138 WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING. 



at all. Let our boys be incited to gather seeds and 

 plant nurseries ; let young trees be bought by the 

 thousand where they now are by the dozen, and let 

 us all cooperate in covering our unsightly rocks and 

 making glad our waste places by a superabundance 

 of choice, thrifty, healthy trees. 



Many of our young men have a taste for adventure 

 and excitement which leads them to the ocean, the 

 mines, to Australia or some other far-off land recently 

 and scantily peopled by civilized beings. I will not 

 quarrel with their taste ; but I judge that there are 

 openings for their enterprise and daring within the 

 area of our own country. Let one thousand of them 

 resolve to devote the next five years to planting for- 

 ests on the treeless plains arid virtual deserts of the 

 Great Basin and on either side of it ; let them select 

 locations where some acres may cheaply and surely 

 be irrigated, and, having carefully provided them- 

 selves with an abundance of the best seeds, let them 

 start patches of woodland at points the most remote 

 from present timber, until a thousand different forests 

 one to each of the associates- -shall have been started 

 and guarded till their roots have taken firm hold of 

 the earth. I presume Congress would grant them 

 preemptions to each section on which they thus 

 planted at least forty acres of forest, and that most of 

 these preemption rights could, within ten years, be 

 sold to settlers for many times their original cost. 



