114 FOREST PLANTING. 



EXPERIMENTS IN CULTIVATION ON THE PLAINS 



ALONG THE LINE OF THE KANSAS 



PACIFIC RAILWAY. 



BY R. S. ELLIOTT. 

 [Published in Prof. Hayden's Geological Report.] 



The treeless plains between the Platte and Arkansas Rivers may 

 be said to extend from the ninety-seventh meridian of longitude to 

 the Rocky Mountains. North of the Platte and south of the 

 Arkansas the general features of the country are similar, but for the 

 purpose of this report we need only have in view the region between 

 the rivers. Its drainage is mainly through the Kansas River, the 

 numerous affluents of which afford, in pools or currents, the water- 

 supplies which have enabled the buffalo to sustain himself in all its 

 parts. Along some of the streams there are occasional groves and 

 fringes of timber ash, box-elder, cedar, cherry, cottonwood^ elm, 

 hackberry, oak, plum, walnut, and willow ; some of the species per- 

 sistent to the mountains, but not in numbers or distribution sufficient 

 to change the character of the country from that of open, treeless 

 plains, rising gradually from about 1,000 feet above the level of 

 the sea at the ninety-seventh meridian to more than 5,000 feet at 

 Denver. 



There is great uniformity in the surface of this immense inclined 

 plane. The face of the country presents a series of gentle undula- 

 tions, but there are no points of much elevation above the general 

 surface, nor any great depressions below it. The geology seems to 

 be in harmony with the surface features, as the earths and rocks of 

 this vast region, five hundred miles in width, range from Lower 

 Cretaceous, (Mudge,) on its eastern border, to the later Tertiaries of 

 the Lake period, (Hayden and Newberry,) near the base of the 

 mountains. 



