A few weeks ago, we made our annual trek to the Neil Sperry All Texas All Garden Show in Arlington. We had to make an abbreviated trip this year for a variety of reasons, but we came away with some really interesting information - a portion of the land that our house sits on may have historical significance!

Anna stopped and spoke at length with an arborist at the show about an old oak tree we have in the back corner of our lot.



We liked the tree because it had a lot of character, especially its interesting shape. It certainly didn't look like it could have grown that way naturally, and as it turns out, we were right.

Anna was discussing the tree with the arborist because, less than two years after we moved in, the tree died. In the spring. Right after it started blooming. The day we started building a custom-shaped deck right underneath it. But I digress.

The developers backfilled the trailing portion of our lot to level out the slope from street level down to the creek. In that process, they buried the root flare of this tree under at least four feet of backfill. We know this because we tried to dig down to the root flare, and I gave up after digging down 4 feet and not finding it. So, the developers killed the tree, it just took a few years for it to finally die out.

So in sharing this story with the arborist and trying to see if anything else could have been done to save the tree, Anna described its physical characteristics. And that's when the arborist told her that we might have an Indian Marker Tree.

He then told her how Indian tribes in the area would take small saplings and tie the top of the sapling over so the tree was actually bent, and then leave it that way for years. They did this to mark location and direction to a resource, usually water. He asked if there was water nearby, and that's when Anna told him about the creek. After growing this way for years, the tree would have a unique shape that was easy to identify and it would point in the direction of whatever resource was nearby. Given the shape of the tree and this bit of history, we're pretty certain that the tree was a marker tree.

Fortunately, even though we did trim back the tree a couple of years after it died, we left a good portion of the tree, including a large area of the trunk that shows the odd shape, possibly preserving at least a portion of local history. In doing a web search on Indian Marker Trees, I ran across a posting from a regional publication outlining the search for Indian Marker Trees very close to us. Searches on Indian Trail Trees came up with other pages, including this one, with pictures of trees that closely match the shape and growth pattern of our own tree.

So we had more than just a cool looking tree, we most likely got to experience a real piece of old west history, right in our own back yard. Maybe it was outlaw Sam Bass who made the trail tree as a marker to where he hid his stash of stolen gold coins, and I just didn't dig down far enough to find the hidden wealth...