STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 399 



most beneficent influence upon plant growtli in the more east- 

 ern parts of the State especially, are receding faster than our 

 forests are growing in other directions. A.nd when they are 

 leveled down by the woodman's axe, not only will winds be 

 fiercer in the upper Mississippi valley and the air drier, but 

 your luck here in the fruit line will be more like ours on the 

 now almost treeless prairie, fortuitous as our temperamental 

 vicissitudes. Just beyond the western border of our State, in 

 Dakota, are the Coteaux, a high and long rampart of hills, with 

 innumerable ravines, heretofore thickly studded with forests, 

 down which babble the crystal brooks. 



The Sissetous there, who have land charters, folloAv the exam- 

 ple of the pale faces elsewhere, cutting and slashing down the 

 century trees for fuel-sale in our markets, and the prairie fires, 

 set by careless Indians or whites, lap up the rest. Unless the 

 national government soon interferes, prohibiting such vandalism, 

 the now beautiful Minnesota will dry up at its more northern and 

 western sources. There is a similar depredation, and on a more 

 gigantic scale, in Montana, in Colorado and other Eocky 

 Mountain states; if not speedily arrested and forests restored, 

 not only will the facilities of irrigation be literally destroyed, 

 but the more western plains will be transformed into dry and 

 parching deserts. And what is still more alarming, congress 

 intends to put on the finishing stroke by abolishing the timber- 

 culture act, the enfoicement of which — granting special abuses, 

 as in everything else — has blessed the prairie country with here 

 and there a growing forest. If there be a personal devil to 

 ''hand the wretch to order," he certainly is busy destroying our 

 forests, for thereby humanity can be most cursed. 



As an organized body that knows what it is about, let us storm 

 our legislature, and by it storm Congress, to save our great 

 forests from utter extinction. Let us demand appropriations to 

 change our ravines and basins and lesser lakes and rivers, into 

 a grand reservoir system, holding back the spring surplus waters 

 now running to waste, whence to draw not only navigable depths 

 for commerce, but aqueous refreshment for all the thirsty plains 

 below. Let us demand a law that shall not only encourage by a 

 money consideration, but compel landholders to plant forests, 

 making such planting on timber claim or homestead inhere with 

 title. When this feasible enterprise is put into execution on the 

 vast scale that it merits, there will be less floods, evaj)oration 

 checked, extremes of heat and cold mitigated, our climate 



