If there is anything that evokes Arizona and the southwest more effectively than a handful of dried out tumbleweeds rolling across a deserted highway, Hollywood has not yet discovered it. Tumbleweed is wed to the American West as surely as Chiquita is wed to bananas.
We can look as far back as 1935 and find Gene Autry crooning “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” in a movie of the same name. In his smooth, honest cowpoke voice, Autry sings the Bill Nolan lyrics:
“I’ll keep rolling along,
Deep in my heart is a song,
Here on the range I belong,
Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”
Few would question that an honest cowpoke belongs on the range with his critters, but how about those tumbleweeds? We once put the question to Tom Chambers, a singer and former president of the Western Music Association.
“The cowboy is not tied down,” Chambers said. “He is just tumbling, tumbling along. He’s just part of nature, like the tumbleweed, and he requires harmony with nature to give him freedom. Without the wind, the tumbleweed is just a dead Russian thistle.”
That’s Russian thistle (Salsola), with the emphasis on Russian.
“The weed that won the West,” as one Nevada researcher called it, is not, ironically, native to any western state. Prior to the late 19th century, there was not a single tumbleweed to be found rolling along in the U.S. Shortly before the turn of the last century, however, Russian farmers began emigrating to the plains of South and North Dakota, bringing with them sacks of flax seed (the seed used for making linseed oil and linen).
“Tumbleweed came to this country in contaminated sacks of flax seed,” said Martin Karpiscak, a research scientist with the University of Arizona’s Department of Arid Land Studies. “It fell off trains and rapidly spread along railroad lines. In 20 years it had spread several hundred miles.”
If ideology could spread as efficiently as the tumbleweed plant, the entire world would undoubtedly be a part of Russia today. A single large tumbleweed, Karpiscak noted, can produce 200,000 seeds. All of those seeds, with a minimum of moisture, can germinate in as little as 30 minutes.
Despite the romantic image, tumbleweeds have become an expensive and obnoxious problem for many communities throughout the West. The plant thrives in disturbed soils, so that retired agricultural fields or areas leveled for new housing developments are prime breeding grounds for tumbleweeds. The plants are brittle and prickly and the roots snap easily in light winds.
“They have been a big problem at some military installations,” Karpiscak observed, “and in other places they’ve been blown into such big piles that they’ve knocked down fences.” Ever wonder how many drivers have swerved dangerously to get out of the way of a rolling ball of tumbleweed? You don’t have to swerve at all, of course, because tumbleweed will just disintegrate when you roll over it, but some people don’t know that.
Numerous attempts to rid the West of this enduring symbol have met with very limited success. Tumbleweed eating moths once were imported from Pakistan and Afghanistan but the moths evidently could not eat enough tumbleweed fast enough.
Well, what about humans? Maybe we could eat it to extinction. Was there any possibility that tumbleweed could be made palatable for the dinner table? A writer named Carolyn Niethammer thought so. She wrote a book called The Tumbleweed Gourmet, which the University of Arizona Press published in 1987. But “Cream of Tumbleweed Soup” never quite caught on as an Epicurean delight, and the book went out of circulation in 1997.
Needless to say, the tumbleweed did not.
So, another thought surfaced. If people won’t eat tumbleweed, maybe they’ll burn it. In the 1970’s and 1980’s Arid Land Studies Department ground up acres of tumbleweeds and compressed them into fireplace logs. Pound for pound, researchers discovered, tumbleweed contained as much thermal energy as wood. Wouldn’t the public be impressed?
Some 10,000 “tumblelogs” were produced but, once again, the idea never caught on. Too many consumers found the odor of burning tumbleweed offensive. Researchers toyed with the idea of adding some pine or oak scent to the mix, a variation on the notion that maybe you really can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but that idea evidently never got off the drawing boards. Finally, the ugly face of economics reared its head: The price of regular fuel woods dropped so low in the 70’s that tumblelogs couldn’t compete.
So, it is no surprise that Karpiscak, who has studied tumbleweed right down to its shallow roots, is so confident when he says, “I doubt anybody will ever get rid of tumbleweeds completely.”
samnegri 