Science: Indian Signs

Many a curiously bent tree growing in the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes region is no mere freak of nature. It is the handwork of long-dead Indians. In the July Scientific Monthly Geologist Raymond E. Janssen of Evanston, Ill. tells how he settled the puzzle of the crooked trees for which he could find no scientific explanation anywhere. He ran across a few historical references which indicated that “trees were sometimes bent by the Indians to mark trails through the forests.” Several summers of study convinced Janssen that the deformed trees are surviving guideposts.

Trees gnarled by accident most often bend from their bases. But genuine Indian markers show “acute or right-angled bend in their main trunks, usually from two to five feet above their bases. Rising vertically from the bent trunks are one or more . . . secondary trunks” (see cut).

From 100 to 300 years ago, Indians twisted the saplings by lashing their tops down with rawhide or vines, weighting them with rocks or soil, or pegging them down with stakes. From about 200 feet to a half-mile apart, their trunks paralleled a trail’s direction. Rows of such trees still survive here & there. Today a silent brave, threading his way past filling stations, could still follow a good existing tree-trail from the shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago, inland through the center of Highland Park (pop. 14,476) to the site of an old Indian village in the Skokie Valley five miles away.