of the Allegheny ridge, all prairie farms look alike, just as a European
supposes this to be the case with all negroes. A better acquaintance
will show the average prairie quarter-section by no means an unbroken
meadow, "level as a house-floor," but diversified by water-courses,
"sloughs," and gentle acclivities--sometimes by considerable ravines and
"barrens" or elevated "swales," thinly covered with timber, or brush, or
both. But I will contemplate more especially a Northern farm, made up of
hill and vale or glade, rocky ridge and skirting bog or other low land,
with a wood-lot on the rear or not far distant, and clumps or belts of
timber irregularly lining brook and ravine, or lurking in the angles and
sinuosities of walls and wooden fences, and a ragged, mossy orchard
sheltered in some quiet nook, or sprawling over some gravelly hill-side.
A brook, nearly dry in August, gurgles down the hill-side or winds
through the swamp; while fields, moderately sloping here and nearly
level there, interposed as they can be, have severally been devoted, for
a generation or more, alternately to Grain and Grass--the latter largely
preponderating. We will suppose this farm to measure from 50 to 150
acres.
Now, the young man who has bought or inherited this farm may be wholly
and consciously unable to enter upon any expensive system of improvement
for the next ten years--may fully realize that four or five days of each
week must meantime be given to the growing or earning of present
bread--yet he should none the less study well the capacities and
adaptations of each acre, and mature a comprehensive plan for the
ultimate bringing of each field into the best and most useful condition
whereof it is susceptible, before he cuts a living tree or digs a
solitary drain. He is morally certain of doing something--perhaps many
things--that he will sadly wish undone, if he fails to study
peculiarities and mature a plan before he begins to improve or to fit
his several fields for profitable cultivation.
And the first selection to be made is that of a pasture, since I am
compelled to use an old, familiar name for what should be essentially a
new thing. This pasture should be as near the center of the farm as may
be, and convenient to the barns and barn-yard that are to be. It should
have some shade, but no very young trees; should be dry and rolling,
with an abundance of the purest living water. The smaller this
pasture-lot may be, the better I shall like it, provided you fence it
very stoutly, connect it with the barn-yard by a lane if they are not in
close proximity, and firmly resolve that, outside of this lot, this
lane, this yard and the adjacent stable, your cattle shall never be
seen, unless on the road to market. Very possibly, the day may come
wherein you will decide to dispense with pasturing altogether; but that
is, for the present, improbable. _One_ pasture you will have; if you
live in the broad West, and purpose to graze extensively, it will
doubtless be a large one; but permitting your stock to ramble in Spring
and Fall all over your own fields--(and perhaps your neighbors'
also)--in quest of their needful food, biting off the tops of the finer
young trees, trampling down or breaking off some that are older, rubbing
the bark off of your growing fruit-trees, and doing damage that years
will be required to repair, I most vehemently protest against.
The one great error that misleads and corrupts mankind is the
presumption that _something may be had for nothing_. The average farmer
imagines that whatever of flesh or of milk may accrue to him from the
food his cattle obtain by browsing over his fields or through his
woods, is so much clear gain--that they do the needful work, while he
pockets the net proceeds. But the universe was framed on a plan which
requires so much for so much; and this law will not submit to defiance
or evasion. Under the unnatural, exceptional conditions which environ
the lone squatter on a vast prairie, something may be made by turning
cattle loose and letting them shift for themselves; but this is at best
transitory, and at war with the exigencies of civilization. Whoever
lives within sight of a school-house, or within hearing of a
church-bell, is under the dominion of a law alike inexorable and
beneficent--the law that requires each to pay for all he gets, and reap
only where he has sown.
You can hardly have a pasture so small that it will not afford
hospitality to weeds and prove a source of multiform infestations. The
plants that should mature and be diffused will be kept down to the
earth; those which should be warred upon and eradicated will flourish
untouched, ripen their seed, and diffuse it far and wide. Thistles,
White Daisy, and every plant that impedes tillage and diminishes crops,
are nourished and diffused by means of pastures.
I hold, therefore, that the good farmer will run a mowing-machine over
his pasture twice each Summer--say early in June, and then late in
July--or, if his lot be too rough for this, will have it clipped at
least once with a scythe. Cutting all manner of worthless if not noxious
plants in the blossom, will benefit the soil which their seeding would
tax; it will render the eradication of weeds from your tillage a far
easier task; and it will prevent your being a nuisance to your
neighbors. I am confident that no one who has formed the habit of
keeping down the weeds in his pasture will ever abandon it.
I think each pasture should have (though mine, as yet, has not) a rude
shed or other shelter whereto the cattle may resort in case of storm or
other inclemency. How much they shrink as well as suffer from one cold,
pelting rain, few fully realize; but I am sure that "the merciful man"
who (as the Scripture says) "is merciful to his beast," finds his
humanity a good paying investment. I doubt that the rule would fail,
even in Texas; but I am contemplating civilized husbandry, not the rude
conditions of tropical semi-barbarism. If only by means of stakes and
straw, give cattle a chance to keep dry and warm when they must
otherwise shiver through a rainy, windy day and night on the cold, wet
ground, and I am sure they will pay for it.
In confining a herd of cattle to such narrow limits, I do not intend
that they shall be stinted to what grows there. On the contrary, I
expect them to be fed on Winter Rye, on Cut Grass, on Sowed Corn,
Sorghum, Stalks, Roots, etc., etc., as each shall be in season. With a
good mower, it is a light hour's work before breakfast to cut and cart
to a dozen or twenty head as much grass or corn as they will eat during
the day. But let that point stand over for the present.
VII.
TREES--WOODLAND--FORESTS.
I am not at all sentimental--much less mawkish--regarding the
destruction of trees. Descended from several generations of
timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to America in 1640), and
myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, I realize that trees
exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to
cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. Utility
is the reason and end of all vegetable growth--of a hickory's no less
than a corn-stalk's. I have always considered "Woodman, spare that
tree," just about the most mawkish bit of badly versified prose in our
language, and never could guess how it should touch the sensibilities of
any one. Understand, then, that I urge the planting of trees mainly
because I believe it will _pay_, and the preservation, improvement, and
extension, of forests, for precisely that reason.
Yet I am not insensible to the beauty and grace lent by woods, and
groves, and clumps or rows of trees, to the landscape they diversify. I
feel the force of Emerson's averment, that "Beauty is its own excuse
for being," and know that a homestead embowered in, belted by, stately,
graceful elms, maples, and evergreens, is really _worth_ more, and will
sell for more, than if it were naked field and meadow. I consider it one
positive advantage (to balance many disadvantages) of our rocky, hilly,
rugged Eastern country, that it will never, in all probability, be so
denuded of forests as the rich, facile prairies and swales of the Great
Valley may be. Our winds are less piercing, our tornadoes less
destructive, than those of the Great West. I doubt whether there is
another equal area of the earth's surface whereon so many kinds of
valuable trees grow spontaneously and rapidly, defying eradication, as
throughout New England and on either slope of the Alleghenies; and this
profusion of timber and foliage may well atone for, or may be fairly
weighed against, many deficiencies and drawbacks. The Yankee, who has
been accustomed to see trees spring up spontaneously wherever they were
not kept down by ax, or plow, or scythe, and to cross running water
every half mile of a Summer day's journey, may well be made homesick, by
two thousand miles of naked, dusty, wind-swept Plains, whereon he finds
no water for fifty to a hundred miles, and knows it impossible to cut an
ax-helve, much more an axle-tree, in the course of a wearying journey.
No Eastern farmer ever realized the blessedness of abundant and
excellent wood and water until he had wandered far from his boyhood's
home.
No one may yet be able fully to explain the inter-dependence of these
two blessings; but the fact remains. All over "the Plains," there is
evidence that trees grew and flourished where none are now found, and
that springs and streams were then frequent and abiding where none now
exist. A prominent citizen of Nevada, who explored southward from Austin
to the Colorado, assured me that his party traveled for days in the bed
of what had once been a considerable river, but in which it was evident
that no water had flowed for years. And I have heard that since the
Mormons have planted trees over considerable sections of Utah, rains in
Summer are no longer rare, and Salt Lake evinces, by a constant though
moderate increase of her volume of waters, that the equilibrium of
rain-fall with evaporation in the Great Basin has been fully
restored--or rather, that the rain-fall is now taking the lead.
I have a firm faith that all the great deserts of the Temperate and
Torrid Zones will yet be reclaimed by irrigation and tree-planting. The
bill which Congress did not pass, nor really consider, whereby it was
proposed, some years since, to give a section of the woodless Public
Lands remote from settlement to every one who, in a separate township,
would plant and cherish a quarter-section of choice forest-trees, ought
to have been passed--with modifications, perhaps, but preserving the
central idea. Had ten thousand quarter-sections, in so many different
townships of the Plains, been thus planted to timber ten to twenty
years ago, and protected from fire and devastation till now, the value
of those Plains for settlement would have been nearly or quite doubled.
A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy
farmers of our own State. One who has a hundred acres of good soil,
whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely,
calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will
pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain
of the time he has hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling
wood. He does not consider how much his soil will lose in Summer
moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the
sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and
ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliberate judgment, a farm
of one hundred acres will yield _more_ feed, with far greater uniformity
of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests,
ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if
it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist
that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal
for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes
a sad miscalculation.
Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suffering from the
improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take
care of itself. I presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from
the same folly, though to a much greater extent. The remains of now
extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of
this continent, and especially the Territory of Arizona, probably bear
witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers'
and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of White Pine
which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of
our Northern States. Vermont sold White Pine abundantly to England
through Canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from
Canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and
she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century.
I entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or
indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands--but, outside
of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut
away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to _plant and
rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut
down_. How this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, I will
try to indicate in the succeeding chapter.
VIII.
GROWING TIMBER--TREE-PLANTING.
In my judgment, the proportion of a small farm that should be constantly
devoted to trees (other than fruit) is not less than one-fourth; while,
of farms exceeding one hundred acres in area, that proportion should be
not less than one-third, and may often be profitably increased to
one-half. I am thinking of such as are in good part superficially rugged
and rocky, or sandy and sterile, such as New-England, eastern New-York,
northern New-Jersey, with both slopes of the Alleghenies, as well as the
western third of our continent, abound in. It may be that it is
advisable to be content with a smaller proportion of timber in the
Prairie States and the broad, fertile intervales which embosom most of
our great rivers for at least a part of their course; but I doubt it.
And there is scarcely a farm in the whole country, outside of the great
primitive forests in which openings have but recently been made, in
which _some_ tree-planting is not urgently required.
"Too much land," you will hear assigned on every side as a reason for
poor farming and meager crops. Ask an average farmer in New-England, in
Virginia, in Kentucky, or in Alabama, why the crops of his section are
in the average no better, and the answer, three times in four, will be,
"Our farmers have too much land"--that is, not too much absolutely, but
too much relatively to their capital, stock, and general ability to till
effectively. The habitual grower of poor crops will proffer this
explanation quite as freely and frequently as his more thrifty neighbor.
And what every one asserts must have a basis of truth.
Now, I do not mean to quarrel with the instinct which prompts my
countrymen to buy and hold too much land. They feel, as I do, that land
is still cheap almost anywhere in this country--cheap, if not in view of
the income now derived from it, certainly in contemplation of the price
it must soon command and the income it might, under better management,
be made to yield. Under this conviction--or, if you please,
impression--every one is intent on holding on to more land than he can
profitably till, if not more than he can promptly pay for.
What I _do_ object to is simply this--that thousands, who have more land
than they have capital to work profitably, will persist in half-tilling
many acres, instead of thoroughly farming one-half or one third so many,
and getting the rest into wood so fast as may be. I am confident that
two-thirds of all our farmers would improve their circumstances and
increase their incomes by concentrating their efforts, their means,
their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of the area they now skim and
skin, and giving the residue back to timber-growing.
In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, Westchester--probably within six of
being the oldest Agricultural County in the Union--I am confident that
ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit
to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a
fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining
the greatest city of the New World; hence, one wherein land can be
cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else--yet I am satisfied
that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than
to grass or tillage. Nay; I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky
land--that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the
rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which it will not as yet pay
to blast--is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be
found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or
rising within two feet of the surface. The time will doubtless arrive in
which many fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not to-day;
these, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the
hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the
steady progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow.
Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of this County
bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods
would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more
constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales
less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight
us by their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with
devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate
fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, the remorseless
devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies, have all but
annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on
two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the
whole of it. And what is true of Westchester is measurably true of every
rural county in the Union.
I have said that I believe in cutting trees as well as in growing them;
I have not said, and do not mean to say, that I believe in cutting
everything clean as you go. That was once proper in Westchester; it is
still advisable in forest-covered regions, where the sun must be let in
before crops can be grown; but, in nine cases out of ten, timber should
be thinned or culled out rather than cut off; and, for every tree taken
away, at least two should be planted or set out.
We have pretty well outgrown the folly of letting every apple-tree bear
such fruit as it will; though in the orchard of my father's little farm
in Amherst, N. H., whereon I was born, no tree had ever been grafted
when I bade adieu to it in 1820; and I presume none has been to this
day. By this time, almost every farmer realizes that he _can't afford_
to grow little, gnarly, villainously sour or detestably bitter-sweet
apples, when, by duly setting a graft at a cost of two dimes, he may
make that identical tree yield Greenings or Pippins at least as
bounteously. I presume the cumulative experience of fifty or sixty
generations of apple-growers has ripened this conclusion. Why do they
not infer readily and generally that growing indifferent timber where
the best and most valued would grow as rapidly, is a stupid, costly
blunder? It seems to me that whoever has attained the conviction that
apple-trees should be grafted ought to know that it is wasteful to grow
Red Oak, Beech, White Maple, and Alder, where White Oak, Hickory,
Locust, and White Pine, might be grown with equal facility, in equal
luxuriance, provided the right seeds were planted, and a little pains
taken to keep down, for a year or two, the shoots spontaneously sent up
by the wrong ones.
North of the Potomac, and east of the Ohio, and (I presume) in limited
districts elsewhere, rocky, sterile woodlands, costing $2 to $50 per
acre according to location, etc., are to-day the cheapest property to be
bought in the United States. Even though nothing were done with them but
keep out fire and cattle, and let the young trees grow as they will,
money can be more profitably and safely invested in lands covered by
young timber than in anything else. The parent, who would invest a few
thousands for the benefit of children or grandchildren still young, may
buy woodlands which will be worth twenty times their present cost within
the next twenty years. But better even than this would it be to buy up
rocky, craggy, naked hill-sides and eminences which have been pastured
to death, and, shutting out cattle inflexibly, scratch these over with
plow, mattock, hoe, or pick, as circumstances shall dictate, plant them
thickly with Chestnut, Walnut, Hickory, White Oak, and the seeds of
Locust and White Pine. I say Locust, though not yet certain that this
tree must not be started in garden or nursery-beds and transplanted when
two or three years old, so puny and feeble is it at the outset, and so
likely to be smothered under leaves or killed out by its more favored
neighbors. I have experiments in progress not yet matured, which may
shed light on this point before I finish these essays.
_Plant thickly_, and of diverse kinds, so as to cover the ground
promptly and choke out weeds and shrubs, with full purpose to thin and
prune as circumstances shall dictate.
Many farmers are averse to planting timber, because (they think) nothing
can be realized therefrom for the next twenty or thirty years, which is
as long as they expect to live. But this is a grave miscalculation. Let
us suppose a rocky, hilly pasture-lot of ten or twenty acres rudely
scratched over as I have suggested, and thickly seeded with hickory nuts
and white oak acorns only: within five years, it will yield abundantly
of hoop poles, though the better, more promising half be left to
mature, as they should be; two years later, another and larger crop of
hoop-poles may be cut, still sparing the best; and thenceforth a
valuable crop of timber may be taken from that land; for, if cut at the
proper season, at least two thrifty sprouts will start from every stump;
and so that wood will yield a clear income each year while its best
trees are steadily growing and maturing. I do not advise restriction to
those two species of timber; but I insist that a young plantation of
forest-trees may and should yield a clear income in every year after its
fourth.
As to the Far West--the Plains, the Parks, and the Great Basin--there is
more money to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than
by working the richest veins of the adjacent mountains. Whoever will
promptly start, near a present or prospective railroad, forty acres of
choice trees--Hickory, White Oak, Locust, Chestnut, and White
Pine--within a circuit of three hundred miles from Denver, on land which
he has made or is making provision to irrigate--may begin to sell trees
therefrom two years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth
for a century--at first, for transplanting; very soon, for a variety of
uses in addition to that.
* * * * *
--But this paper grows too long, and I must postpone to the next my more
especial suggestions to young farmers with regard to tree-planting.
IX.
PLANTING AND GROWING TREES.
Whoever has recently bought, inherited, or otherwise become the owner of
a farm, has usually found some part or parts of it devoted to wood; and
this, if not in excess, he will mainly preserve, while he studies and
plans with a view to the ultimate devotion to timber of just those
portions of his land that are best adapted to that use. In locating that
timber, I would have him consider these suggestions: