MESQUITE
(Prosopis Juliflora)

There are known to be sixteen species at least of mesquite in the world, in Asia, Africa, and North and South America. The one here considered has a geographical range of at least seven thousand miles north and south, from Kansas to Patagonia, and an east and west range of four thousand miles, if the naturalized growth in Hawaii may be considered the western outpost of the species.[7]

The generic name prosopis is a Greek word meaning “burdock;” the rest of the botanical name is Latin, meaning “July flower.” Mesquite is an Aztec word (mezquitl), coming down through the Spanish. Other names for the tree are algaroba, honey locust, honey pod, and ironwood.

The largest size of mesquite is found along the Rio Grande in southern Texas where trees three feet in diameter and fifty feet high are found, but individuals of that size are rare. The species is supposed not to extend west of New Mexico, but varieties grow farther west.

The leaves are compound, with twenty or more leaflets. The foliage is thin and casts a penumbrous shadow; trees generally occur wide apart, and there is enough sunshine reaching the ground to satisfy grass and other plants growing there. The pods are from four to nine inches long, and each contains from ten to twenty seeds. The principal growth of this tree in the United States is in Texas. It has been planted in Hawaii and has run wild in some of the islands of the group. It is of slow growth, but of remarkable vitality, holds its own, and gains ground in the face of obstacles.

Persons well acquainted with conditions in Texas, both past and present, say that the mesquite area is at least double now what it was when the state came into the Union. Old stands were scattered here and there, but hundreds of square miles which were in grass only, and little of that, half a century ago, now support forests of mesquite. It is perhaps a misnomer to designate some of these stands as forests, for they present a rather ragged and sorry appearance, but they are forests in the process of forming. The old growth, which is found principally in the counties bordering on the lower Rio Grande, is made up of trunks of large size, but the stands that have come on within the past fifty or sixty years are of smaller trees. A large mesquite trunk is from one to three feet in diameter; a small one from one foot down to an inch or two. A person would need to hunt from center to circumference of Texas to find many mesquite trunks that would make a straight sawlog twelve feet long. The tree is generally one of the most crooked, deformed and unpromising in the whole country; and its habit of dividing into forks near the ground, like a peach tree, makes it still more difficult to make use of. In fact, in winter when mesquite trees are bare of leaves the appearance of a forest reminds the observer of an old, neglected, diseased, moss-grown peach orchard in the eastern states; but in summer the leaves conceal much of the trunk scaliness and deformity, and there is something positively restful and attractive in the prospect of a wide range of these trees, covering hills and prairies. The leaves are compound like the acacias, and are delicate and graceful.

The spread of mesquite in the last fifty or seventy-five years has been attributed to the checking of grass fires which Indians once set yearly to keep the prairies open. The dispersion of the trees is facilitated by the scattering of seeds by cattle which feed on the pods. It is a tree hard to kill. Roots send up sprouts year after year during long periods. Sometimes, but not often in Texas, when adverse circumstances become so severe that the mesquite tree can no longer survive above the surface, it grows beneath the ground, sending only a few sprouts up for air. “Dig for wood” is a term applied to trees of that kind, when fuel is dragged out with mattocks, grab hooks, and oxen.

The roots of the mesquite penetrate farther beneath the surface for water than any other known tree in this country. Depths of fifty or sixty feet are occasionally reached. Well diggers on the frontiers learned to go to the mesquite for water. Large trunks never develop unless their roots are abundantly supplied with moisture. Railroad engineers on the “Staked Plains” of northwestern Texas turned that knowledge to account in boring wells.

Though mesquite is seldom or never mentioned in the lumber business, it is and has been one of the most important trees of the region. Its fuel value is very great. It has cooked more food, warmed more buildings, burned more bricks, than any other wood in Texas. The tannic acid in it injures boilers and it is not much used for steam purposes. It is very high in ash. A cord of mesquite wood when burned leaves from ninety to one hundred pounds of ashes. This exceeds five fold the ashes left when white oak is burned.

Mesquite is a high-grade furniture material, though it is difficult to work because of its exceeding hardness. Ordinary wood-working tools and machinery will not stand it. Suites of nine pieces are sold in some southwestern cities at $200 or $300. The merchants find difficulty in getting mesquite furniture made. Factories do not want to handle it, though the articles sell higher than mahogany. Large, heavy tables, deeply carved, are sold in some of the cities, but all seem to be made to order and largely by hand. The appearance of the polished and finished wood is a little lighter in color than mahogany. It is not uniform in color, but shades from tone to tone in the same piece. A little of the lighter colored sapwood is worked in with pleasing effect. Some of the tones resemble black walnut, and some suggest the luster of polished cherry.

Mesquite is brittle. Pieces of large size may be broken by a few blows with an ax. It has about half the strength of white oak, and is very low in elasticity. The wood has been used for two hundred years—possibly for thousands of years—as beams and sills for adobe houses; but it is not required to carry much weight. Spaniards employed it in building their churches and forts within its range. A timber taken from the Alamo, at San Antonio, Texas, in 1912, was said to have served more than 190 years with no sign of decay. Fence posts survive the men who set them. Paving blocks outlast sandstone subjected to the same use. Railroads in southern Texas employ this wood for crossties, but it is so hard that holes must be bored for the spikes.

Mesquite baskets are made by hand of splits the size of knitting needles, some of white sapwood, others of dark heartwood. Such baskets, large enough to contain five quarts, sell in the curio shops at San Antonio for $1.25 each. Some wagon makers insist that mesquite is in the same class with Osage orange for wagon felloes in hot, dry regions; but it does not appear that much of it is so used. The brittleness of the wood is against it, in use as felloes, except for vehicles of the heaviest sort where large pieces are demanded.

Among the uses of mesquite, by-products are an important consideration. The pods are food for farm stock. Before the first railroad reached San Antonio mesquite pods were a regular market commodity. The Mexicans know how to make bread and brew beer from the fruit; tan leather with the resin; dye leather, cloth, and crockery with the tree’s sap; make ropes and baskets of the bark. Parched pods are a substitute for coffee; bees store honey from the bloom which remains two months on the trees; riled water is purified with a decoction of mesquite chips; vinegar is made from the fermented juice of the legumes; tomales of mesquite bean meal, pepper, chicken, and cornshucks; mucilage from the gum; and candy and gum drops from the dried sap.

One of the most promising uses for this wood is in turnery. Short lengths can be utilized to advantage. The artistic color fits it for the manufacture of lodge gavels, curtain rings, goblets, plaques, trays, and numerous kinds of novelties. Spindles for grills and stairways do not suffer in comparison with black walnut, mahogany, cherry, and teak. The wood is porous, annual rings narrow and indistinct, and the medullary rays thin and inconspicuous.

A variety (Prosopis juliflora glandulosa) is found from Kansas to eastern Texas, and also in Arizona and California. It is the common mesquite of eastern Texas. Another variety (Prosopis juliflora velutina) occurs in some of the hot valleys of southern Arizona and southward in Mexico.