360° FORESTRY OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
for the generation preceding him, and nothing for the generation to come; 
he expects the next generation to provide its own shade. The question 
he wishes to determine is whether the trees he plants will benefit men 
in this generation. Curiously, people almost always overestimate the 
age of trees. Who has not heard a great elm or oak spoken of as cen- 
turies old when it really has grown within the lifetime of living men? 
Trees are a sure crop, and, after all, a quick crop. The homesteader 
who goes out on the raw prairie knows that it is five years before his" 
farm can be producing crops with anything like regularity. His trees 
are making a return as soon as his fields are. The Mennonite settlers 
in Kansas, of whose success we have spoken, in seven years, at the far- 
thest, from the time they turned the first sod, are literally sitting in 
the shade of the trees they planted; are raising their own firewood, 
and eating the fruit of their own mulberry trees. What these settlers 
from Russia, strangers to our climate and soil, can do, others can do. 
It must be remembered, too, that the objectors have had their day; 
every argument which can be used against the cultivation of forest 
trees has been used in the prairie States west of the Mississippi against 
the cultivation of fruit trees. For example, men accustomed to hillside 
orchards in the old States have demonstrated to their own satisfaction 
that apples would not grow in Kansas; but wagons full of round and 
rosy evidences. to the contrary may be seen standing in the streets of 
every Kansas market town. The number of those who till the soil, be 
it a bit of garden ground or acres by the hundred, who believe in the 
profitableness of trees, is constantly increasing. In front of the humblest 
cottage in town you see the three or four maples or elms covering the 
front of the lot; and out on the wide prairies, as far as settlement has 
extended, the group of planted trees marks the outpost of the picket 
guard of civilization. It is with the hope of contributing in some way 
to this useful and beautiful pursuit, which is to shelter the bare and 
blistered earth; which is to catch and hold the rain and the dew; which 
is to shelter the home and its o¢cupants from summer’s heat and win- 
ter’s' cold; which is to bring fuel and comfort to the housewife; and 
which is to increase by millions the well-earned wealth of a nation, that 
this brief report is submitted to reading and thinking people. 
Respectfully submitted. 
F. P. BAKER, 
