There I saw what appeared to be the marks of an axe.  I was completely convinced that I had personal enemies who went around nights chopping off the roots of my trees, for I knew that most of my neighbors were completely out of sympathy with my tree cultivation.  In fact, farmers living in that section of the country were always poking fun at my nut tree plantings and orchard work, for their idea of what was proper on a farm was a treeless field of plowed ground.  As I thought of all these things, I pulled up many other trees; in fact, there were dozens that were chopped off so that they could be completely pulled out.  Others still had one or two roots clinging to the main trunk and these I carefully replanted so that they would continue to live and grow.

Not long after the tragic day on which I found all these ravaged trees, I noticed, winding in and out close to the young orchard trees, the mounds which pocket gophers make when they tunnel under the ground.  I followed some of these by digging into them with a shovel, and discovered that they led to the roots of trees, the very trees that had been chopped off and killed.  My enemies were not human after all.

Sending for a pamphlet from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, I studied the material given about pocket gophers and their habits.  I then began their systematic eradication, using about twelve steel muskrat traps.  I succeeded in trapping, in one season, over thirty of them, at a time when they were so prolific and their holes so numerous that I could not drive a horse through the orchard without danger of breaking one of its legs.  I also used poisoned grains and gases but I do not recommend them.  Trapping is the only method in which one obtains actual evidence of elimination.  It took me many years to force the gophers out of my orchards and I still must set traps every fall, during September and October when they are most active.  Their habits are such that they do most of their tunnelling in the early fall months, before frost, during which time they expose and isolate the roots on which they intend to feed during the winter months when the ground is so hard that they cannot burrow further.  This period is when they are most easily trapped.

It was with the idea of establishing a balance of nature against these animals that I conceived the idea of importing bull snakes.  Almost everyone has heard of the bull snake, but its name is a poor one, for it has the wrong connotation.  These snakes are actually a fine friend to the farmer since each snake accounts for the death of many rodents each year.  Their presence certainly was of definite value in decreasing the number at my farm.  Bull snakes have the long body typical of constrictors, sometimes reaching a length of nearly six feet at maturity, and being at the most an inch and one-half in diameter.  This country had a natural abundance of such snakes at one time but ignorance and superstition have lessened their number so that it is now a rare