one night when we pitched our tent after dark on the bottoms below Fort
Snelling, and did not know till we had laid ourselves down that a colony
of ants had pre-empted the spot before us. We did not get much sleep,
but we had the comfort of feeling that they were nice, clean,
self-respecting, self-defending ants. Would that our experience in
hotels had been equally fortunate!

[Illustration: A young Douglas fir.]

Leaving the western boundary of the forests of Minnesota near Glencoe
and going across the prairie and plains to the mountain forests of
Montana is an interesting experience. The only trees in Western
Minnesota and the Dakotas are those found along the lakes and water
courses, and west of the Missouri the trees and shrubby growth, even in
such places, becomes very scanty or entirely disappears, giving a weird
appearance to one who has always associated water and trees together in
his mind. As we draw near the Montana line, trees begin to appear on the
tops of the buttes and high bluffs on the distant horizon. Traveling on
the railroad I have wondered what they were. With our own private car we
satisfied our curiosity by zig-zagging our way up to a camping place
among them, the first night they came in sight. Of course they were our
old friends, the Ponderosa pine, whose name will always be associated
with our grand old man from Nebraska. They ought to be renamed the
Harrison pine. How they endure the drouth and cold in a soil so poor
that grass withers and dies out, and how they stand erect where every
other living thing bows to the bleak winds and blizzards of the
prairies, is one of the mysteries of plant life. What a splendid bonfire
we made of their boughs that night, flaring as a beacon out over the
ocean of prairie about us!

The day before we had passed by hundreds of clumps of a beautiful blue
lupine with finely cut foliage and profusion of color that rivaled any
flower of its shade I have seen in cultivation. On the way home we
gathered a handful of seed from which we shall hope to grow some plants
at home. We tried to dig a few to transplant, but their roots seemed to
go down, down, till with my short handled shovel, I got discouraged. The
herbage of the plains has learned to dig deep for water.

[Illustration: A camp by the Red River of the North, Mrs. Wedge sitting
by a giant cottonwood. Our 16 lb. tent at the right.]

Leaving the Yellowstone at Big Timber and striking across the plains to
t