Part 67

Eleven species of cottonwood are found in the United States, if all trees of the genus Populus are classed as cottonwoods. It is not universally admitted, however, that they should be so classed. The common cottonwood is the most widely known of all of them, but it is recognized under different names in different regions, viz.: Big cottonwood, yellow cottonwood, cotton tree, Carolina poplar, necklace poplar, broadleaf poplar, and whitewood.

Its range covers practically all of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. It is rare or missing in eastern New England and southern Florida, and most abundant in the Mississippi valley, and there the largest trees are found. Some exceed 100 feet in height, and four in diameter. Extreme sizes of 140 feet in height with diameters of from seven to nine have been reported. The cottonwood was a frontier tree on the western plains when settlers began to push into the region. It grew as far west as any hardwood of the eastern forests, and was found beyond meridian 100, which was supposed to be the boundary between the region of rains and the semi-arid country. The cottonwood clung to the river banks and to islands in the rivers, and by that means escaped the Indian’s prairie and forest fires which he kindled every year to improve the range for the buffalo. It is supposed that most of the open country east of meridian 100 was originally timbered, and that the Indians destroyed the forests by their long-continued habit of burning the woods and prairies every year to improve the pasture. Cottonwood was the longest survivor, because it grew in damp places where fires did not burn fiercely. Black willow was its most frequent companion on the western outposts of the forests.

The cottonwood was fitted for holding its ground, and pushing forward. Its light seeds are carried by millions on the wind and by water. The tree bears large quantities of cotton (hence the name), and when the wind whips it from the tree, seeds are caught among the fibers and carried along, to be scattered miles away.

This tree was not much thought of by eastern people who had plenty of other kinds of wood, but pioneers on the plains who had a hard time to get any, found cottonwood useful. It made fences, corncribs, stables, cabins, ox yokes, and fuel. The first canoes made by white men on the upper Missouri river were of cottonwood. Lumber cut from this tree is inclined to warp and check unless carefully handled, and this prejudiced it in the eyes of many; but difficulties of that kind were easily mastered, and instead of being a neglected wood it became popular. Some of the largest early orders came from Germany. Vehicle makers in this country employed it for wagon beds, as a substitute for yellow poplar when that wood’s cost advanced. Manufacturers of agricultural implements were pioneers in its use, it being excellent material for hoppers, chutes, and boxes.

Cottonwood weighs 24.24 pounds per cubic foot, which is approximately the weight of white pine. It has about the stiffness of white oak, but only about eighty per cent of white oak’s strength, and fifty per cent of its fuel value. The wood is very porous, but the pores are small, usually invisible to the naked eye. The medullary rays are small and obscure. The appearance of the wood is not improved by quarter-sawing. The summerwood forms a thin, dark line, so faint that the annual rings are often scarcely distinguishable. The tree is generally a rapid grower; heartwood is brown, sapwood lighter, but as a whole, this tree produces white wood.

The annual cut is declining. It was little more than half in 1910 what it was in 1899. Some regions where large trees were once abundant now have few. The sawmill output in 1910 for the United States--including several species--was 220,000,000 feet. The veneer cut was 33,000,000 feet, log measure; the slack cooperage staves, chiefly for flour barrels, numbered 44,000,000; and pulpwood amounted to about 18,000,000 feet. The lumber cut was largest in the following states in the order named: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Minnesota. The tree was lumbered in forty-one states.

Cottonwood is a standard material in several lines of manufacturing. It is made into nearly every kind of box that goes on the market, from the cigar box to those in which pianos are shipped. Manufacturers of food products are particularly anxious to procure this wood, and it is one of the best for woodenware, such as dough boards, ironing boards, and cloth boards. It is used by manufacturers of agricultural implements, interior finish, bank and office fixtures, musical instruments, furniture, vehicle tops, trunks, excelsior, saddle trees, caskets and coffins, and numerous others.

There is no danger that cottonwood will disappear from this country, but it will become scarce. It is being cut much faster than it is growing, and is losing favor as a planted shade and park tree, because of its habit of shedding cotton in the spring and its leaves in the early autumn.

SWAMP COTTONWOOD (Populus heterophylla) is known also as river cottonwood, black cottonwood, downy poplar, and swamp poplar. Its range describes a crude horseshoe, running from Rhode Island down the Atlantic coast in a narrow strip, where it is neither abundant nor of large size; touching northern Florida; running westward to eastern Texas and thence up the Mississippi basin and the Ohio river to southwestern Ohio. There is nothing handsome about its appearance with its heavy limbs and sparse, rounded crown. In the eastern range the average height is probably not more than fifty feet but in the fertile Mississippi valley it reaches 100 and has a long merchantable bole three feet in diameter. Its bark is rugged, dirty-brown and broken into loose, conspicuous ridges. It is easily distinguished from the other cottonwoods by the orange-colored pith in the twigs. The buds are rounded and red and have a resinous odor. Sawmills and factories never list this wood separately. It comes and goes as cottonwood. Its uses are the same as those of common cottonwood. The two species grow in mixture throughout the entire range of the swamp cottonwood.

TEXAS COTTONWOOD (Populus wislizeni) is a rather large tree and is the common cottonwood in the upper valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico and western Texas. The yellowish color of the twigs is apt to attract attention. The wood is used about ranches and occasionally a log finds its way to local sawmills; but its importance is limited to the region where it grows.

MEXICAN COTTONWOOD (Populus mexicana) extends its range north of the Mexican boundary into southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. It is abundant in Mexico where the largest trees are eighty feet high and three or four in diameter. It is smaller near the northern limits of its range, and there it hugs the banks of mountain streams. Stockmen use the trunks, which are usually small enough to be called poles, to make fences and sheds.

NARROWLEAF COTTONWOOD (Populus angustifolia)is a mountain species which manages to live in the semi-arid regions from the Rocky Mountains of Canada to Arizona, but is seldom found below an elevation of 5,000 feet, and it ranges up to 10,000. Trunks are eighteen inches or less in diameter, and fifty or sixty feet high. The seeds are larger than those of most other cottonwoods. It being a semi-desert species, its wood is appreciated where it is accessible, and it has local uses only.

LANCELEAF COTTONWOOD (Populus acuminata) is a small tree with limited range, growing in the arid region along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, southward from the Black Hills. It is found also north of the Canadian border. It is usually fifteen or eighteen inches in diameter, and thirty or forty feet high. Trunks seldom go to sawmills, but some local use is made of the wood. Trees are occasionally planted for shade in towns of western Nebraska and Wyoming.

FREMONT COTTONWOOD (Populus fremontii), called white cottonwood in New Mexico, but elsewhere simply cottonwood, grows from western Texas to California, and as far north as Utah and Colorado. It sometimes attains a diameter of five or six feet and a height of 100. The Indians in New Mexico formerly made rude, clumsy ox carts of this wood, without a scrap of iron or other metal in the vehicles. One of the carts is preserved in the National Museum, Washington, D. C. The wood is tough and light, but it is dull white, with no attractive figure. Even the annual rings are hardly distinguishable. Logs are occasionally sawed into lumber, and farmers in western Texas make wagon beds of it.

BALM OF GILEAD

BALM OF GILEAD

(Populus Balsamifera)

This tree is known in different regions by the following names: Balsam, balm of Gilead, cottonwood, poplar, balsam poplar, and tacamahac. The usual name, balm of Gilead, is applied in recognition of the supposed healing virtue of the wax which covers the buds and young leaves. It has long been used in medicine, but its exact value is still a matter of discussion. The wild Indians of the North discovered a use for the balsam in mending their bark dishes, and plugging knot holes in the wooden trenchers. The wax is slow to dissolve in water, and it resisted for a long time such soups as were known to the redman’s culinary art. Bees know the value of the wax and use it to seal cracks and crevices in their hives and to hold the comb in place. It is popularly believed that the economy of the wax on the buds is to keep them from freezing. That view is erroneous, for it would take more than a coating of wax to keep the buds warm with the thermometer from fifty to seventy degrees below zero, as it is every winter in some parts of this tree’s range.

Balm of Gilead is a native of the North from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but its finest growth is about the headwaters of the Mackenzie river, on Peace and Laird rivers, and the lower valley of the Athabaska. Sixty years ago Sir John Franklin reported that most of the driftwood of the Arctic ocean was this species. Since that time the range has been more definitely determined, and it is now known that the tree grows so far north that it is for some weeks in darkness, and again in summer for some weeks in unbroken sunshine. It grows in Alaska nearly 200 miles north of the Arctic circle. Its natural range southward reaches New England, New York, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon.

Trees of all sizes abound, from mere shrubs in the outskirts of its range to trunks 100 feet high and six feet in diameter in favored localities. In the United States the best timber seldom exceeds thirty inches in diameter and sixty or seventy feet in height. The bark on limbs and young trunks is brownish-gray, frequently so tinged with green that it is noticeable at a considerable distance; but usually large trees have reddish-gray bark with deep furrows and wide ridges. Year-old twigs are clear, shiny reddish-brown; end buds are about an inch long, the side buds somewhat shorter.

The wood is not distinguishable in appearance from that of the other poplars or cottonwoods, but it is lighter than most of them, weighing 22.65 pounds per cubic foot, has a breaking strength which places it among the weakest woods, but in stiffness making a much better showing. The pores are small, numerous, and are distributed equally through all parts of the wood.

Balm of Gilead bears seeds abundantly and scatters them widely. It must do its planting quickly in the short summers of the cold North. It sticks close to alluvial flats, banks of rivers, borders of lakes and swamps, and gravelly soils. It grows to a diameter of fifteen inches in about forty-five years.

Though balm of Gilead is not one of the most important timber trees of this country, its place is by no means obscure. No separate tally is kept of it among woods cut for pulp, but it goes with aspen and other similar species as “poplar.” A little better account is kept of the amount passing through wood-using factories. The annual quantity so reported in Illinois is 2,775,000 feet, and it is made into boxes and crates. The lumber is shipped from the North, since it does not grow as far south as Illinois. The situation is different in Michigan, for balm of Gilead grows there. The amount going yearly into factories in that state is reported at 4,912,000 feet. It is made into many commodities, but boxes and crates take most of it. The wood is reduced to veneer and converted into berry buckets, grape baskets, fruit and egg crates, and other small shipping containers. It is made into excelsior and woodwool which are used as packing material. Druggist’s barrels are manufactured from this wood. These are small, two-piece vessels, bored hollow, with a closely fitting lid, and varying in size from a couple of inches high, to nearly a foot. They contain powders, perfumes, pills, and other commodities in small bulk. The wood is worked into pails, tubs, and kegs. Furniture makers put balm of Gilead to use in several ways. It is cut thin for shelving; it is made into panels, and is employed as cores over which to lay veneers of more expensive materials. Woodenware factories generally keep it in stock in the northern states.

The supply is ample at present to meet all demands. Cutters of pulpwood probably take more than sawmills, and are satisfied with smaller timber. Trees are often planted for ornament, but few if any have yet been propagated for forestry purposes.

HAIRY BALM OF GILEAD (Populus balsamifera candicans) is not a species but a variety, and it is so different from balm of Gilead that it is entitled to a place of its own. Ordinarily it passes under the common names applied to balm of Gilead. It is a cultivated tree in eastern Canada and northeastern United States, where it has escaped from cultivation and is running wild. Both Sargent and Sudworth say that nothing is definitely known of the tree’s native range; while it has been claimed by others that it once grew wild in Michigan but was destroyed by lumbermen. Probably most planted balm of Gileads are of this variety, as they are very ornamental. It is a large tree with branches less upright and crowns more open than in the wild species. The leaves are wide, heart-shaped, and are usually silvery white beneath with minute hairs on the margins, on the veins, and leaf stems. It is not improbable that this variety could be more profitably planted for forestry purposes than the species which grows wild; but there is no present indication that foresters favorably consider either of them.

LARGETOOTH ASPEN (Populus grandidentata) is named on account of the shape of the leaves. It is sometimes called aspen, popple, white poplar, and large poplar. The wood weighs 28.87 pounds per cubic foot, and is the heaviest of the poplar group except Fremont cottonwood of the arid southwestern regions. The wood is white, attractive, but not strong. It was formerly manufactured into chip hats and shoe heels in New England, and is now used for baskets, crates, boxes, buckets, refrigerators, excelsior, and pulp. Northern factories usually give it the general name “poplar,” and for that reason its importance in the lumber trade is underestimated. Trees may reach a height of seventy feet with a diameter of two; but a height of forty or fifty is more usual. The species’ range extends from Nova Scotia to Minnesota, southward to Delaware and Illinois, and along the Appalachian mountains to North Carolina and Tennessee.

GUMBO LIMBO (Bursera simaruba) is a south Florida species and is known also as West Indian birch. It is in a family by itself with no near relative. It is not a birch. The wood is spongy and very light, weighing less than nineteen pounds per cubic foot. It decays with remarkable rapidity. Branches thrust in the ground take root and grow. An aromatic resin, exuding from wounds in the bark, is manufactured into varnish. The leaves are substituted for tea, and gout remedies are made from the resin. Large trees are fifty feet high and two feet or more in diameter. Another Florida tree, not in the same family as this, is also called gumbo limbo (Simarouba glauca), paradise tree, and bitter wood. Ailanthus (Ailanthus glandulosa) is in the same family as paradise tree, but is not native in this country, though extensively planted here.

ANGELICA TREE (Aralia spinosa). This is a small tree, which usually develops little or no heartwood. The springwood, or the inner and porous part of the ring, is broad and yellow, the summerwood, or exterior part of the ring, is narrow and dark. The wood’s figure, due to the marked contrast between the outer and inner portions of the rings, is strong. When finished it shows a rich yellow, but somewhat lighter than dwarf sumach which it resembles. It is made into small shop articles, like button boxes, photograph frames, pen racks, stools, and arms for rocking chairs. Its range extends from Pennsylvania to Texas. It is sometimes known as Hercules’ club.