With trees too scarce to make fence rails and woven wire fence not available, Osage-Orange hedges were the only practical way to fence the virgin land. Its orginal range was about the same as the Osage Indian tribe in southwestern Missouri and the adjacent parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. Its wood is hard, strong, durable, and resilient, and for those reasons it was widely used for bows by the plains Indians. Pioneer women soon discovered that the bark of the roots made an excellent yellow dye for their home-spun cloth.
Leaves are bright, shiny and oval shaped.
They are smooth and leathery to the touch. Fruit resembles a grapefruit, being a yellowish-green, round, and an aggregate or grouping of many small individual fruits. Squirrels are about the only animals which eat the oranges. Both fruit and leaves have a white, sticky sap. Twigs are slender, light orange in color and bear short, sharp thorns.