The black walnut tree is more common in southern Missouri than just about anywhere else in the United States. Many residents in the region have one or more on their property or know someone else who does.
The nut of its fruit is a popular source of food, despite also being a common source of lower back pain among people who gather them during late summer and fall. Numerous people even use the nuts as a means of making some money by delivering boxes, buckets and truck loads of them to drop-off stations for pay by-the-pound.
While the back-breaking activity of gathering walnuts is familiar to many folks, they may not give a second thought to the rest of the tree.
But there are others who give full consideration to it.
When he was 12 years old, Joe Gunter began working with lumber at his father’s mill in Ozark County. In 1959, Gunter moved to Texas County and soon began to concentrate on cutting down walnut trees. Fifty-two years later, he’s still at it.
A couple of years after he came to Texas County, friend and client, Joe Richardson II, began calling him “The Walnut King.” At the time, Gunter, a Success resident, didn’t give much heed to the nickname. But about 25 years later, he embraced the moniker and now uses it on his business cards and voice mail.
And rightly so.
Gunter has felled trees on hundreds of properties in southern Missouri, especially farms in valleys.
“I can go down a valley, and I know I’ve cut on one out of three farms,” he said. “I can even recognize trees and notice how much they’ve grown.”
Many an assistant has learned the ropes from Gunter, acquiring knowledge of “bore cutting” (a method of taking down trees right at their base by systematically cutting into their three large roots), tree recognition and other aspects of dealing with walnut timber. Some of them used that knowledge to go out on their own.
“But most of them haven’t lasted very long,” Gunter said.
Certainly not 50 years.
In addition to black walnut, Gunter has experience cutting oak, pine, cherry and butternut (also known as white walnut). But when he cut his first load of walnut in 1959, it brought good money and he was hooked.
“It brought twice as much as a load of oak,” Gunter said. “That got me interested.”
In fact, Gunter has seen a load of walnut pay as much as 10 times more than the same amount of oak.
These days, walnut processors want logs in the range of eight feet in length, whereas in years past, six and seven-footers were acceptable.
“I have to change my rules according to the way the market changes,” Gunter said.
Sometimes tackling growth large enough to get more than 10 logs out of a single tree, Gunter recalls one that yielded a whopping 18. He’s also cut one walnut that yielded 1400 board feet of lumber.
Of course, the more logs a tree produces, the more valuable it is.
“That’s why I like to cut big trees,” Gunter said, “because there’s more of those logs up in there than people think there are.”
Sometimes people come to him requesting having land cleared or a few trees cut, but some of the work Gunter has secured over the years has come by way of prospecting. He’ll see a tree or two that looks good and knock on the landowner’s door, or return to a place he previously worked after the right amount of time has passed.
“They’ll say ‘I remember you, you were here 13 years ago,'” Gunter said. “And I’ll say, ‘You reckon you got any grown back up?’ Within 13 years, trees will get big enough to cut again if they’re growing in good valley land.”
It’s not uncommon for Gunter to do jobs that involve taking down 100 or more trees. But he has done some much larger jobs in his time. In 1965, on the Cloud 9 Ranch west of West Plains, he worked three months to cut 800 trees.
For the past 16 years, most of the cutting Gunter has done has been accomplished using the same Stihl 066 Magnum chainsaw. Since he got his hands on the unit, he hasn’t come up with a reason to switch; he’s changed chains, replaced the 24-inch blade and made a couple of repairs. But when something works, it works.
“It does the job,” Gunter said.
He takes a back-up saw with him when he cuts, but that’s mainly to free the main unit if it gets pinched in a tree.
“When you get hung up, another saw will get it out quicker than wedging it out or anything else,” Gunter said.
Once a tree is down and sellable logs have been cut, the logs must be “skidded” to where a truck can haul them away. Up until 1969, Gunter used a team of mules to do his skidding. Since then, he has used a 1954 Ford Golden Jubilee tractor he acquired.
“It does well in tight places and will climb a ditch bank like a cat,” Gunter said. “And I figured out that it doesn’t need to eat hay when you park it.”
To give them extra weight for sturdiness and traction, Gunter fills the oversized rear tires in his trusty Jubilee with a liquid mixture designed to prevent freezing. After being runner-up to the same John Deere model for many years, he made some changes to the Jubilee and finally took first place last year in the Classic Tractors division at the annual tractor pull competition in Cabool.
Now the target is on Gunter’s head.
“The guy told me he was going to overhaul his tractor this winter and be ready to beat me again,” Gunter said.
When he used to load the cut logs himself, Gunter did so in a single-axle truck after finding it to be better at going through streams, ditches and mud than double-axle models. He sold the truck in 2006 and now contracts out to have logs hauled away from cut sites.
Although they will grow on ridges and knolls, walnut trees tend to do better in protected bottom areas of the hilly Ozarks, where the soil is rich and moist and wind doesn’t blow as strong.
Gunter has so much experience with walnut trees, he can now walk up to one and in his mind calculate how many logs and how much board feet he’s going to get out of it. He can also recognize good and bad wood before he cuts and either avoids or pays less for trees with signs of defects like “bird peck” (damage done by birds), “shake” (damage done by wind to trees growing in more exposed areas), hollowness and too much sap.
“I can kind of tell which ones I’m wasting my time on because I’ve cut so many of them myself,” he said. “If you work at a sawmill, you can tell what a good cut log looks like. But when you walk up to a tree and buy it like I do, if it turns out bad you learn a lesson and know what to look for next time.
“Sometimes I’ll get fooled a little by the shake or the hollow, but I usually look for a scar on the side of a hollow tree and if it’s big at the bottom I know it’s hollow. Things like that I can spot 50 yards away.”
Needing to have logs in that 8-foot range, Gunter will sometimes cut trees below ground level.
“The deepest one I’ve ever cut was four feet under ground in a sand bottom,” he said. “I had to make stair steps so I could run out of the ground while it was falling.”
Most of the lumber Gunter has cut he has sold to local mills and processors. But he has at times shipped wood to far away places, including China, Japan and Italy.
When he’s not cutting walnut trees or skidding logs, Gunter often spends time restoring one of the antique cars in his collection. But while his garage is full of items the History Channel’s American Pickers would probably salivate over, it’s walnut that still occupies most of his thoughts.
Last week, The Walnut King worked a tract of land near Arroll with help from Jim Hurst and his son, Matt, also of Success. The job included cutting down and logging numerous walnut trees. One made it particularly attractive to The Walnut King – one with a yield of 50 feet of logs.
“There’s one exceptionally good tree down there,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bought the job if it weren’t for that one tree.”
When Gunter started cutting walnut trees, he may not have envisioned doing it for more than half a century. But as it turned out, once he started, he was definitely in it for the long haul.
Now he feels his title is fitting.
“I just kept on cutting them,” Gunter said. “I don’t think that I’m ‘The Walnut King’ for buying more cut logs than anyone else, but for the logs and standing timber I’ve cut, I kind of believe I am.
“I’ve cut more than anybody I know.”