The First Tree on the Texas High Plains

Right here, on what was once a bare and treeless stretch of the Texas Panhandle, a homesteader named Thomas Cree planted a single bois d'arc tree in front of his dugout home in eighteen eighty-eight. On the naked High Plains, where the horizon runs unbroken for miles in every direction, that tree became a landmark and a good luck symbol for the settlers who followed. It shaded their dugouts through droughts, blizzards, and brutal summers.

Bois d'arc, also called Osage orange, was prized on the Plains for its nearly indestructible wood, used for fence posts and wagon wheels. Cree's original tree is said to have lived for nearly a century before dying. Residents of Armstrong County planted a new tree on this spot in nineteen ninety as a memorial to that enduring spirit of early settlement on the High Plains.