GROWING RUBBER IN CALIFORNIA 1 



By E. L. Perky 



Assistant to the Director, Emergency Rubber Project 

 U. S. Forest Service, Los Angeles, Calif. 



[With 4 plates] 



Back in 1852 a physician and amateur botanist named Bigelow, who 

 was attached to the Mexican Boundary Survey, collected a plant 

 specimen new to him in the Big Bend section of Texas and sent it 

 to Prof. Asa Gray of Harvard for identification. It was a low shrub, 

 something like sagebrush, with grayish-green foliage and small, 

 yellow, composite flowers. It was also new to Gray, so he named it 

 Parthenium argentatum, and described it. 



But the plant was not new to the natives of that section and north- 

 central Mexico, where it grew freely. They called it guayule 

 (y-oo-leh) and had long since discovered that its bark contained a 

 gum which when extracted could be molded into a ball that bounced. 

 It is said that whole communities engaged in mass chewing of the 

 bark for the purpose of making play balls. 



The gum was rubber, and rubber was beginning to find ever 

 greater demand in the United States. When the Centennial Exposi- 

 tion opened at Philadelphia in 1876 the Mexican State of Durango — 

 in the best chamber of commerce tradition — sent a guayule exhibit 

 in an effort to interest Yankee capital, but the idea failed to take 

 hold. In 1888, a New Jersey rubber firm, apparently under a misap- 

 prehension regarding the true nature of the guayule plant, sent an 

 emissary to Mexico to procure a quantity of "guayule bark." The trav- 

 eler found guayule to be a 2-foot-high shrub, but he was out of touch 

 with his firm so he took a chance and shipped home 100,000 pounds 

 of the entire shrub. His bosses were thoroughly disgusted, but they 

 laboriously peeled the stuff, boiled the bark, and extracted what 

 rubber could be recovered by that means. The only bright spot in 

 the whole business was the fact that the rubber was found to be of 

 excellent quality. 



1 Reprinted by permission, with additional illustrations, from the Journal of Forestry; 

 vol. 42, No. 5, May 1944. 



351 



