The Osage Orange Keeps the Time — a walk through Indiana
Last fall, I took a walk through Southwestway Park, a mid-sized natural space flanking the White River in Indiana. The abnormally short, spectacularly beautiful midwestern autumn had just begun but the sky was already settled into a typical Indianapolis grey. The river was flat and calm, but flowing as it must. In between the tree frogs and blooms of mushrooms, I found a strange, weighty specimen in my path. It was a hard, green, almost brain-like fruit.
Stepping off the trail and into the trees, I noticed more and more of these bizarre lumps, scanning the tree canopy for evidence of their source. I later learned that the fruit was called an Osage Orange and considered the mystery solved. But even a year later, I remained captivated by the sheer size and abnormality of its form.
The Osage Orange goes by many names and each reveals a new part of its history — a plotline that extends past tens of thousands of years.
The name “Osage” is the French-to-English, phonetic translation of the “Ni-u-kon-ska” Native Americans. It is translated to “People of the Middle Waters”. The French understood “Osage” to refer to all within the tribe and the traditional cultures of this group of indigenous Americans were shared with many others living in the plains, like seasonal hunting of bison, remarkable poetic rituals, and the use of a particularly durable bark to create clubs and bows. This bark, of course, came from the Osage Orange tree. Thus, the French term for the tree “bois d’arc”, literally bow wood, was coined.
The U.S. government found oil on Osage land in the 19th century, initially leading to prosperity within the community. This prosperity, however, would soon give way to massive tragedy. The Osage Orange tree, which had populated North America thousands of years before colonization, would continue to persist in the vastly different landscape.
The Osage Orange tree quickly became popular among Europeans who settled along Midwestern water bodies. The trunk of the tree is covered with “acuminate tips”, spines that fracture the tree canopy into precise triangles.
These spines, it turns out, are a strong deterrent to people and other animals. And since the Osage Orange can grow in stalks and bulky walls, the third name for the plant arose: the hedge apple.
By the mid-1800s, the tree was widely propagated to harvest its useful wood and to grow as hedges, a more easily maintained fence alternative. The use of these trees to wall off agricultural land and prairies eventually inspired the creation of barbed wire fences, which had not been invented yet.
By the late 1890s, around 60,000-miles of hedges had been planted in the Midwest. Currently, the tree has been planted in all 48 contiguous states.
In the 1940s, yellow dye used to color fabrics, including the uniforms of American soldiers, was primarily sourced from Germany and Mexico. When World War II began, trade with these countries ceased, but the need for yellow uniform dye was stronger than ever. So, the U.S. government began searching for alternatives.
Enter the bark of the Osage Orange tree and its brilliant but easily tarnished yellow bark. The bark of the tree is high in a protein called tannin, the same compound that makes tea dry and bitter, giving it its brilliant color. Eventually, a Midwestern fence post company was able to successfully use waste and byproducts generated from wood harvesting to create a reproducible, tannin-rich dye that could be locally sourced.
The most striking thing about the Osage Orange tree is the size of its fruit. It can hardly fit in an average human hand, much less a human mouth, or a deer mouth, or any of the mouths of the wild animals that might roam the natural spaces of the Midwest.
While it might be seen as a form of protection for the tree, this large fruit-to-mouth ratio is very bad for its propagation. The only animals that might dine upon the fruit of the bois d’arc have to break apart its fleshy surface and nibble at the seeds in its core, destroying the chance that those seeds might be pooped out, dormant but alive, and grow into new trees.
Indeed, aside from this occasional nibbling by squirrels or birds, nothing eats an Osage Orange. So how did it persist before human beings forced it to? The answer lies in the Mastodon.
The Osage Orange evolved in a world not wholly made for us and its persistence in America is an anachronism.
In the present day, much of Indiana’s natural heritage, a rich marshy ecosystem, has been depleted and replaced by some of the most important industries to the human enterprise. Where we may once have found dense damp forests and misty ponds teeming with frogs and arachnids, we now find flat swaths of agricultural land interspersed between industrial manufacturers of everything from sealant for airplane windows to lugnuts for semis. Unglamorous, underappreciated, and wholly necessary.
By 2016, Indiana had amassed over 16 million acres of agricultural land dedicated to the provisions of a single species: us. But before all that, the lands were reigned by the ancestors of ancient elephants. The Mastodon grew to heights of 10 feet tall and weights of over 10 tons. At these massive sizes, their mouths were surely big enough to eat an Osage Orange in one, seed-preserving bite.
In 2019, a family of Indiana farmers found evidence of these powerful creatures on their land, the same land now tirelessly sown with row crops. The farmers marveled at both the enormous size and the unbelievable weight of a single tusk, which required 2 men to hold.
The Mastodon, “just as Hoosier” as the man who found it, was born 13,000 years ago and lived to be 40 or 50 years old before taking a tusk to the cheek and passing away. Later named Fred and donated to the Indiana State Museum, he was alive just as the last of the glaciers that once blanketed North America were receding. His world was being permanently altered by climate change, fueled by the shifting orientation of the sun. Soon after, the last of his family and then the last of his kind would die, likely due to unsustainable levels of human predation.
Forgotten over tens of thousands of years, the Mastodon would not be rediscovered until approximately 1704. This was the same year that the first regular newspaper in the first 13 U.S. colonies was published, the same year that Isaac Newton was publishing theories on light refraction, and the same year that Italian scientists first observed polar ice caps on the surface of Mars.
The Osage Orange, extending its spines and boasting multi-species useability, has been present through it all. And when human memory has failed, the fruit has kept the time.
Want another look back into deep time? Click the link below to learn how lichen survived the catastrophe that killed the dinosaurs.
