fragrant meadows and ample
groves, it is because the picture is one which reveals so much as to the
nature and meaning of Northwestern progress.

CLEARING AWAY THE FORESTS AND ITS EFFECTS.

Not a little has been written regarding the rapid destruction of the
vast white-pine forests with which nature has covered large districts of
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It is true that this denudation has
progressed at a rate with which nothing of a like character in the
history of the world is comparable. It is also true, doubtless, that the
clearing away of dense forest areas has been attended with some
inconvenient climatic results, and particularly with some objectionable
effects upon the even distribution of rainfall and the regularity of the
flow of rivers. But most persons who have been alarmed at the rapidity
of forest destruction in the white-pine belt have wholly overlooked the
great compensating facts. It happens that the white-pine region is not
especially fertile, and that for some time to come it is not likely to
acquire a prosperous agriculture. But adjacent to it and beyond it
there was a vast region of country which, though utterly treeless, was
endowed with a marvelous richness of soil and with a climate fitted for
all the staple productions of the temperate zone. This region embraced
parts of Illinois, almost the whole of Iowa, southern Minnesota, Kansas,
Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and parts of Montana--a region of
imperial extent. Now, it happens that for every acre of pine land that
has been denuded in Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota
there are somewhere in the great treeless region further south and west
two or three new farm-houses. The railroads, pushing ahead of settlement
out into the open prairie, have carried the white-pine lumber from the
gigantic sawmills of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries; and thus
millions of acres of land have been brought under cultivation by farmers
who could not have been housed in comfort but for the proximity of the
pine forests. The rapid clearing away of timber areas in Wisconsin has
simply meant the rapid settlement of North and South Dakota, western
Iowa, and Nebraska.

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL SPIRES, COLORADO.]

TREE PLANTING ON THE PRAIRIES.

The settlement of these treeless regions means the successful growth on
every farm of at least several hundred trees. Without attempting to be
statistical or exact, we mig