The Journey and Discoveries Begin | The Legacy Grows: Lewis and Clark's Garden

Then: Osage Indians prized the strong, lustrous wood for making bows.
Noted and collected: Cuttings sent back from St. Louis even before the journey began in May 1804.
Now: Messy fruit and huge thorns make it unwelcome in most home landscapes. But its fruit, bark, seed, roots and wood are being studied as antibiotics and as food preservatives. Osage has proved useful in strip-mine reclamation because of its tolerance of alkaline soil and drought-resistance. The fruit has long been used as a roach repellent.

Jamie Easter started carving bows at age 13 and found that Osage orange wood made superior ones. He'd read how Native Americans used that very same wood for bows, and he found plentiful free supplies of it on the farms near his Iowa home.

DONALDSON, Iowa — Seven days a week, through hot, sticky summers and frigid winters, young Jamie Easter hand-carves long bows of Osage orange. His workshop on the family farm, 100 miles north of the Lewis and Clark Trail, is an old sheep shed framed in Osage orange.

Until the cold drives him indoors in October, Easter works outside using hand tools to shave the long staves, following the grain with a Zen-like concentration. With a view of lush green rolling hills and acres of corn and the family dog his only company, Easter, 22, custom carves about 100 Osage bows a year at $400 apiece. He, like the Osage tribe before him, values the bright yellow hardwood for its strength and beauty.

A distant line of Osage trees visible from Easter's workshop tells the story of the settlement of the Plains.

By 1850, the dense "hedge," as Osage is also known, was the most-planted tree in America, used to divide property, contain livestock and create windbreaks. Resistant to decay and disease, easy to grow in a variety of soils and needing little care, the impenetrable living fences of Osage orange partitioned the prairie section by section.

"The Osage fruit had an exquisite odour and was the size of the largest orange, of a globular form and a fine orange colour..."
— Meriwether Lewis, May 1804
In a letter to president Thomas Jefferson.

The towering Osage orange trees in Old St. Peter's churchyard in Philadelphia likely rooted and flourished from cuttings sent by Lewis to President Thomas Jefferson, who in turn sent them to seed seller and horticulturist Bernard McMahon. Those trees are among a handful of living species grown from expedition findings.

Lewis first saw Osage orange trees in St. Louis before the Corps of Discovery started its journey up the Missouri River in May 1804. Intrigued by the thorny branches and the large, bumpy, sweet-smelling fruit, Lewis sent cuttings back to Thomas Jefferson along with cuttings from other fruit trees, minerals and a horned toad.

The fact that the first plant Lewis collected west of the Mississippi was later determined to be previously unknown to science says much of his plant knowledge and keen eye.

It also illustrates that Lewis believed that Jefferson's instructions to observe "growth and vegetable productions, especially those not of the United States" and to find new, beneficial plants were an important goal of the corps' mission.

Osage became so valued in the 1800s that the seed sold for $5 a pound at one time. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that farmers and settlers planted 60,000 miles of Osage orange hedges in 1868 alone.

The advent of barbed wire cut demand for Osage orange, and by 1880 it was rarely planted. Existing stands of hedge were used as fence posts, and the tough hardwood often outlasts the barbed wire strung from it.

"It's a wood that's been kicked in the seat of the pants as good for nothing but fence posts," Easter says. But in his eyes, Osage is anything but useless.

Easter became fascinated with bows at age 13, when he carved his first. He learned from his grandfather, who lived just up the hill. His father thought it was just a passing fancy, but he bought his son a few books on carving to encourage the hobby. Easter read the books avidly and kept carving bows that will withstand the test of time, just like the Osage orange tree.

The Journey and Discoveries Begin Like Lewis, we launch in the Midwest and find Osage Orange

The Journey and Discoveries Begin
Like Lewis, we launch in the Midwest and find Osage Orange