THE MESQUITE - OTHER POD BEARERS.
Prosopis juliflora, DC.
The mesquite or honey pod is one of the wonderful plants of the arid and semi-arid regions from Col orado and Utah to Texas and southern California. At best it is a tree sixty feet high along the rivers of Arizona. In the higher and more desert stretches it is stunted to a sprawling shrub, with numerous stems but a few feet high. Its leaves are like those of our honey locust but very much smaller, and the tree furnishes little shade. The bark of the trunk is thick, dark reddish brown, shallowly fissured between scaly ridges. In winter the tree looks dead enough, but the young shoots clothed with tender green bring it to life in early spring, and the greenish fragrant flowers, thickly set in finger-like clusters, appear in successive crops from May to July. These are succeeded by pods four to nine inches long in drooping clusters, each containing ten to twenty beans.
Not its beauty of leaf and blossom but its usefulness is what makes this tree almost an object of worship to desert dwellers, red men and white. The long fat pods supply Mexicans and Indians with a nutritious food, green or ripe.
Cattle feed upon the young shoots and thrive, when other forage is scant or utterly lacking. The fuel problem of the desert is solved by the mesquite in a way that is a great surprise to the newcomer. His sophisticated neighbor takes him on a wood-gathering expedition. Stopping where a shrubby mesquite sprawls, he hitches his team to a chain or rope that lays hold of the trunk, and hauls the plant out by its roots. And what roots the mesquite has developed in its search for water! There is a central tap root that goes down, down, sometimes sixty feet or more. Secondary roots branch out in all directions, interlock, thicken, and form a labyrinth of woody substance, in quantity and quality that makes the timber above ground a negligible quantity. This wood is cut into building and fencing materials—two great needs in the desert. The waste makes good fuel, and every scrap is precious. Posts, railroad ties, frames for the adobe houses, furniture, fellies of wheels, paving blocks, and charcoal are made of this wonderful tree's root system. A gum resembling gum arabic exudes from the stems.