80 NATIVE PASTURES. 



direction, and now it can be found in prairies thirty miles away. 

 Under favorable conditions the wild, native grasses produce 

 from one to three tons or more of hay per acre." 



Professor Shelton, for Central Kansas, says: "Our prairie 

 grasses cannot endure close pasturing or heavy tramping. No- 

 toriously, the most promising wild pastures, after three or four 

 years of even moderately close grazing, become permanently 

 occupied by coarse, rank-smelling, worthless weeds." 



"In Nebraska," says Dr. C. E. Bessey, in 1885, "There have 

 been notable migrations of plants within the past twenty 

 or thirty years. The buffalo grasses of various kinds were 

 formerly abundant in the eastern part of the State, now they 

 have retreated a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles, and have 

 been followed up by the blue-stems (Andropogon and Crysopo- 

 ffon). The blue-stems now grow in great luxuriance all over 

 great parts of the plains of Eastern Nebraska, where twenty 

 years ago the ground was practically bare, being but thinly 

 covered by buffalo grasses. In Dakota it is the same, the tall 

 blue-stems are marching across the plains, and turning what 

 were once but little better than deserts, into grassy prairies." 



Native Pastures. With reference to grazing in Colo- 

 rado, R. A. Cameron, in the National Live-Stock Journal, 

 1872, says: " The rainfall is precipitated mainly in the spring 

 as rain, and in the winter entirely as snow. The summer 

 months are dry, with rare rainfalls, and these are short, followed 

 immediately by cloudless skies. The grasses grow rapidly in the 

 spring, but are cut short by the drought, and ripen and dry up 

 in June. It is the absence of moisture in any quantity during 

 the warm weather that not only completely cures the native 

 grasses, but which preserves them unfermented, sweet and 

 nutritious during the summer and winter. They assume a 

 brown color, and give a sombre aspect to the great plains, 

 striking the eye of the farmer from the New England States 



