EARLY DAY STORIES. 169 



Kongra-tongra, crow big. However, those people who visit 

 the Hot Springs of South Dakota for their health, or who 

 take a trip to Wind Cave, or who camp for a week or two 

 in Spearfish Canyon for an outing, see little of the Black 

 Hills and know little about them on their return. If you 

 would really know the Black Hills, leave the beaten trails 

 do not go where everyone else goes, but go where no one else 

 goes, or, at any rate, where few others go. By so doing you 

 will learn to know the Black Hills. 



Although the Black Hills are so nearly completely cov- 

 ered with a growth of evergreen timber as to give them, 

 when seen at a distance, a deep dark color, there is yet much 

 of the surface that is treeless. In the lower parts of the 

 hills the timber is confined chiefly to the canyons, the side 

 ravines and pockets in the hillsides, and the north slopes 

 the level tracts and the south slopes being nearly treeless. 

 As higher elevations are reached the timber becomes denser 

 and heavier, and thickets of quaking aspen and second- 

 growth groves of pine and spruce appear, making dense 

 thickets in many places. At an elevation of 5000 to 6000 

 feet the surface is mostly covered with timber, but even then 

 it is greatly diversified by many open treeless tracts called 

 parks, covered only with grass and containing anywhere 

 from an acre or two up to hundreds of acres of open country. 

 These parklike tracts, surrounded with dense forest are ex- 

 tremely attractive. Sometimes these parks take the form 

 of open glades, a quarter or a half mile long, and only a few 

 rods wide, covered with densely growing grass a foot or so 

 high, with an abundant variety of bright colored flowers. 



Do not conclude that the Black Hills country is all of it 

 made up of rough, rocky ragged hills and canyons some 

 of it is, much of it in fact, but there are hundreds of tracts 

 of smooth, undulating, or sloping land, varying from a few 

 acres to hundreds of acres in a tract. There are wagon 

 trails leading through in many places, these, of course, hold- 



