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.