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CHAPTER XXIV.

PRAIRIES AND THEIR TREELESSNESS.

HE prairies of the Mississippi Valley, especially those lying within the limits of the great State of Illinois, constitute one of the most remarkable features of North American topography. Hundreds of thousands of acres, stretching through all the central and western portions of the state, present a scene of almost unbroken level and tree.lessness. The great prairies are neither a perfect plain, nor in all cases completely undiversified with arboreal vegetation. The surface is generally undulating; and here and there rise gravelly knolls and ridges on which the timber has obtained a foothold. But these wooded spots are often many miles apart, and scarcely serve to rest the eye, wearied with the monotony of an interminable clearing, fenceless meadows, and unsheltered farm-houses.

The traveler, leaving Chicago by one of the great southern routes for instance, the Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis Railway-passes out through the muddy and straggling outskirts of the Western metropolis, and, ere he has thought of the great prairies through which he had expected to pass, he finds himself at sea. Looking from his car-window, the country landscape seems at first to be entirely wanting. One feels as if passing over a trellis-bridge three hundred feet above the surrounding region. The customary objects -forests, shade-trees, fences, houses, distant hills-which elsewhere lift themselves to the horizontal plane of the eye, are not here. The traveler must make the second effort, and look down upon the level of the country upon whose

bosom he has launched. The sensation is that which one experiences in going to sea. The rattling train is easily transformed into the puffing and creaking steam-ship, while the interminable prairie, mingling its distant and softened green with the subdued azure of the summer sky, can be likened to nothing but the ocean's boundless expanse. The ever-recurring undulation of the prairie is the grand oceanswell which utters perpetually a reminiscence of the last storm, while the evening sun, with dimmed lustre, settles down into the prairie's green sod, as to the mariner he sinks into the emerald bosom of the sea.

Illinois has been styled the garden state of the West. The deep, rich, pulverulent soil of the upland prairie, and especially its readiness for the plow, without the interven-* tion of a year's hard labor in opening a clearing, have always constituted powerful attractions for the settler from the stony soils of New England, and the wooded regions of the other states. It is extremely doubtful, however, whether the absence of forests over the area of half a state possesses a balance of advantages. Forests possess immense utilities in addition to furnishing lumber and fuel. This discovery was long since made in the denuded regions of the older European countries; and Americans are talking at times as if they were growing wiser. Even the cobblestones of a New England or New York soil are not unmitigated inconveniences. During the day they absorb the warmth of the sun, and at night they retain it and impart it to the soil. In times of drought they screen the soil from the direct rays of the sun, and thus moderate the intensity of the heat. They diminish the evaporating surface of the soil, and thus diminish the effects of continued droughts. A loose stone is a shade; but, unlike a tree, it has no roots of its own to creep about and steal the moisture from weaker forms of vegetation. A few stones do not

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diminish materially the amount of soil upon an acre; and, with the benefits which they confer, it is doubtful whether they are not actually to be desired, especially in regions subject to drought. A field will produce no more grain with the stones picked out than with the stones left in.

From our earliest knowledge of the prairies, speculation has been rife as to their origin. The old and popular belief was that which attributed their treelessness to the annual burning of the grass by the Indians. But the prairies present other phenomena which the annual burning fails to explain. Besides, the treelessness remains in regions where the burnings have ceased. And, lastly, the treeless prairies were not the only regions burned by the Indians. And if they were, it seems more likely that the Indian burned the rank grasses because the region was treeless, than that the region became treeless from the burning of such vegetation as flourishes in the shade of a forest.

It has sometimes been suggested that the region was originally forest-covered, and that the southern cane flourished in such luxuriance amongst the trees as to rob them of their moisture and nourishment, and thus cause their extinction. The cane, having deprived itself of the protecting shade of the forest, was in turn scorched out by the rays of the summer sun. This theory is every way unsatisfactory.

With others, the absence of trees is to be attributed to the dryness of the atmosphere-and consequently of the soil-at certain seasons of the year. It can not be doubted that the treeless plains of the far West, and also other regions, have failed to produce arboreal growths through an insufficient supply of moisture. Still other treeless regions are such from an excess of saline constituents in the soil. But all such regions have nothing in common with the prairies of Illinois except their treelessness. The topog

raphy and soil-constitution of the Illinois prairies points to a different and a peculiar history. Moreover, trees occupy the drier knolls of the prairies in the midst of the common atmospheric conditions.

Exactly the reverse of this theory is that which attributes the absence of trees to an excess of moisture in the soil at certain seasons. But we well know that there is no soil or situation so wet and stagnant but certain trees will flourish upon it—the willow, the cottonwood, the beech, the black ash, the alder, the cypress, the tupelo, the wateroak, the tamarack, the American arbor-vitæ, or some other tree-some of them standing joyously half the year, if need be, in stagnant water. Many swales are indeed treeless; but is this in consequence of the inability of a willow to take root and maintain itself, or rather in consequence of the formation of the swale in times so recent that the germs of trees have not yet been scattered over it? Moreover, wetness can not be attributed to many portions of the Illinois prairies which are entirely treeless. Is there a dif ferent cause for treelessness here?

Lastly, it has been suggested within a few years, by high geological authority, that the lack of trees is caused by excessive fineness of the prairie soil. It can scarcely be denied, however, that other soils, as pulverulent as that of the prairies, are densely covered with forest vegetation, and that in the same latitudes and under the same meteorological conditions. On the other hand, certain soils of a coarser texture are equally treeless. But the final objection to this theory, and to all theories which look to the physical or chemical condition of the soil, or even to climatic peculiarities, for an explanation of the treeless character of the upland prairies of the Mississippi Valley, is discovered in the fact that trees will grow on them when once introduced-not water-loving trees exclusively, but ever

greens, deciduous forest-trees, and fruit-trees, such as flourish in all the arable and habitable portions of our country. Every one will now admit that trees flourish upon the prairies. In proof of the fact, the prairie farmers are actively engaged in their introduction. "The prairies ***" says Gerhard,* "may be easily converted into wooded land. by destroying with the plow the tough sward which has formed itself on them. There are large tracts of country where, a number of years ago, the farmers mowed their hay, that are now covered with a forest of young, rapidlygrowing timber. *** A resident of Adams County testifies to the effect that locust-trees planted, or, rather, sown on prairie land near Quincy, attained in four years a height of twenty-five feet, and their trunks a diameter of from four to five inches. * * * In like manner, the uplands of St. Louis County, Missouri, which were in 1823 principally prairie lands, are now covered with a growth of fine and thrifty timber, so that it would be difficult to find an acre of prairie in the county." This testimony is confirmed by numbers of persons from various parts of the state whom I have questioned on the subject. The introduction of timber as a branch of rural industry is now systematically pursued. The principal drawback to the cultivation of forests and fruit-trees is the violence of the prairie winds and the occasional severity of the wintry weather.

If what I have suggested in reference to the persistent vitality of buried vegetable germs be true, we have a ready, simple, and beautiful solution of this long-vexed problem.

There are pretty satisfactory evidences that the soil of the prairies is of lacustrine origin. It has the fineness, color,

**Illinois as it Is, p. 277. Compare also Wells's Amer. Jour. Sci. and Arts, i., 331; Engelmann, Ibid. [2], xxxvi., 389; Edwards's Rept. Dept. of Agric., 1862, p. 495.