[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 the Snowy Mountains, we found the Ponderosa pine, and soon the Flexilis pine, wherever a rocky ridge is lifted above the level of the plains, so that these trees were in sight a large share of the time, even far away from large rivers and groups of mountains.  If a homestead anywhere in that state is not cozily protected by bright colored evergreens it is not because there is any difficulty in getting trees that will thrive in that soil.

[Illustration:  A young Ponderosa pine.]

The Snowy Mountains are in the center of Montana, quite unsheltered from the other ranges of the Rockies.  It is the meeting place of the flora of the mountains and the plains.  I think it is the eastern limit of that peerless tree of the Rockies, the Douglas fir.  I gave my impressions of this tree to the society a year or two ago.  I am still more in love with it from what I again saw last August in