PURSUITS. 145 



their condition, and prevent the growth of grove and forest 

 over the spaces covered only with the long grass and flowers. 

 The roots of the grass are exceeding tough, and form a 

 sward w^iich keeps down the slower vegetation of the em- 

 bryo forest, which is here, as elsewhere, conceived within the 

 mould of the teeming earth. This sward is so compact and 

 strong, that five or six yoke of oxen are necessary for a 

 breaking team, w^itli a very large plough running on wheels, 

 called a prairie plough. The other circumstance adverse to 

 forest growth, beside the sward, is the amiual burning of the 

 prairies by the Indians and hunters, which has been prac- 

 tised since the country was first visited by the French in the 

 seventeenth century, and is said, by the discoverer of the 

 Missisippi, to be an old custom of the natives. The bodies 

 of timber are almost exclusively on the streams, and the 

 spaces between are prairie ; presenting, at their junction, the 

 similitude of shore and sea ; which likeness, no doubt, in- 

 duced an old sailor (whom 1 know) to fix his residence and 

 build his house on one of these points^ as the projections of 

 the groves into the prairie are called, w^here, in prospect lay 

 before him a wide expanse of prairie 



" Stretching 

 In graceful undulations, far away 

 As if the ocean in his gentlest swell 

 Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed 

 And motionless — " 



The prairie has, for the most part, this undulatnig surface. 



Some of it is broken by ridges and deep ravines, some only 



slightly undulating, sufficient to shed the waters, some a dead 



level as true as could be drawn with a line. Of course 



some of these tracts of prairie are wet, others dry. On 



these prairies, so long as the country is only partially settled, 



8 



