Part 12

“Why call them sugar pines?” I asked the stage driver. He pointed to some drops of resin-like substance on the scales of the cone I held in my lap. “Taste it,” he said. I did, and it was sweet, with somewhat the flavour of maple sugar. Crystals of this sugar come from wounds in the bark, and from the ends of green sticks when burning. The sap is quite as sweet as that of maple trees, but one is soon surfeited in eating the candy-like substance.

The stage driver told me that a lumberman could cut $5,000 worth of lumber from one of these sugar pine trees. No wonder they think that it is a burning shame for the government to reserve these noble woods of the Yosemite tract “just to be looked at.” Fortunately for us, and for the people of the whole country, some thousands of acres of magnificent forest are reserved on those Western-mountain slopes, where they are safe from the lumberman’s axe. If we cannot go to see them this year, perhaps we can fifty years hence. They will still be standing, still growing, these noble remnants of the grandest forests of any country. Specimens of what Mr. John Muir calls “the largest, noblest, and most beautiful of all the seventy or eighty species of pine trees in the world.”

THE NUT PINES

A group of soft pines, with fewer needles than five in a bundle, grows on the Western mountain slopes. Small trees they are, which have to struggle hard against the winds and storms, and with the scant moisture of the desert air and soil for a bare living. They are very interesting because of the fact that they have nuts, rich, sweet, and nutritious, under the scales of their cones, and these nuts are important items in the food of many Indian tribes of the West.

The first is the four-leaved nut pine that grows on the barren mountain slopes of Southern and Lower California. It is a desert tree, rarely reaching forty feet in height, and this only in the most favourable situations. The foliage is pale sage green. No other pine has four leaves in a bundle. Its nut-like seeds are rich in oil, starch, and sugar. Without them the Indians of Lower California would probably starve. In Riverside County the tree is common at 5,000 feet above sea level. It has a regular pyramidal head, when young, becoming low, round-topped and irregular when very old.

Another piñon, but this one with a bushy, broad top, and often considerably taller, grows with the four-leaved pine on the mountains of Lower California, and northward along the canyons and mountain slopes of Arizona. The short leaves are dark green, and there are but two or three in a bundle. The seeds are plump, and rounded, or angular. The upper side is brown, the lower side black, and each has a pale brown wing.

A third nut pine, or piñon, two- or three-leaved, grows on the eastern foot hills of the outer ranges of the Rocky Mountains, on both sides of the system. Forests of it are found on the high plains of Colorado and Arizona. It sometimes grows large enough to be used for lumber. The nuts are half an inch long, and have thin, brittle shells. They are gathered by Indians and Mexicans, and may often be bought in the markets of Colorado and New Mexico.

The one-leaved nut pine seems to belong with the spruces and firs, and other single-leaved evergreens, but there are frequently two leaves in the bundle, and there is a little scaly sheath at the base. The grey-green leaves often hang on for ten or twelve years. The winged nuts are over half an inch long. The wood furnished fuel and charcoal to the smelters in the mining regions, and the Indians of Nevada and California harvest the nut crop.

Every autumn when we are going for chestnuts and hickory nuts in our Eastern woods, we may think of the Indian families who leave their homes in the lowlands, and climb the mountain slopes to gather their nuts which are their staff of life. If we should miss our nutting excursion, it would make no vital difference in our lives during the coming winter. Our nuts are not a serious part of the provisions of the household. But with the Indians, to miss the nut pine harvest, means to have no bread for the winter that is coming.

Mr. John Muir, who has often lived among these stunted upland forests, and seen the Indians gathering the nuts and using them later as food, tells us many interesting things. The trees of the one-leaved nut pine are low, like old apple trees, and full of cones. The Indians get long poles, and beat the cones off the trees, then roast them on hot stones, until the scales open. Then they shake out the nuts, and gather them in baskets and bags to carry home. These nuts are eaten raw or parched on hot stones. These are the easiest and simplest ways. But the best and most palatable form in which they are prepared costs much more time and labour. The nuts are parched, then ground or pounded into meal. This is stirred up with water, into a kind of mush, which is formed into cakes and baked. This is, in general, the way in which all pine nuts are made into bread.

The time of the nut harvest is, for the Indians, the merriest time of the year. If the crop is heavy, the spirits of the party are light. A single family, if it is fairly industrious, can gather fifty or sixty bushels of these rich, thin-shelled nuts in a single autumn month; and with this quantity to carry home, can go down the mountains, tired but happy, knowing that their bread for the winter, and plenty of it, is assured.

THE HARD PINES

The hard pines are a group of needle-leaved evergreens, whose leaf bundles contain two or three needles, as a rule. The wood is heavy, usually dark in colour, and saturated with a resinous, gummy sap. The common name, “pitch pine,” refers to the resinous wood; it is much harder to work with than that of soft pines. The most valuable hard pine forests grow in the Southern states. These are now the chief sources of pine lumber in the Eastern half of the continent. They furnish also quantities of turpentine, pitch, tar, and oil, products of the resinous sap which saturates the wood of these trees while they are growing.

One trait of the pitch pines is that they retain the leaf sheath. The soft pines shed the sheath as soon as the leaf bundle has attained its full length.

THE SOUTHERN PITCH PINES

The woodwork and floors of a great many houses of moderate cost are done to-day in Southern pine, sometimes called “yellow pine,” sometimes “curly pine.” The alternating bands of dark and light yellowish brown, often very much waved, give the wood an ornamental grain that is much admired. It is common and most desirable that this wood should not be stained nor painted, but given the “natural finish” which brings out the rich orange colour, and shows at their full value the wavy bands and intricate patterns that are the chief beauty of the wood. The arching timbers that support the roof of a church are often made of stiff timbers cut from Southern pines, and dressed only with a coat of oil, under which time deepens and enriches the wood’s natural colours.

THE LONGLEAF PINE

The longleaf pine is one of four hard pines whose lumber is not distinguished by ordinary carpenters, but is generally called “yellow pine.” “Georgia pine” ranks a little higher than the rest. That is the longleaf, which grows over a territory much greater than the state of Georgia. This is the chief source of turpentine, pitch, and tar, as well as one of the very best lumber trees of the pitch pine group. The most ornamental wood is that with the curliest grain, and the narrowest bands of alternating dark and light colour. It grows slowly in hard, sandy soils on the damp coast plains near the Gulf of Mexico.

We shall know this tree from all other pines by the length of its needles. They are twelve to eighteen inches long, flexible, dark green, shining, three in a bundle, enclosed at the base in long, pale, silvery sheaths. They remain on the tree but two years, therefore the tree top is bare except for thick tufts of these drooping leaves on the ends of the branches. If you have never seen these trees growing in their natural forest belt, that ranges from Virginia to Florida, and west to the Mississippi River, or in small scattered forest patches in Northern Alabama, Louisiana, or Texas, you may have seen branches or small trees shipped north to be used for Christmas decorations. In the waste land that the lumbermen have cut over, in the neighbourhood of these longleaf forests, men go in early December, and cut the little trees. Saplings two or three feet high bring good prices in the Northern markets, where holly branches, ropes of ground pine, sprigs of mistletoe, and leaves of Southern palms are sold. A little two-foot longleaf pine, standing erect, with all its long flexible leaves bending outward like a fountain of shining green, is handsomer than any palm of the same size.

The popularity of these pine shoots is growing, and those who cut them seem not to realise that they are killing the forests of the future. Trees grow from seeds which fall in the territory cleared by the lumbermen. If these little trees that Nature plants are cut as fast as they show themselves above the forest floor, how are the longleaf pine forests to be restored? It is a great problem, for a great part of the natural wealth of the South is in these lumber tracts, now being cleared at a terrific rate of speed, and the land left practically worthless when stripped.

The cones of the longleaf pine are narrow and tapering. The scales are thick, and each bears a small spine. The leaves are the distinguishing trait, and the tall, slender trunk crowned by a long open head of short, twisted branches.

THE SHORTLEAF PINE

The shortleaf pine ranks second only to the longleaf among the forest pines of the South. It is the common “yellow pine,” and “North Carolina pine” that is commonly sold from lumber yards in the North and Middle West. Its wood is almost as beautiful in the natural finish. Its leaves are short in comparison with those of the longleaf, and scarcely longer than any pines of the North. They are found in clusters of twos and threes, and they have the dark blue-green colour of the white pine, lightened by the silvery sheaths at the bases of the clusters. The leaves are soft and flexible, slender, and sharp-pointed. They vary from three to five inches in length. The cones are two to three inches long, and half as broad; the thickened scales have small spines. It takes two years to bring cones to maturity, and the old ones hang on several years. In this they differ from our Northern pitch pine.

Forests of this timber pine are scattered from Connecticut to Florida, and west to Illinois, Kansas, and Texas. They are being slaughtered by lumbermen as fast as those of the longleaf. The young trees are tapped for turpentine. In the South and East, these forests are practically gone. The lumber mills are busy in the great tracts west of the Mississippi, and below the Arkansas River, in the forests of shortleaf pine, which until recently were untouched, and too far from the markets to be profitably cut.

The shortleaf pine will reforest the old areas, and spread over a widening territory, if only it is given a chance. One hundred years is enough time to restore a forest,—to grow a crop of these trees. Young ones spring from the roots of old trees, a habit not at all common among pines. Let us hope that before the Southwestern forests are gone, new ones east of the Mississippi River will take their places, so that the shortleaf shall not disappear from the lumber markets as the white pine of the Northeastern states has done.

THE CUBAN PINE

The Cuban pine or swamp pine of the South, with stout green leaves eight to twelve inches long, in twos and threes, is not confused with the longleaf nor the shortleaf, for its leaves are intermediate in length between the two. This beautiful pine grows in forests that skirt swampy coast land. Its leaves are carried two years, so the trees have dense, luxuriant crowns of green, and are more beautiful as a part of the landscape than any other forest pine of the South. The wood of the Cuban pine is not distinguished in the lumber trade, as it is much the same in quality and appearance as longleaf pine.

THE LOBLOLLY PINE