4 in FORESTRY OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 
gradually disappeared as you traveled westward. These same streams 
were supplied with considerable bodies of timber from the mountains 
eastward. The intervening distance from where the timber disappeared 
on the east to where it again begun on the west was perhaps two hun- 
dred miles, although in the adjoining bluffs, at points where no trees 
or even brush was found along the streams, bodies of old trees were 
found and used extensively for firewood. 
The digging of irrigating canals is the signal for a heavy volunteer 
growth of timber along their borders, the cottonwood, the willow, and 
the elm predominating. Forest trees planted by tue settlers or ranch- 
men upon the bottom lands at any point between the Missouri River 
and the mountains seem to live and flourish without further attention. 
All plainsmen remember the immense “lone cottonwood”. tree that: 
stood for a century, far removed from the Arkansas River in the vicinity 
of Fort Dodge, Kansas. For years large supplies of cedar were found 
in the hills near Julesburg, Nebr., not far from the confluence of the 
North and South Platte Rivers; this timber was used extensively by 
Ben Holliday’s overland stage line even as late as 1865. 
The average annual rain-fall of this great plain, which extends 
from the Territory of Dakota to the Rio Grande, does not exceed 12 
inches. Although it is claimed that timber will not grow in a region 
where the annual rain-fall is less than 20 inches, and although it may 
be argued that the great plains are treeless because they are rainless, 
and not rainless because they are treeless, people who have lived on 
the eastern border of the great desert for the last quarter of a century 
and noted the climatic changes wrought in that time,and who have 
seen this border pushed westward several hundred miles, have faith to 
believe that not only will the civilization of the Missouri Valley, fos- 
tered and sustained by modern forms of agriculture, be met from the 
west by that sustained by artificial water supply, but that the nine- 
teenth century will witness the highest forms of horticulture and agri- 
culture successfully practiced upon an unlimited scale in the very heart 
of this now treeless and rainless desert. 
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. 
The great gain so far made is that of knowledge, and to this great 
gain every discussion, every report, every experiment, every success, 
every failure even, has contributed. The too enthusiastic have learned 
moderation, and the despondent have been encouraged. No man who 
has looked over the ground will maintain that all kinds of trees will 
grow in the high prairies and plains that grow in lands of mists, rain, 
and mountain, and, on the other side, no thoroughly posted and practi- 
cal prairie farmer or plains-man will say that trees will not grow even 
in the constantly diminishing precincts of the ‘* American desert.” 
