ation. The coarse, short, hearty
grass that carpets most of this region, and which is allowed to attain
its full growth only in the valleys of the Chugwater and a few other
streams which have their course mainly within or very near the Rocky
Mountains, and which the Buffalo no longer visit, seems worthy at least
of trial by the farmers and shepherds of our older States. Its ability
to resist drouth and overcropping and hard usage generally must be
great, and I judge that many lawns and pastures would be improved by it.
That it has merely held its ground for ages, in defiance of the crushing
tread and close feeding of the enormous herds of the Plains, proves it a
plant of signal hardihood and tenacity of life; while the favor with
which it is regarded by passing teams and herds combines with its
evident abundance of nutriment to render its intrinsic value
unquestionable.

The green traveler or emigrant in early summer has traversed, since he
crossed the Missouri, five hundred miles of almost uniformly arable
soil, most of it richly grassed, with belts of timber skirting its
moderately copious and not unfrequent water-courses, and he very
naturally concludes 'the American Desert' a misnomer, or at best a
gross exaggeration. But, from the moment of leaving the Buffaloes behind
him, the country begins to _shoal_, as a sailor might say, growing
rapidly sterile, treeless, and all but grassless. The scanty forage that
is still visible is confined to the immediate banks or often submerged
intervales of streams, though a little sometimes lingers in hollows or
ravines where the drifted snows of winter evidently lay melting slowly
till late in the spring. By-and-by the streams disappear, or are plainly
on the point of vanishing; of living wood there is none, and only
experienced plainsmen know where to look for the fragments of dead trees
which still linger on the banks of a few slender or dried-up brooks,
whence sweeping fires or other destructive agencies long since
eradicated all growing timber. The last living, or, indeed, standing
tree you passed was a stunted, shabby specimen of the unlovely
Cotton-wood, rooted in naked sand beside a water-course, and shielded
from prairie-fires by the high, precipitous bank; for, scanty as is the
herbage of the desert, the fierce winds which sweep over it will yet,
especially in late spring or early summer, drive a fire (which has
obtained a start in some fairly grassed vale or nook) throug