Bodark is Texas slang for Bois d’arc, the French term meaning bow wood. Better known in these parts as Horse-Apple, (Machura pomifera), the “pig tight and bull strong” hedge planted by early settlers who could’t afford stone walls in the decades before barbed-wire. Before bodark spread over the Great Plains as a hedge, it was limited to a tiny range in the Red River region where Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma join. The bois d’arc had almost gone extinct at the end of the Pleistocene around 12,000 years ago because the animals that processed the seed through digestion and dispersed its seeds, mastodons, ground sloths, horses, and camels, disappeared from North America. Deer and rodents tear-up the grapefruit-sized fruits for the seeds, but do a terrible job of spreading them over long distances. The wood made the best bows in North America and was highly valued. For a time the remnant habitat was monopolized by the powerful Spiroan trade network (1250-1450 AD) that traded the bow staves all over the Great Plains and down to the Texas Coast. The tree has a tendency, after being cut, to sprout several shoots that grow to bow staves size in just a few years. [It was this sprouting habit that made the bodark hedge so thick] In 1804 Meriwether Lewis wrote to President Thomas Jefferson about the tree: So much do the savages esteem the wood of this tree for the purpose of making their bows, that they travel many hundreds of miles in quest of it.” Today, because of the use as hedges, the bois d’arc grows all over the Great Plains, including Erath County.

The above photos were taken on the Bosque Trail in Stephenville, on June 3, 2022

Connie Barlow. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms. New York: Basic Books, 2000; and Leslie Bush. “Evidence for a Long-Distance Trade in Bois d’arc Bows in 16th century Texas (Maclura pomifera, Moracee),” Journal of Texas Archeology and History Vol. 1:51-69.

Texas settlers were lured into Texas by land speculators with claims that Texas was a paradise where rain was plentiful. “Wheels of the wagons heading west in 1883 made music as they turned . . . Tied to their wagons were iron wash pots, coops of clucking Plymouth Rock hens, plows, and crates of squealing pigs. At the heels of the team of mules trotted a dog; and two cows, secured with ropes, followed docilely. Children, tousled headed, sensed the happiness of their parents; they sang and climbed over the mounds of coffee and sugar and played around the jars of peaches, pears, peas, jams, and pickles. But it stopped raining and by 1886 all surface water was gone and there were no crops. In 1886 the “Wheels of the same wagons – dried and aged, headed east . . . , groaning and creaking as the churned the dust. Occupants, disappointed, disgusted and heartsick. A cracked iron wash pot, smutty from numerous fires, was secured to the side of the wagon, and the hound which walked beside the wagon looked like a rattan birdcage draped with hide. No cows followed the wagon; no chickens cackled; and no pigs squealed. These wagons heading east were the same wagons that had gone west three years before.”

C. Richard King. Wagons East: The great Drought of 1886. Austin: The University of Texas, 1965.

Roy Sylvan. Droughts. TSHA: Texas State Historical Association. tshaonline.org