WILDERNESS 
 
The Remnants 
Many of the diverse wildernesses out of which we have ham- 
mered America are already gone; hence in any practical 
program the unit areas to be preserved must vary greatly in 
size and in degree of wildness. 
No living man will see again the long-grass prairie, where 
a sea of prairie flowers lapped at the stirrups of the pioneer. 
We shall do well to find a forty here and there on which 
the prairie plants can be kept alive as species. There were a 
hundred such plants, many of exceptional beauty. Most of 
them are quite unknown to those who have inherited their 
domain. 
But the short-grass prairie, where Cabeza de Vaca saw 
the horizon under the bellies of the buffalo, is still extant in 
a few spots of 10,000-acre size, albeit severely chewed up by 
sheep, cattle, and dry-farmers. If the forty-niners are worth 
commemorating on the walls of state capitols, is not the 
scene of their mighty hegira worth commemorating in sev- 
eral national prairie reservations? 
Of the coastal prairie there is one block in Florida, and 
one in Texas, but oil wells, onion fields, and citrus groves 
are closing in, armed to the teeth with drills and bulldozers. 
It is last call. 
 
No living man will see again the virgin pineries of the 
Lake States, or the flatwoods of the coastal plain, or the 
giant hardwoods; of these, samples of a few acres each will 
L1 4V    -M L'J  4 .  +.1L  +,1  __1 M3iL  -)  .  ±L 1 -P  A1I1 
 
hemlock of thousand-acre size; there are similar blocks of 
Appalachian hardwoods, of southern hardwood swamp, of 
cypress swamp, and of Adirondack spruce. Few of these 
[ 189 ]