DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out on the Texas High Plains, in Carson County, there was a man named Thomas Cree who did something in 1888 that folks would be talking about for over a hundred years. He set a bois d'arc tree out front of his dugout home.
Now, you've got to picture that. A dugout home — carved into the earth itself — and right out front, one lone tree standing up against everything the High Plains had to throw at it. Drouth.
Blizzard. Heat. The kind of heat that makes you question your choices, and the kind of cold that makes you question them all over again.
That bois d'arc didn't flinch. It stood there and became something more than a tree. It became a symbol — a good luck symbol — for the settlers who were trying to scratch a life out of that wide, unforgiving country.
When things got hard, and they got hard plenty, folks could look at that tree and reckon that if it could hold on, maybe they could too. That is no small thing. That tree carried weight that no tree should have to carry.
And it carried it for a long, long time. Cree's bois d'arc finally died in the 1970s. The plains had outlasted it at last.
But here's where the story takes a turn — because Carson County wasn't done. In 1990, the county's own residents came together and planted a new tree on that very spot. Not to replace what was lost, exactly.
But as a memorial — their word, and the right one — to the area's early pioneers. The tree is gone, but the ground remembers. And now, so do you.
What the marker says
Set front dugout home by Thomas Cree, 1888. Good luck symbol of settlers through drouth, blizzard and heat. Cree's bois d'arc tree died in the 1970s. County residents planted a new tree here in 1990 as a memorial to the area's early pioneers.