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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 beanty. Most of them are
quite 
unknown to those who have inherited their domain. 
But the short-grass prairie, where Cabeza de Baca 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 fort niners
are 
worth commemorating on the walls of state capitols, is not the scene of their

mighty hegira worth commemorating in several 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 the dark and bloody

ground; of these, samples of a few acres each will have to suffice. But there

are still several blocks of maple-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 tag-ends are secure from prospective

cuttings, and fewer still from prospective tourist roads. 
One of the fastest-shrinking categories of wilderness is coastlines. Cottages

a d tourist roads have all but annihilated wild coasts on both oceans, and
Lake 
Superior is now losing the last large remnant of wild shoreline on the Great

Lakes. No single kind of wilderness is more intimately interwoven with history,

and none nearer the point of complete disappearance. 
In all of North America east of the Rockies, there is only one large area

formally reserved as a wilderness: the (4etico-Superior International Park
in 
Minnesota and Ontario. This magnificent block of canoe-country, a mosaic
of lakes 
and rivers, lies mostly in Canada, and can be about as large as Canada chooses