The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1898-02-13
Yaun g Eagle
NJ. VI. MURDOCH. Editor.
THE KANSAS NILE.

The perspectives of the prairies of
South Kansas have been much modu-
lated and greatly diversified within
twenty years. Groves, road-rows of
trees, and of planted orchards, have
TRANSPORTED these once open sweeps of
lnarginless monotony into attractive
pictures, boundless as beautiful The
mute wind-swept swells. which dazed
the sight of the first settlers of quar-
ter of a century ago, as sea-like they
rolled away in tense nudity, from
horizon to horizon, and which were abb
sorbingly attractive only because Of
their pensive and mixed loneliness,
have been metamorphosed by the
hands OF these sturdy jewellers into
blithesome landscapes, and the once
deserts dirge is changed to a song of
gladsomeness and triumph, and all
through the planting Of trees. A limit
less reach, without metes or bounds,
through which trailed from side to side
its turbid tide, the Nile of Kansas, Of
dewless margins and drifting sands,
over which the lamenting winds walled,
night and day, as they swept on from
mountain to sea, eternally, are now but
the memory of a dream. They are
gone. They disappeared in a metagen-
esis. were transmitted into a multiplied
succession Of the brightest rural pic
lures that ever the sun shone on. From
rim to rim of the horizon the aforetime
boundIess rounds have been lined into
squares Of green hedges, each dotted
with its home and orchard, by its lesser
squares of garden, field and pasture,
all varied gem-settings of a mighty
brooch with a frame-holding of forest
trees. The South Kansas Of twenty
five years ago has been completely
transformed by tree-planting and tree
growing. What South Kansas is today
in that respect much of western Kan
sas will yet become.
]. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, late |
secretary of agriculture, has given |
much of his time and influence for pro- |
noting tree planting on the prairies of |
his adopted state. The good he has &C
complished goes without saying. In |
another twenty-five or fifty years |
neither Kansas nor Nebraska will be |
recognized as states of the steppe, but |
rather famed for their pleasant alter |
mating light and shade. Mr. Morton |
makes no pretensions as a literateur,
that we are aware, but the following |
lines from his pen on planting trees are
well worth preserving as much for
their real poetical merit as for their
lesson to the hopeful dweller on the
prairie:
What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the ship which will cross the sea,
We plant the maSts TO carry the sails,
We plant the plank to withstand the gales,
The keel, the keelson and beam and knee,
We plant the ship when we plant the tree.
What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the houses for you and me,
We plant the rafters, the shingles, the
floors;
We plant the studding, the laths, the
doors,
The beams and siding, all parts that be.
We plant the house when we plant the
tree.
What do we plant when we plant the tree?
A thousand things that we daily see;
We plant the spire that out-towers the
craE,
We plant the staff for our country's flag,
We plant the shade, from the hot sun free,
we plant all these when we plant the tree.