THE AGRICULTURAL GRASSES OF THE UNITED STATES. 15 



territories were acquired from Mexico in 1848, our Government turned its attention to 

 the Pacific slope, and to the necessity of a Pacific railroad, and sundry exploring ex- 

 peditions were organized in 1853 to examine the various routes — northern, southern, 

 -and central. Thtse expeditions, and those preceding, of Lewis and Clarke, of Long, 

 of Bonneville, and of Fremont, gave to the world a great mass of information of all 

 kinds concerning those little known regions. Each of the Pacific railroad exploring 

 parties had scientists of the greatest repute in various branches of investigation, as 

 geology, botany, and natural history, and had with them experienced guides, hunters, 

 woodsmen, mountaineers, and prairie-men; and all these were as ignorant as the rest 

 of the winter resources of that vast domain. The reason was that all the explorations 

 were made in summer, each party returning to winter in lower altitudes in the settle- 

 ments without any attempt to discover and unveil the winter characteristics of the 

 mountain regions. 



We learned at Onraha that the discovery of the resources of the Rocky Mountain 

 plateaus for winter grazing was really made during the war by the parties under that 

 enterprising man, the late Edward Creighton (afterward president of the First Na- 

 tional Bank of Omaha), who had taken the contract to build the telegraph line from 

 Omaha to San Francisco. One winter their animals were left to graze in the elevated 

 pastures of those regions, and were found in the spring in splendid order for the prose- 

 cution of their labors. This fact was utilized by Mr. Creigton, and it was the founda- 

 tion of his large fortune, made in great part by stock-raising in Western Nebraska and 

 Wyoming. These facts soon became known. By the time the Union Pacific Railroad 

 was completed, in 1869, the enterprising capitalists and herdsmen of the West were 

 aroused and ready to avail themselves of this new and promising mode of investment. 



General Alvord proceeds further, as follows : 



We will now undertake to explain the anomaly that the grasses of the arid plateaus 

 are ready at all seasons for grazing, whereas in winter in all the lower altitudes they 

 are not. Heat and moisture will cause the grasses in autumn and in winter to rot. 

 With us they decay and, unless cut in season, cured and made into hay, are lost to 

 use. 



In the arid Rocky Mountain plateaus the grasses, as they stand on the soil, are 

 cured in the sun during the summer, the action of heat retaining and concentrating 

 in the stalks the sugar, gluten, and other constituents of which they are composed. 

 This is true of the bunch grasses, the buffalo and grama, and many similar grasses 

 which pervade those regions. It is so cold and so dry in those elevations that there 

 are neither heat nor moisture to rot them. And the snows are so fine (save in some 

 exceptional seasons) in that cold atmosphere, that they are so blown by the winds 

 into drifts, that four-fifths of the soil is never covered by them. Thus, the grass is ever 

 accessible to the domestic and other animals, while the snow is so fine that it falls 

 from their backs ; therefore they are not encumbered with a coating of frozen snow, 

 which in the lower regions would go far toward killing the poor brutes. They find 

 shelter in the hollows, bushes, and forests during very severe weather. In the natu- 

 ral abodes of the buffalo, antelope, and other wild animals, it is found that our valued 

 domestic animals can in like manner survive the winter. Countless millions of buf- 

 faloes have ever subsisted on the buffalo grass. Although our domestic animals gen- 

 erally prefer the other grasses, the buffalo grass does not fail to be one of their re- 

 sources. 



The difficulties in lower altitudes than those I have described have been that after 

 a warm speJl and a thaw, the snow freezes to a crust and the grass is matted down 

 by the ice, and kept from the stock. East of the Cascade Mountains, in the'arid por- 

 tion of Oregon, bunch grasses and cured grasses are found near the Dalles, where it is 

 only 300 or 400 feet above the sea. In December, 1852, I witnessed such a thaw, fol- 

 lowed by freezing, which kept the oxen from getting to the grasses, and consequently 

 large numbers died of starvation. If they had been wintered near Fort Boise or any- 



