110 



in spite of these handicaps of soil and drainage had it not been for fires 

 in the grass, which must have burned at frequent, perhaps annual, in- 

 tervals. The prevailing winds are southwest. Almost without excep- 

 tion, the map of forest soils shows that the strips of timber along streams 

 were considerably wider on the north or east banks than on the south 

 or west. The fires on the exposed banks confined the timbers closely tc 

 the stream, while this stream-barrier permitted the forest to creep out in 

 the lee of the protection thus afforded. While clearing has over wide 

 areas removed all traces of the original forests, the record of its previous 

 existence is thus imbedded in the character of the soil itself, and the 

 reliability of the classification thus indicated has been abundantly proved 

 in areas where the evidence still remained in the form of stumps, or 

 remnants of the forest itself. 



Based upon these soil classifications, the Soil Survey states that in 

 44 counties for which records are completed, a total of 6,105,032 acres 

 was originally forested. A map showing the gross areas of these 

 forested soils for all counties indicates that approximately 50 per 

 cent of the state might have originally had timber cover. But there 

 exist many smaller areas of prairie soils within these districts. For the 

 44 counties above mentioned, it was found that the area of forest soils 

 as shown by the map was apparently 7,016,223 acres, thus indicating 

 that but 85.73 per cent of the apparent forest area was actually forested, 

 or 6,105,032 acres. 



For the entire state, a gross area of 17,838,971 acres of original 

 forest soils was indicated by this soil map. Applying the same reduction 

 per cent to this figure, the resulting net area originally forested was indi- 

 cated as 15,293,349 acres, or 42.64 per cent of the state. This rough 

 check was then confirmed in another manner. 



The forty- four counties on which the Soil Survey figures were 

 based are distributed as follows : 



In the sixty-one counties lying in the north half of the state thirty- 

 two were covered and twenty-nine omitted. In the forty-one counties 

 making up the more heavily wooded southern half, twelve were covered 

 and twenty-nine omitted. It is these southern counties, whose weight 

 is thus considerably lessened, which raise the total of wooded area above 

 the one third, which applied more correctly to the remainder of the 

 state than to the whole. A separate computation of these two groups 

 of counties gave areas originally wooded as follows: 



