Osage orange has been planted in perhaps every state of the Union, and grows successfully in most of them. It is one of the most widely distributed of American forest trees, but its distribution has been chiefly artificial. It was found originally in a very restricted region, from which it was carried for hedge and ornamental planting far and wide. Its natural home, to which it was confined when first discovered, embraced little more than ten thousand square miles, and probably half of that small area produced no trees of commercial size. Its northern limit was near Atoka, Oklahoma, its southern a little south of Dallas, Texas; a range north and south of approximately one hundred miles. Its broadest extent east and west was along Red River, through Cooke, Grayson, Fanning, Lamar, and Red River counties, Texas, about 120 miles. Some Osage orange of commercial size grew outside the area thus delimited, but no large amount. Much of that region, particularly south of Red River, was prairie, without timber of any kind; but scattered here and there were belts, strips, thickets, and clumps of Osage orange mixed with other species. On the very best of its range, and before disturbed by white men, this wood seldom formed pure stands of as much as 100 acres in one body, and since the country’s settlement, the stands have become smaller or have been entirely cleared to make farms. All accounts agree that the Osage orange reaches its highest development on the fertile lands along Boggy and Blue rivers in Oklahoma, though fine bodies of it once grew south of the Red River in Texas, and much is still cut there though the choicest long ago disappeared. Few trees are less exacting in soil, yet when it can make choice it chooses the best. In its natural habitat it holds its place in the black, fertile flats and valleys, and is seldom found on sandy soil. It is not a swamp tree, though it is uninjured by occasional floods. The tracts where it grows are sometimes called “bodark swamps,” though marshy in wet weather only. The tree attains a height of fifty or sixty feet when at its best, but specimens that tall are unusual. Trunks are occasionally two or three feet in diameter, but that size is very rare. At the present time probably ten trees under a foot in diameter are cut for every one over that size.