FORESTRY AND THE WATER PROBLEM. 477 



healthful breezes and the purified waters that drive away the pesti- 

 lence and supply all the people with the very " elixir of life." 



Contrast with the forest the natural condition of the treeless 

 prairie. The terrible hot and cold winds blow there unchecked and 

 untamed, beating the ground harder and harder at every merciless 

 touch, oft rolling up sand waves, oft stripping off the covering on 

 millions of acres of grain, wilting down our tender plants, depleting 

 the very juices of life under the inflamed skins of our exposed stock, 

 making farmers nervous, angular and profanely mad while buffet- 

 ing against these aerial fiends; and yet not over ten per cent of them 

 are doing anything practical and worth a mention of credit to build 

 up forest walls for a paying agriculture. 



Without the necessary forestal areas on the prairie,what is the efifect 

 of our hard-struggling agriculture upon our lake and river systems? 

 la their wild state our prairie sods are grass-matted and hard, pre- 

 venting much of the water from the clouds to sink underground 

 and allowing it to run off into great lakes that overflow and cut the 

 country into river channels. Hence it was, that when the prairie 

 was unsettled and the forests unraided by ax and fire, our lakes and 

 rivers, generally speaking, were filled to the brim. The subduing 

 of the sods by the plow and pulverizing them by the harrow, thus 

 tearing off the sod-shell, have let the rainfall down into the lower 

 strata, mainly retained on the surface of the clay hard-pan under 

 the soil, largely taking it away from the lake and river and giving 

 it to the plants of our culture, so that all lakes fed by surface 

 water and not by deep underground springs must inevitably dry up. 



Are we therefore to infer that eventually we must to a great extent 

 lose our lake and river systems because of the increasing deinands 

 of agriculture? This calamity follows unless we save and build 

 enough forestry to counter-balance the unlimited draft upon our 

 precipitation. A compensative law here should be considered. 

 The more densely we cover our prairie lands and waste places with 

 the rank vegetation of our culture, the more evaporation accrues for 

 air humidity, inductive to rainfall; but such vegetation cannot per- 

 form the full function of the forest. Our farm and horticultural 

 plants have no natural mulch to economize moisture like the forest, 

 nor have they a leafy roof, lifted high for air circulation to shade 

 the ground and keep the air cooler to precipitate humid winds, like 

 the forest. 



It is obvious that forestry building must accompany agriculture in 

 all its horticultural and other relations; that where the plow takes an 

 acre, another or at least half an acre somewhere should and must be 

 given to forestry to preserve the precipitatioual balance. The for- 

 estry and water problem reduced to its primal base of operation is 

 inathematically this: 



1. That at least one-third of our remaining native forests of the 

 state, located mainly on non-agricultural lands and the spring 

 headlands of our water systems, should be reserved as a forest area, 

 kept intact for all time for water preservation, game and lumber 

 profit without invasion upon new growth. 



2. That at least one-third of the unforesled prairie portion of the 



