OSAGE ORANGE 



(Toxylon Pomiferum) 



OSAGE orange belongs to the mulberry family. There are fifty- 

 four genera, three of which are found in the United States, the 

 mulberries, the Osage orange, and the figs. Osage orange is known by 

 several names, the principal one of which refers to the Osage Indians, 

 who formerly lived in the region where the tree grows. It is called 

 orange because the fruit, which is from two to five inches in diameter, 

 looks like a green orange, but it is unfit for food. In its range most people 

 call it bodark or bodock, that being a corruption of the name by which 

 the French designated it, bois d'arc, which means bow wood. It was 

 so called from the fact that Indians made bows of it when they could get 

 nothing better. Its value as material for bows seems to be traditional 

 and greatly overestimated. It is lower in elasticity than white oak and 

 very much lower than hickory, and, theoretically, at least, it is not well 

 suited for bows. The wood is known also as mock orange, bow-wood, 

 Osage apple tree, yellow-wood, hedge, and hedge tree. The last name is 

 given because many hedges have been made of it. 



Osage orange has been planted in perhaps every state of the Union, 

 and grows successfully in most of them. It is one of the most widely 

 distributed of American forest trees, but its distribution has been chiefly 

 artificial. It was found originally in a very restricted region, from which 

 it was carried for hedge and ornamental planting far and wide. Its 

 natural home, to which it was confined when first discovered, embraced 

 little more than ten thousand square miles, and probably half of that 

 small area produced no trees of commercial size. Its northern limit was 

 near Atoka, Oklahoma, its southern a little south of Dallas, Texas; a 

 range north and south of approximately one hundred miles. Its broad- 

 est extent east and west was along Red River, through Cooke, Grayson, 

 Fanning, Lamar, and Red River counties, Texas, about 120 miles. 

 Some Osage orange of commercial size grew outside the area thus de- 

 limited, but no large amount. Much of that region, particularly south 

 of Red River, was prairie, without timber of any kind ; but scattered here 

 and there were belts, strips, thickets, and clumps of Osage orange mixed 

 with other species. On the very best of its range, and before disturbed 

 by white men, this wood seldom formed pure stands of as much as 100 

 acres in one body, and since the country's settlement, the stands have 

 become smaller or have been entirely cleared to make farms. All 

 accounts agree that the Osage orange reaches its highest development on 

 the fertile lands along Boggy and Blue rivers in Oklahoma, though fine 



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