1811 Missouri River journey encouraged by Jefferson, John Bradbury said the price of a bow made from Maclura was very high: a horse and a blanket.

  White men, having little use for bows, made Osage orange—when they could find straight trunks—into wagon axles, wheel spokes, pulleys, tool handles, the keel and ribs of at least one river steamboat, the world’s first chuck wagon, telegraph poles, insulator pins, police billy clubs, and railway ties: in an experiment by the Pennsylvania Railroad, sleepers of oak, chestnut, and catalpa decayed in a couple of years, but Maclura ties in virtually new condition were in use almost a quarter of a century later. Even though the wood is so hard, so impervious to bugs, so incorruptible that some American streets were paved with yellow blocks of Osage orange, it is still supple and responsive enough that dowsers witch for water with forked branches of it. Because of its potential heat, farmers have to learn to use it sparingly to keep its intense fire from destroying a metal stove. Indians showed settlers how to use the wood and shallow roots, brightly orange like washed carrots, to concoct tinctures, dyes still utilized early in this century to turn doughboy uniforms olive drab.

  But it was another aspect of the Osage orange that, for a time, made it important to rural Americans living between the Wabash and the hundredth meridian: thorns: not stubby and hooked like a rose’s or long and maleficent like the vicious spikes of the honey locust, which inflict pain that continues for hours after getting stabbed, but rather modest inch-long spines of just the right length and strength to turn away fleshy creatures without lacerating them, unless we speak of mice caught and rammed down on a hedge thorn by a loggerhead shrike (I once came across a small Maclura dressed out in several tiny rodent skulls as if some cannibalistic homunculi had been marking their territory). If its thorns are perfect instruments, nearly so also is its capacity to adapt to the climates and soils of the prairies, its ability to grow from either inexpensive seed or seedlings, its resistance to insects; once established, it takes to pruning by thickening its zigzag lateral branches and sending up vertical shoots that can grow forty inches in a year. A trunk that gets too big can be cut for firewood or a gatepost: countians speak of cedar, catalpa, honey locust, and coffee-tree posts for barbed-wire fencing lasting a man’s working life, but one of hedge can last his and his children’s. They also talk about old cowboys trusting in the longevity of the wood, year after year hiding a bottle of whiskey for long prairie nights in the hole of a loose Osage orange fencepost.

  Chase County lies just north of the native range of Maclura, so the prehistoric aspect of these hills was free of them, yet today, especially on the uplands of the southwest quarter, they mark off the prairie with their long and dark rows, the trees sometimes enclosing and shading section-line roads—a splendid gift for a walker in July—and in other places making a stroke right across the land like the narrow signature of some long-gone farmer whose field boundaries they yet reveal. The trees began reaching the county in the early 1870s, putting an end to both stone fences and old disputes between farmers and ranchers that, across the prairies, took the form of hedge bounties and herd laws, the bounty paying people up to $128 a mile to plant and maintain living fences, and the herd laws requiring stock owners to contain their animals: it took time and litigation before Kansans widely decided to follow the English precedent of holding responsible, not farmers for fencing animals out, but stockmen for keeping them in. Because Chase County has never had a herd law, farmers usually protected their own crops, and some progressive cattlemen also realized that strong fences help safeguard bloodlines of good cattle from a stray bull or a tick-infested herd carrying Texas fever.

  But the rows of Maclura still standing reveal more than the ancient battle between tillers and herdsmen: some time after American explorers began sending back reports on the prairies and plains, a notion develope
d that this land was treeless because it was without trees. Knowing that a mature grove can transpire much moisture, people came to believe that to plant trees was to increase rainfall by raising the humidity (the nearly constant winds that absorb and disperse transpiration didn’t enter their thinking), and so one argument held that living fences of Osage orange would bring rain: of the four basic elements any seed requires—sun, soil, water, protection—half came with the territory, and Maclura could provide the other two while at the same time disrupting the desiccating winds. These ideas gained strength from the frequent above-average precipitation during the settlement years in eastern Kansas. The first historian of Chase County, H. L. Hunt, praising the white man’s husbandry in changing the land from a desolate waste, wrote: That our county has undergone a decided climatic change since its first settlement is evident from united report of early settlers, who say that when they first settled here, they could not raise potatoes without mulching the ground to keep it moist, that corn was a very uncertain crop. These homesteaders, new to the region, saw the great drought of 1860 as typical weather rather than as a brief phase of a greater, more humid cycle.

  Chase hedgerows are a little over a century old now, and not one of them is any longer actually a hedge: untrimmed for years, they are lines of forty-foot-tall trees full of gaps (some made by cutting out posts to carry their successor, barbed wire) and therefore useless as fences, although valuable as windbreaks and wildlife cover. Farmers cuss them, now so overgrown and their roots unpruned, because they shade crops and draw away moisture a couple dozen feet into a field, sapping as many as two acres of crops per mile of hedge. Cowhands gripe about cattle ceasing to graze on summer afternoons and taking to the grass-thin shade of a hedgerow: Slim Pinkston told me, You play hell to get a hot steer out of there where he cain’t eat and put on weight.

  In its first years, hedge is troublesome: it requires effort to establish a fence, and, under good conditions, it takes five years to grow enough to turn away stock; a line of twelve-inch seedlings I planted in Missouri four years ago, despite care, still wouldn’t stop a diapered infant. Young plants are vulnerable to drought, fire, gophers, and cattle. Even once established, a row must be continually patched in and cut back almost annually if it is to serve as a barrier.

  Although Osage hedge quickly appeared in abundance across the tall prairies, its era as an agricultural tool was even briefer than that of river steamboats, and what the locomotive did to paddlewheelers, barbed wire did to the hedge-apple fence: made it a lovely, comforting, historically rich anachronism. It is probably not coincidental that the invention of barbed wire occurred in Illinois, not far from where Professor Turner proved Osage orange to be good prairie fencing, and it even seems that Joseph Glidden, from whose 1874 barbed-fence patents modern wire descends, took his idea from the shape of a thorned branch of Maclura (nature generates, man elaborates: from the gourd, the canteen).

  Long past the introduction of cheap and effective steel fencing, countians continued planting Osage orange because, I think, something deeper moved in them, an urge that barbed wire, the devil’s hatband, can never fulfill: a living fence of hedges and trees gives a feeling of enclosure to a people still at heart woodlanders, people who, even in later generations, found the vastly open expanses overwhelming, threatening, and they knew, whatever else these uplands are, they aren’t cozy; the prairie novels of Willa Cather are full of this discomforting omnipresence. But a farmstead and its lane, tidily hedged in, could give the sense of a snug and intimate English farm, and the family could look out to a distant tree line demarking their boundaries to see all they had given their lives to and see encompassed their real capital, their investment, their defense against the precarious world beyond them. Osage orange, as much as a deed, showed what was theirs, marked off for the world their accomplishment, their contribution to civilization. Property lines were invisible things, but a row of windbreaking Osage orange, standing like guardsmen, gave proof.

  The enclosures also enforced things: before the fencing of the prairie, homesteaders made their own roads to town, to church, to the neighbors, and tracks lay haphazardly over the place, each family needing its own crossing over a creek, its own grade over a hill, and everyone moving in frequent trespass. A workable system of bridges and roads and an upholding of property rights demanded organization beyond the mere following of a few old, established upland trails and valley lanes; it seemed to require Jefferson’s grid: as curbstones are to a suburb, so was Osage hedge to the prairies, as it came to mark out routes and channel citizens onto them, laying down a pattern that so shaped lives that people began to build their new houses in alignment with the now visible grid. They set out their furniture accordingly, dressers and bedsteads against walls running only in cardinal compass directions, so that, still today, Chase County sleeps north-south or east-west, the square rooms squared with the world, the decumbent folk like an accountant’s figures neatly between ruled lines, their slumber nicely compartmentalized in Tom’s grand grid.

  The dreaming citizens lie comforted that outside their walls run the township-and-range lines, their defense against a fruitful and transgressing nature perpetually threatening erasure and apparent disorder. That’s why, if you ask me, they retain the so discernible Osage orange hedgerows, and it’s also why they cut and poison and burn and bulldoze those Maclura that break ranks and take higgledy-piggledy to the open pastures rightfully belonging to the aboriginal and faceless grasses and forbs. And that’s also part of the reason, even if it is unperceived, why countians line up on Broadway in the Falls and stand through a June thunderstorm to get a plate of Chase bison barbecued over old hedge fenceposts.

  And it may explain why a Missouri visitor one autumn Tuesday will tramp about for hours in search of an Osage orange walking stick, and, at last finding a proper shape, shred his arms getting it out, why he will trim and dethorn and smooth it and oil its hardness to a gleaming. It’s why, thereafter with it in hand, he will walk the county a bit differently, holding not just a stick but also a synecdoche of the place.

  Around Half Past

  The western hill drops down sharply to Diamond Creek Road, and a ledge provides a small bench. I am sitting on it, up above things it seems, watching the empty road. Not much is happening other than the saps rising, the creek running, the wind ruffling a nighthawk trying to keep clamped on to a barbed-wire fence. A car comes along, slows, stops, and a man and woman get out, look across the vale, and he points at something, and she looks in that direction and puts her arm around his waist, pulls him against her, and they laugh and drive on. I sit and watch, nearly invisible, the eyes of the blind hills: in that private moment, so unwittingly (and now widely) shared, what brief thing happened down there to give them delight? Did he point out where he first saw her on horseback, where he got the tractor stuck, where they would one day build a house? The moment seemed nothing much, more mere fact than meaning, an ordinary occurrence, the sort of thing that composes most of human life, the kind of insubstantial detail lost to historians and left to dreaming novelists.

  I’m thinking how much I’d like to witness on this spot some happenstance between a man and woman five hundred years ago, thinking how time turns the mundane to significance. Or maybe it’s that time clarifies the value of the commonplace: archaeologists excavate tenth-century middens and last-century privies and then display the old refuse in glass cases in marble-floored museums. Was a woman’s embrace less than a pre-Columbian coprolite?

  It is about two-thirty in the afternoon, the fifth of April: if I came to this little coign of vantage at half past two for the next month, the next year, how would my view of the prairie change? For days on end, zoologists sit behind blinds and observe animals, so why doesn’t someone become a site watcher? I consider it, consider the discomfort, the boredom, the time—the very things that make for changed perceptions—and I know I lack the will to carry it out, and, truth to say, that bothers me.

  I am hiking on in
some restlessness, and then: what if I gathered hours and became a collector of half past twos? If I recorded what I saw between two and three o’clock every day I am in the county, would it add up to an album of hours? I’m walking and thinking about it, and I begin to see the assemblage of moments as one of the illustrations in a child’s book: a bird’s-eye view of a house in cutaway, with members of the family doing this and that: mother carving a pumpkin, father lighting his meerschaum, junior putting the propeller on a model Hellcat, sister hunting the gerbil hiding behind the chair, a lawn robin pulling at a worm.

  Now: it has been twenty months since I sat and watched the Diamond Creek Road, and I have assembled a notebook, and from it I give you in random arrangement this selection, a compendium of humdrum, a cutaway view of Chase County, Kansas, in the late 1980s: