 The following is a production of New Mexico State University. The Dallas Arboretum is a collection of beautiful gardens visited by many people. Today we are in the Texas Pioneer Adventure exhibit with Maria Conroy. Hi, Maria. Hi, Curtis. A real teepee here. It is. What's the function of this garden here at the Arboretum? Well, we call this area our Texas Pioneer Adventure Area, and we built it about three years ago to tell the story of the peoples who lived here in Texas in the 19th century and how plants were such a vital part of their lives. The Native Americans used a lot of the plants and animals here. They surely did. They were the first people who were here, and they taught the pioneers so much of what they knew. They were not farmers. They were gatherers and hunters. So we have artifacts around. This is a Please Touch exhibit where people can come in and get a chance to see the kind of animals that the Native Americans would have hunted. So we have the skins here. You can pet a fox and a coyote and see the kinds of animals they would have hunted. The buffalo, of course, being the primary animal that they were looking for and the animal that they followed in their travels. And then as they went along, they learned a lot about plants and the different uses of plants as medicines and as food, and they shared that information with the pioneers when they got here. When the pioneers came and their covered wagons, they were taught first by the Indians. Exactly. I hear a lot of sound. You've got some visitors here now, don't you? Yes, we do. We do a lot of school groups here teaching them about the plants of this area. So they can see what this black land prairie looks like and how they built homes out of the prairie. That's right. It's a hard thing to try to visualize. Here I see it. It looks good and black, so you'd think it's rich, but I can see the calcium in it. But it does make a good house. It does. What does it like to live in? Well, come inside and you'll find out. Oh, it's cool in here. It is cooler in summer, warmer in winter. That's nice. What caused them to decide to build this odd house? They had their wagons. They did, but they discovered the kind of storms we have here in North Texas that a covered wagon is not reliable housing. So they built what they had. There weren't enough trees in this area, this grassland area for them to build wooden houses. So they dug up the sod and stacked it like bricks and built sod houses. I think it's really interesting. Look at the walls here. You can see this was the living prairie they built their house out of. That's right. So it probably was green for a while. It was green. It was. They have just about everything you need in the house. Shelves, bed, privacy, a screen there. I used quilt to give them a bedroom at night and open it up for more living space during the day. You can see how small it was. Sod house is very hard to build and they came here to be working on the planting. And so they built their house just as small as they could to get by. I noticed there's candidates here for the ceiling. Right. The original houses they built with the branches and sod laid on the top, but then they had a lot of company like snakes in their soup and bugs dropping in on them. So they thought of taking the canvas off that covered wagon and using it as a ceiling. And that helped. It's still leaked, but at least it didn't leak bugs. So that's one of the reasons, it's still leaked. One of the reasons they decided that they wanted to build a woodhouse. And so you do have woodhouses too. That's right. We do. Well, this looks like the kind of house you see on television that the pioneers lived in. It does. It does. This is a reproduction of actual size and style of some of the early woodhouses. And they had landscaping around their houses. They did native plant landscapes. So they used what was available in the area. Exactly. And these are native plants here. I recognize the aster. Right. Very good. And I see over here the autumn sage. That's right. Which is a native of Texas. Excellent. And sun drops. Exactly. Desert willow. I've seen that way out in West Texas. Yes. It does very well here. And the red oak here. It's a schumar. Okay. Red oak. It does very well here. Saw some St. John's Ward as well. It does very, very well here. Maria, thank you for showing us how the people lived here in the black land prairies. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author. And do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.