THE BLACK WALNUT
Rex Burress
The regrettable western wildfires are blackening forests, damaging many species, primarily conifers, but including hardwoods, black oaks, black walnuts, and everything woody...and alive!
My interest was stirred about black walnut trees recently, by an item on the historical page in the E-R paper concerning governmental interest in black walnut trees during World War I, including Butte County. For some tree species, the saw got them before the fires.
I immediately wondered what the War Department was doing with black walnuts. All over the land, signs on black walnut trees popped forth with “Property of the United States” posted as if there was a genocidal effort to eliminate the species. The Boy Scouts of America were summoned to locate black walnut for harvesting in 1918, and they succeeded in locating 20 million feet of standing eastern black walnut trees [Juglan nigra]. 105,250 trees were harvested in that sweep.
A large number had also been planted in northern CA along roads like at Woodland, CA and Gridley. The roadsides under the trees became peppered with nut fruit in the fall, and I would bag a bunch of my favorite delicacy. There are six species in North America and 25 species in the world, and presumedly the entire genus has a similar high quality wood and uniquely flavored nut. California has two species, and the J. hindsii grows in Butte County.
J. nigra is native east of the Rockies, including my home state of Missouri, and when I was a boy on the farm, Dad, Mother and I would have an October 'nut day,' that involved Dad harnessing the team of horses to pull the iron-wheeled wagon down to our section of the No Creek bottomland. Some huge black walnut trees grew in the bend of the creek, in a rainy land where there were seldom fires.
What a 'fall' day that was, both in colorful autumn leaves falling from trees and in falling nuts. There were no Englisb Walnuts, Juglans regia, to make gathering and cracking easier, but the nigra and pecans, and many hickory nut trees thrived in the moist woods. Mother would fix a picnic lunch, and we took a .22 rifle to bag a few squirrels, and took fishing poles to set for catfish. We would return up the lane before dark with a load of nuts and wild game. The hand-picked messy walnuts required gloves or you would stain your hands black forever!
Our farm was nestled up against the game warden's dark woodland. The buckbrush that was dense on our side gave way to a dense oak and nut forest at the fenceline, well populated by wildlife excluding deer and turkey that were restocked later in the l960's. In fact, my Dad bagged his first buck there, but he shot it across the creek, and by the time he reached it, someone else was putting their tag on it! That occurred on the home-farm after he retired to Trenton and I was working in the west.
America is the original native home to a variety of nut trees mostly on the eastern side of the country, where over a dozen hickory nut species grow, along with pecans, beeches, chestnuts and Juglans. The only hickories in California are introduced species, and I know of only one shagbark hickory on Montgomery Street in Oroville.
Now for the punch line. What was the U.S. Military doing with black walnut wood? Answer--They were making walnut gun stocks and airplane propellers! At least, the species has had a chance to recover, since wood is not used in military rifle stocks now, but rather various metals, and walnut propellers gave way to jet power. However, that was a lot of trees for just gunstocks and propellers. The ecological tragedy about physical wars is the toll taken on natural resources. Think peace!
“It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seems to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do around two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far.”--John Muir