80 NATIVE PASTUKES. 



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

 Under favorable conditions the wild, native grasses prodmte 

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

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

 /grasses cannot endure closo ])asturing or heavy tramping. ^Jo- 

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

 years of even moderately close grazing, become pernmnently 

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



*' III Xe])raska," says l^r. C. E. liessey, in 188'), "There have 

 been notable migrations of plants within tlie past twenty 

 or thirty years. Tlie buffalo grasses of various kinds were 

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

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

 been followed up by the blue-stems {AtuJrojXKjon and Cry.sdjiu- 

 f/on). Tlie blue-stems now grow in great luxuriance all over 

 great parts of the jjlains of Eastern Nebraska, where twenty 

 years ago the ground was practically bare, being but thinly 

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

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

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



Native Pastures. — With reference to grazing in Colo- 

 rado, 1{. A. Camcn i, in the National Live-Stock Journal, 

 18T2, says: '* The rainfall is })recipitated mainly in the spring 

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

 nntnths are dry. witli 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 .Tune. It is the absence of moisture in any quantity during 

 the warm weatlier that not only completely cures the native 

 grasses, but which preserves them unfcrmented, sweet and 

 nutritious during the summer and winter. They assnme a 

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

 striking the eye of the farmer from the New England States 



