} 1 00 Ot 4 4 - 
56 ANNUAL REPORT. 
help. After you have made this fight and ofieeta you have a 
piece of ground you can grow trees on or anything else ; but past 
you do make it, every month’s delay gives the enemy an advan’ 
Take the bull by the horns! Having made this fight Pei 
dred small battle fields on the Main Line, and conquered, we follow- 
ed up the victory, by plunging our cuttings into the deep mellow 
earth as deep as we could stick them. Between April 23d and May 
23d, 1873, we made this fight, and planted this first installment of 
500,000 white willows. 
They are strung along in small, isolated tracts from Swede Grove 
to the Breckenridge Flats, a distance of over a hundred miles. But 
another enemy was putting in an appearance. No sooner did the 
willows commence growing than the weeds and grass came up as 
thick as hair on a dog. We lost no time in organizing a campaign 
against this new enemy, and the fight was kept up without intermis- 
sion until August ist. It was a lively tussel between the willows 
and the grass and weeds, but the willows came out ahead, excepting 
in one or two instances near Swede Grove where the pigeon grass 
was too many for them. 
During the month of June and a few of the first days of July we 
broke about 500 acres for future tree planting. This breaking was 
done in strips parallel with the road, and on each side of the track— 
two strips on each side; the first strip from eight to sixteen feet 
wide with the right of way lines in the centre of the strip; then, par- 
allel with these strips, and from 100 to 180 feet back, another strip 
on each side was broken 25 feet wide. By planting white willow 
cuttings exactly on the right of way lines the company will in four 
or five years have a live fence sufficient to keep cattle and horses 
away from the track, and at the same time grow a valuable wind- 
break. The strips 25 feet wide and 100 to 150 back are also to be 
planted to willow, cottonwood, soft maple, box elder, ash, butternut, 
oak and other valuable varieties of timber. Here we obtain an outer 
wind-break at small cost, which will not only protect the road from 
snow blockades but will, also, in the course of fifteen or twenty 
years, and from then for all time, furnish ties, just when, and where, 
they will be needed. In the future construction of railroads across 
prairie regions, such strips should be broken while the road is in 
process of construction ; or better yet, would be the breaking of all 
the ground between the strips and planting the whole belt. This 
would fill the bill. 
To resume, September 1st, 1873, all hands commenced pulling up 
and piling the weeds which had grown during harvest. Then when 
this was done we mowed around the young trees, burned around 
them, burning up all the weeds and rubbish, and thus protecting the 
trees from the prairie fires which had not yet begun to run. 
This is the payment of tae premium on a kind of insurance the 
tree-planter cannot safely postpone beyond the last of September. 
In October of this season of 1873 we went into our June breaking 
between Kandiyohi and St, John, with plows. Found it mellow as 
an ash heap. October 12th commenced planting white ash seed on 
some of this ground, between Willmar and St. John. Planted 
enough for 1,500,000 trees, when the ground froze up, the last of Oc- 
