Indian Trail Trees Bent By Natives Being Identified and Preserved
Indian Country Today
The trees are known as Indian marker trees or Indian trail trees and were bent by Native Americans in their youth to mark trails or other landmarks
āIf they could talk, the stories they could tell,ā Steve Houser, an arborist and founding member of the Dallas Historic Tree Coalition, told the Associated Press. The Indian trail trees, he said, āwere like an early road mapā for American Indians.
The trees are known as Indian marker trees or Indian trail trees and were bent while saplings by Native Americans in their youth to mark trails or other landmarks, like a creek crossing.
Houserās mission: to protect the historic trees and their stories. The group has identified four marker trees and is looking into reports of 32 more across Texas.
Groups like Houserās are popping up across the country to protect and maintain Indian trail trees.
Mountain Stewards, a nonprofit based in Jasper, Georgia has compiled a database of 1,850 marker trees in 39 states, reported the AP.
The groupās process to verify a tree is indeed an Indian marker includes age, it must be at least 150 to 200 years old, and finding marks that show where the tree was tied down.
The Great Lakes Trail Marker Tree Societyās website has a bevy of photographs of Indian marker trees. The groupās founder, Dennis Downes, released a book in 2011 called Native American Trail Marker Trees. It documents the history of the trees through Downesās travels of North America.
āThey are living archeology,ā Rick Wilson, the chief ranger at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado, told the AP. Park Ranger Jeff Wolin said the Utes bent the ponderosa pines to mark a trail to Pikes Peakātava or sun in the Ute languageāan area sacred to them about eight miles away.
The trees are an important part of history that should be preserved.
āItās something that you want to hug and say, āHey, there was a time in your life when you were special to us and now you are still special and look how beautiful you are,āā Wallace Coffey, former Comanche Nation chairman told the AP. Coffey has consulted with the Dallas Historic Tree Coalition and said the marker trees they have found likely helped Comanche warriors find water or shelter during battles with the United States military.
āA lot of people donāt recognize what they are and theyāre a really important part of the history of this country,ā Earl Otchingwanigan, Ojibwe, told the AP. The now-retired Bemidji State University professor also said he found a trail marker in the shape of the letter āNā near his Crystal Falls, Michigan home. āWhen I hear people are interested in it, I think they are starting to understand that there are a lot of messages on this earth that people cannot take for granted anymore.ā
This story was originally posted on Apr 5, 2012.