ROCKY MOUNTAIN BVEKGKEENl ?! 



Beem flooded with the softness of the moonlight. These trees 

 of such attractive and unique coloring, are sports or variations 

 of their respective species, found only in our Western mountains. 



Gathering The Seeds. Well, let us take a trip to the moun- 

 tains and gather some seeds. One year we followed in the wake 

 of a sawmill. The men took the logs and let us have the 

 tops, so we could gather rapidly. But generally we let the 

 squirrels do the work. They can climb so much better than we. 

 I have been In those high altitudes when the trees wduld be 

 burdened with cones, and in three weeks there would not be 

 one to be seen. It is a, busy time both for squirrels and seed 

 gatherers. It would be cruel to the squirrels were it not for 

 the fact that they cut off ten times as much as they can possibly 

 ' consume. But their idea is to leave nothing. They will take 

 a large tree, say of the Concolor, the cones of which are as 

 large as an ear of small sweet corn, and in a short time the 

 stems will be gnawed off and the cones come thumping to the 

 ground. Sometimes the cones are bad; the seeds did not 

 mature. These the squirrels never touched. We did, but found 

 them worthless. At first we used to climb and gather at great 

 expense and trouble, but now our collectors almost entirely de- 

 pend on the squirrels. If a man wants the hardest scolding 

 he ever had let him fill a, bag with cones while the little fel- 

 low is at work up a tree. He tells him in plain language he 

 is a thief and a robber, and if he wasn't so large he would come 

 down and give him the biggest thrashing- he ever had, and 

 sometimes he would start to do it anyhow, but the nearer 

 he got to his enemy the bigger he looked, and then he would go 

 back and work a while and scold a while. 



The most singular thing about the little fellow Is the way he 

 keeps the seeds. They must be kept fresh or he cannot use 

 them. If they should spoil he would starve. He has places 

 where he stores them among old well-rotted cones. He stands 

 them on end in clusters of about a double handful and sprinkles 

 some old cone dust between them; then covers them lightly 

 and sometimes under a single tree the men will get two or 

 three bushels. The cones are put in sacks and bound on burros 

 or horses and taken to camp, where they are spread out on 

 large sheets to dry. They are then threshed out and put 

 through a fanning mill and are ready for market. The Industry 

 has grown immensely. Our collectors in Beulah, Col., gather 

 nearly a ton a. year; many of these go to Europe. One year we 

 sent a lot to plant Prince Bismarck's estate, a few years before 

 he died. 



The PIcea Pungens. The Picea Pungens Is the king of the 

 Spruces, clothed in ro7"il robes of silver and sapphire, a very 

 kohinoor smong the gt/ns of the Rockies. It is a child of the 

 stormi king, growing at an altitude of from 8,000 to 10,000 feet 



