Have you ever heard of Indian wood?  I know, me either.  But Mike and I were at John and Kay Griffin's farm last weekend and he had some on his trailer.  He was putting in a road on his property and dug up some pine tree stumps that would be considered "Indian wood". I pulled off a small piece and smelled it - turpentine! Wow, it was strong.

 Here's a picture of what the stumps look like. Not much to look at, but John said that tiny pieces of the wood from this kind of pine tree was used to start fires because of the concentrated turpentine in the wood.  What??? I've been around pine trees my whole life and didn't know this?  I needed to do some research!

Sure enough, this type of wood is also called fatwood, fat lighter, pine knot, and heart pine.  When a pine tree is cut down, struck by lightning,  or even just loses a limb, the tree’s roots continue to send pitch – or resin, the sticky stuff that hardens into amber – to the impacted area. 

The wood becomes saturated with the pitch, which contains terpenes.  That's right, the stuff turpentine is made of.  (it's a natural chemical that is highly flammable).  The pitch also makes the fatwood extra hard and resistant to rot. Aha, that's why it doesn't totally decompose out in the woods.

A small amount of fatwood can be carried as part of a tinder kit (you know, next time you're roughing it out in the woods with no charcoal lighter).
 

Here's a picture of the wood up close.  You can see the red streaks embedded in the wood.  Pine resin is resistant to decay and will begin to solidify when the tree dies. Why one stump starts to decay and another one next door becomes fatwood depends on the acidity of the ground, time of year the tree fell,  the condition of the tree while it was living.

So, here's what you have to do.  Go out in the woods, find an old nasty rotting pine tree stump and try to kick it over.  If it resists, and you have to use force to get it out, it may be fatwood.  If it disintegrates when you kick it, keep looking.  If you use a wood burning fireplace in the winter, a tiny piece of fatwood will help get the fire going.

I'll let you know this winter how well that works.  I wonder how many stumps I'm going to have to kick before I find any?  That's OK, Mike will be the one who has to dig them up!