CHAPARRAL IS A PLAGUE 
other Spaniards turned loose in Mexico had become a 
wild breed of longhorns and lived in this region before the 
white man settled here. They were the basis of the herds 
that the cattle barons managed and brought to vast num¬ 
bers in the years that followed the Civil War. 
But now the prairies are gone. The herds that wan¬ 
dered over them remain but in fragments. In their place 
are endless stretches of all-smothering chaparral. 
There is an interesting reason why these prairies re¬ 
mained prairies. They did so because every few years 
it happened that the grass was tall, dry, and parched 
toward the end of the summer. Then a bolt of lightning 
or a spark from the campfire of a red man set the plain 
afire. The flames swept a whole region, searing any shrub 
or baby tree that may have sprung up here hoping to start 
a line of its kind. Only the grass seeds, already shaken 
on to the earth, escaped. So the next season there was 
only grass to reappear. 
But man put an end to the prairie fires. He learned 
the knack of back-firing and stopping them. He devel¬ 
oped such numbers of cattle that they ate the grass too 
short for these fires. He fenced off his ranches and 
changed them from the ways of nature which they had 
always known. 
And the chaparral, in the absence of the searing flame 
which was its only successful enemy, got started and 
prospered. Its thickets have transformed and laid waste 
vast areas that through the ages offered home and food 
to innumerable hordes of grazing animals. 
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