The Platte River was running high in the blistering summer of 1901, and the mules were prone to startle. So the plucky young scholars improvised. Using picket ropes, they tethered their saddle horns to the wagon tongue, remounted their horses, and slowly—one step at a time—began to ford the braided river, nearly two hundred yards across.
“The old cow ponies knew more about pulling from the saddle horns than the riders [did],” teamster Charles A. Scott later admitted, but they soon reached the opposite shore, supplies dry and wagon upright, and continued merrily on their way: collecting plant specimens, felling trees, counting rings, taking notes, singing songs, writing letters. In the coming decades,the seven men who comprised the Nebraska Sand Hill Reconnaissance Survey—recent college graduates, all of them—would usher the science and practice of forestry into the twentieth century. They would chair the deanships of budding forestry programs across the country. They would write books and bulletins and shape federal forestry legislation. But in the summer of 1901, a summer so hot it soldered their cookware, they were united with a single mission: to determine once and for all if the Nebraska Sandhills—long considered a desert wasteland—could nurture a forest after all.
No one was more hellbent on the idea than botanist Charles Bessey, who had been publicly flirting with a radical “solution” to Nebraska’s timber shortage ever since accepting the first deanship of Nebraska’s College of Agriculture in 1884. Noting the “moist stratum” beneath the sand and the numerous rivers that gurgled to life in the grass-covered dunes, he quickly rejected
the Sandhills’ prevailing reputation. In fact, to the contrary, Bessey eventually concluded that a great forest had once covered this mysterious terrain—a forest later razed by wildfire and trampled by grazing bison. He’d located isolated pockets of cedar and pine throughout the region, and the same dense cover of ponderosa that swaddled the Black Hills and Rocky Mountains, he noted, also swaddled portions of the Nebraska panhandle. All told, Bessey wrote, “We are forced to assume that the forest areas must have formerly been more extended, sufficiently so to connect these isolated canyon forests with one another.”
And extended again they could be.
“That it would be desirable to do so needs no argument,” he wrote in his annual report for the Nebraska State Board of Agriculture in 1894. “The beneficial influence upon the state would be almost incalculable.”
Well before Bessey began his investigation of the Sandhills, those who reaped the rewards of America’s westward migration championed tree planting as a means of “ameliorating” the climate. But it wasn’t just land agents and railroad boosters. It was writers and government officials and scientists too—even professional foresters. Similar to the once-popular myth that “rain follows the plow,” many also believed that rain follows the trees.
Rain falls on the Nebraska National Forest, Bessey Ranger District, near Halsey in Thomas County.
Nebraska National Forest near Halsey on a hazy fall day.
But as theories of increased rainfall gradually died out toward the end of the nineteenth century, Bessey and others refocused on the more tangible benefits of tree planting: the conservation of moisture, protection against the plains’ unrelenting winds, a source of shade in a land sorely without, even a touch of beauty to “break up that monotonous skyline.”
In January 1891, at Bessey’s urging, the Nebraska Division of Forestry agreed to finance an experimental plantation in Holt County, Nebraska, on the eastern fringe of the Sandhills. Though hardly a runaway success, “It seems already to have proved what was intended,” wrote Division Chief Bernhard Fernow just two years after planting, “namely that in the sand-hill region of Nebraska coniferous growth, especially of pines planted closely, is the proper material and method.” Unable to stretch their shoestring budget any further, the division soon refocused on other priorities, and the so-called Holt County Plantation gradually fell off the radar.
Fernow, meanwhile, resigned to accept the forestry deanship at Cornell. But his successor, a politically astute Yale graduate named Gifford Pinchot, quickly reignited the gospel of plains forestry. After first hiring Bessey to continue studying “the causes which produce treeless prairies,” he then authorized the Nebraska Sand Hill Reconnaissance Survey. Over the next three months, the eager party cut a wide swath through the Sandhills, compiling an exhaustive record of woody plants along the way. In the panhandle they discovered ponderosa pine and red cedar thriving on barren slopes where nothing else could grow, some with nearly three hundred rings. The Sandhills proper showed far fewer signs of established tree growth, but the soil and climate were essentially the same, and the Holt County Plantation—now towering 20 feet above the plains—offered additional proof of concept. If precautions were taken to avoid fire and overgrazing, the team concluded in its final report, similar forest conditions could be achieved.
Despite pushback from cattlemen and railroad executives, President Theodore Roosevelt finally approved Bessey’s wild vision in April 1902, withdrawing more than 200,000 treeless acres from homestead entry and establishing the Dismal River and Niobrara Forest Reserves in the heart of the Sandhills. In 1906 Roosevelt added the 347,000-acre North Platte Reserve, and in 1908, all three were combined to create the Nebraska National Forest.
“This was the first project of its kind ever attempted in the United States,” wrote Scott, who was subsequently hired to survey the boundaries for the Dismal River Reserve near Halsey and establish a supplementary eighty-acre nursery. “No one in the Bureau of Forestry could advise us, and the commercial nurserymen of the country had no experience with this type of work and we were told we would have to use our own judgement and do the best we could.”
But after years of trial and error, Scott and his team slowly reaped their reward. Eventually the forest would blanket nearly twenty thousand acres of central Nebraska, making it the largest hand-planted forest in the world. A federal afforestation program in China’s Tibetan Plateau would later surpass it, but the Bessey Ranger District today remains the largest in the Western Hemisphere.
“It isn’t an amazing forest like the Sequoias—it’s shaggy and small,” says District Ranger Julie Bain. “It is, however, a feat of human endeavor, and for that reason it is interesting.”
Were it not for the ultimate success of the Bessey Nursery, however, the Nebraska National Forest would likely have followed so many other plains forestry reserves into oblivion—and the nursery itself was once on the chopping block.
“If we wouldn’t have put up greenhouses, they would have closed us—guaranteed,” says Manager Richard Gilbert. “The oldest federal tree nursery in the U.S. would have been closed, and it would have been a shame.”
Now 120 years old, the Bessey Nursery provides seedlings for every national forest within the USFS Rocky Mountain Region and to a slew of other public entities throughout the Great Plains. And as wildfires and pest infestations continue to devastate public and private lands throughout the American West, demand for seedlings from the Bessey Nursery only continues to grow.
But perhaps more than anything else, the forest today is a living monument to the ethos behind Nebraska’s former nickname.
“We, of Nebraska, have taken to ourselves the distinguished name of ‘Tree Planters,’” Charles Bessey wrote in 1894. “Let us show to the world an example of tree planting and forest production worthy of the energy of our people.”