Excerpt from Prairie Songs: Being Chants Rhymed and Unrhymed of the Level Lands of the Great West

A quarter of a cerftury ago the prairies of North ern Iowa were only just won from the elk and buffalo, whose bones and antlers lay in thousands beside every trail and watering place. These rich and Splendid meadows had swarmed with herbivora for ages of undisturbed possession, and every crumbling crib of bones or bleaching antler was a powerful incentive to a boy's imagination. From them my mind was able to construct some idea of the grandeur of the flocks which once peopled thesegreen vistas. Even then I felt the beauty of the wilderness, which is coming to have deeper charm as it passes irrecoverably from sight.

The prairies are not the plains. The plains do not begin until you reach the Missouri river and be gin to climb toward the Rocky Mountains. These verses have to do with both plains and prairies, though the wild prairies are nearly gone. The vege tation differs wildly, as will be evident from allu sions throughout this volume. The plains are mainly clothed in a short hair-like grass which cures early in the stock and is russet in color dur ing most of the year.

The prairies were rich in grasses. Blue-joint, crows-foot and wild oats. Sunflowers and innum crable and brilliant flowers grew in the beautiful meadows, out of which groves of popple and hazel bushes rose like islands out of shallow seas.

These prairies were intersected by beautiful streams, belted in splendid groves of oaks and maples and basswood trees. The prairies were gen erally level, with long swells like a quiet sea, but in the neighborhood of streams they grew more varied and wooded.

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