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poverty and wretchedness, not only such a home in a small house, but the larger and 

 more expensive the house, the more barren and forbidding. Show us an artist who will 

 picture a house on the prairie without trees, and such an artist has poverty of design, 

 has missed his calling, and no one will buy the picture ; and the home itself will lack 

 value without trees, many times more than their cost, for its lack both of beauty and 

 comfort. 



*' Lo, the poor Indian " — Although I was in Iowa before they left, I have never seen 

 the marks on the prairie where they had built a wigwam, or seldom even pitched a tent in 

 the open prairie ; but they invariably sought the timber, as do the cattle, to shelter 

 themselves from winter winds. If we will have a law to compel a man to school his 

 children, we should have a section to compel the father to set trees to protect his 

 children from the winds and storms of winter. 



Now for the fields. — Experience shows that high winds are injurious to the crops; they 

 often break the leaves of the corn, or slit them into shreds, and the growth and yield of 

 any field crop is perceptibly better where protected by a line of trees, and yet farmers 

 object to the trees taking too much of the land, without knowing that the field will yield 

 more if ten per cent, of it has a belt of trees on the north and west sides. I have never 

 heard of any field crop being injured by too close confinement of air by trees ; it is thought 

 that this may be the case with orchards. Then trim up the trees at the bottom and 

 thus give half the force of wind. Far more orchards are injured by too much wind than 

 by too little. 



Our western farmers now almost entirely use barbed wire for new fences, and re- 

 pair of old ones. The osage hedge was generally set for fences five to twenty-five years ago, 

 which needed no fence-posts ; and the farmers neglected planting wood for that pur- 

 pose, hence a good portion of the thrifty young oaks that cover the bluff lands and groves 

 about the streams of water, have been allowed to grow up until they are ten to fifteen 

 inches in diameter, making good posts. But there is a large proportion of farmers in this 

 prairie country who have no post-timber grove to cut from. They have now come to the 

 time when they begin to say : — " If we had planted post-timber twenty years ago, we 

 should now have a supply of posts." 



What shall we plant ? — First I would say to the new settler on the frontier, plant the 

 white willow, for the ease of producing trees quickly, by sticking cuttings and stakes into 

 the ground. It answers for fuel, and for fence, for wind break, for a live tree fence-post 

 to nail the piles to, or to support the barbed wire. Next have a strip of land ploughed 

 one year, and the next year set a belt of four or more rows four feet apart of Western or 

 Hardy Catalpa on the north and west sides of the farm. It is a safe tree in transplant- 

 ing, of very rapid growth, and we have abundant evidence, from undoubted authority, of 

 its great durability for posts, sills, bridge-timber, railroad ties. My experience with it, 

 for more than twenty years, fully satisfies me that it is the most valuable tree for the 

 farmers of the Northwest, and all the states where timber planting is done. Although 

 we are a fast people, we have moved very slow in getting the catalpa introduced. But wr 

 HAVE DONE IT. A catalpa of my own raising, twenty -two years old, which has had hard 

 usage, having been transplanted three times, was cut last winter, it was fourteen inches in 

 diameter. A writing-desk made from it is very beautiful. Let me step out now and 

 measure some trees I have that are six years from seed. They are six to nine inches in 

 diameter, and twenty to twenty-eight feet high. The best tree in the row of eight was 

 cut off with the axe when two years old, and in four years it has grown seven inches in 

 diameter, and twenty-four feet high. The best way to transplant catalpa, is to cut them 

 off if they are either one, two, or more years old, and set out the root with a short stump. 

 I will this year take roots, one, two, and three years, with the stock cut off, and drop 

 them in the furrow like potatoes, and then cover with the plough. This quality of tree 

 can be had now of nurserymen at $7 to $30 per 1,000 [and for a great deal less, yearlings, 

 first-class $7 ; second-class for $3.50 per 1,000. — Ed.] 



When catalpa trees are cut off near the ground they start several shoots, which should 

 all be picked off but one, and when treated in this way they make straight handsome trees 

 for the lawn, blooming early in June (the Southern Catalpa blooms two or three weeks 

 later, and cannot hybridise), the great bunches of large white flowers among the luxuriant 



