xxx INTRODUCTION. 
that will set out the greatest number of forest -trees. 
When I was there it was $500 for the first premium, 
$400 for the second, and so on down to $25. Even the 
women and children could earn premiums, medals, and 
diplomas, and great was the competition for these re- 
wards of the state. The results of all have been wonder- 
ful. Patches of timber have sprung up everywhere, and 
where a few years ago only the naked plain was seen, 
now waves a goodly forest. Trees ten and twelve years 
old are thirty feet high, and eight to ten inches in diame- 
ter. It may be remarked that forest-trees grow in the 
West with wonderful rapidity, and if care were taken in 
planting them, all the vast flats from the Missouri River 
to the Rocky Mountains would soon be covered with 
forests and farms. It has been demonstrated in Utah 
and other places that sage-brush land, when irrigated, 
produces twenty-five, thirty, and even forty bushels of 
wheat per acre. In Colorado I have seen fifty bushels of 
wheat per acre cut from land which, before it was ir- 
rigated, looked like a worthless gravel-heap. 
As an evidence of the rapidity with which trees grow, 
Mr. James T. Allen of Nebraska says: William Hollen- 
beck has two hundred acres of timber, mostly ash, planted 
from seedlings in 1861, and the trees now measure thirty- 
five inches in circumference, and are over forty feet high. 
Mr. Hollenbeck also has forty acres of black walnut 
planted in 1865, and many of the trees now measure 
thirty-five inches in circumference, and are forty-five 
feet high. Some of them bore nuts four years from the 
planting. 
There are soft maples growing in Omaha, Nebraska, 
which at fourteen years of age were forty-three inches 
in circumference, and forty-five feet high. Two speci- 
