f             TOI THE BOYS AND GIRLS OF THE 
  0<                     FORT STOCKTON SCHOOLS 
 
 
     I was born in Kentucky. My schooling was had in various places 
btween the Missouri River and the Atlantic Seaboard, and in all that 
wide stretch of country, mountain, plain and prairie, the oak was 
easily the chief of all the deciduous trees. Deep set in the earth, 
gracious in shape, and lofty of form, the different species of the 
genus Quercus were, each, as worthy of the homage of the Druids, as 
the oaks of Mona in the days of Suetonius,- barring the use of the 
silver sickle,- for there was no mistletoe in those Northern latitudes. 
It was a genus of giants that I knew. 
     But in 1877 when I went out into Buffalo Land in the Western 
borders of North Texas, I found that the oak genus had its pigmies 
as well as its giants. There was a great scope of country from the 
Canadian River on the North to the Rio Grande on the South, extending 
East from the Cap Rock of the Llano Estacado on the West to about the 
100th degree of longitude West from Greenwich, in which the dominant 
form of arboreal growth was a Lilliputian tree, growing to a height 
of one to two feet and with trucks about as thick as a man's thumb. 
There were much larger trees in this territory- willows, junipers, 
oottonwoods, chinaberries, walnuts, hackberries and mesquites, - but 
with the single exception of the thrifty mesquite, there were exceed- 
ingly scant in numbers, and generally only to be found closely adjacent 
to water courses. Now the dwarfed shin-oAk bore its acorns over much 
of that country at the foot of the high plain. 
     It was found most frequently in sandy lands growing in scattered 
clumps, but where the sand was specially favorable it was to be found 
in great thickets and sometimes reaching a height of four feet or more* 
These thickets were well known to the buffalo hunters and to the fron- 
tiersmen as "shinneries", a word evidently derived from the descriptive

name of that oak,- the shin-oak, -and as far as I am informed these names

are still applied by the inhabitants of that territory. The shinneries 
were coverts, in which in those early days might be found the Virginia 
deer, the wild turkey, the pinnated grouse, and in the lower latitudes 
the javalin or peccary. 
     These shinneries were generally to be found in the Central and 
Northern part of the habitat of the shin-oak, and about the largest 
one of which I have any knowledge lies between the Southeastern corner 
of New Mexico and the track of the T & P Ry. Co. near Monahans, Texas.

South of that track the sands become light and infrequent. But the oak 
in scattered clumps can be found in the Southern part of Pecos County, 
Texas, in a limestone country along the higher outline of the )Yarathon 
fold from the Glass Mountains to the Pecos River. And it may be seen 
also in places much West of this, but thin on the ground, and sparsely 
scattered. The Kingdom of the Lilliputian oak does not much exceed the 
bounds above set out, but it appears as a trifle in many places of the 
Southwest. 
 
 
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