BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
The battle to document and save old trees that may have once marked native American trails.
 From the November 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine
Six months before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression, Richard Gloede, a landscape architect and the owner of a nursery in Evanston, Illinois, wrote a letter to General Abel Davis, the chair of the Cook County Forest Preserve?s advisory committee. He implored Davis for help in protecting the ?old Indian trail trees? along the shores of Lake Michigan. ?I have located on the North Shore alone over one hundred and have photographed, measured them according to size, condition, which way they point by compass, etc.,? Gloede wrote in a letter dated March 22, 1929. ?It seems to me that these trees should be put in the best of care and kept so.? The trees in question, often referred to as trail marker trees, would not have been hard to find. Each made two roughly 90-degree bends so that a portion of the trunk grew horizontally, parallel to the ground, forming a shape that can best be described as one half of a field goal post. Today, thousands of trees with this distinctive double bend have been documented in the United States, and there is evidence that at least some of them were manipulated on purpose, shaped by indigenous peoples to provide landmarks where others did not exist.
Like us, North America?s early civilizations needed navigational tools, and in heavily w...