A friend deeply engaged in lumbering gives me a hint, which I think some owners of stony farms will find useful. He is obliged to run his logs down shallow, stony creeks, from the bottom of which large rocks often protrude, arresting the downward progress of his lumber. When the beds of these creeks are nearly dry in Summer, he goes in, with two or three stout, strong assistants, armed with crowbars and levers, and rolls the stones to this side and that, so as to leave a clear passage for his logs. Occasionally, he is confronted by a big fellow, which defies his utmost force; when, instead of drilling and blasting, he gathers dead tree-tops, and other dry wood of no value, from the banks, and builds a hot fire on the top of each giant bowlder. When the fire has burned out, and the rock has cooled, he finds it softened, and, as it were, rotten, on the top, often split, and every way so demoralized that he can deal with it as though it were chalk or cheese. He estimates his saving by this process, as compared with drilling and blasting as much more than fifty per cent. I trust farmers with whom wood is abundant, and big stones superabundant, will give this simple device a trial. Powder and drilling cost money, part of which may be saved by this expedient.
I have built some stone walls—at first, not very well; but for the last ten years my rule has been: Very little fence on a farm, but that little of a kind that asks no forbearance of the wildest bull that ever wore a horn. The last wall I built cost me at least $5 per rod; and it is worth the money. Beginning by plowing its bed and turning the two furrows together, so as to raise the ground a foot, and make a shallow ditch on either side, I built a wall thereon which will outlast my younger child. An ordinary wall dividing a wood on the north from an open field of sunny, gravelly loam on the south, would have been partly thrown down and wholly twisted out of shape in a few years, by the thawing of the earth under its sunny side, while it remained firm as a rock on the north; but the ground is always dry under my entire wall; so nothing freezes there, and there is consequently nothing to thaw and let down my wall. I shall be sorely disappointed if that wall does not outlast my memory, and be known as a thorough barrier to roving cattle long after the name of its original owner shall have been forgotten.
XXXVII.
FENCES AND FENCING.
Though I have already indicated, incidentally, my decided objections to our prevalent system of Fencing, I deem the subject of such importance that I choose to discuss it directly. Excessive Fencing is peculiarly an American abuse, which urgently cries for reform.
Solon Robinson says the fence-tax is the heaviest of our farmer's taxes. I add, that it is the most needless and indefensible.
Highways we must have, and people must traverse them; but this gives them no right to trample down or otherwise injure the crops growing on either side. In France, and other parts of Europe, you see grass and grain growing luxuriantly up to the very edge of the beaten tracks, with nothing like a fence between them. Yet those crops are nowise injured or disturbed by wayfarers. Whoever chooses to impel animals along these roads must take care to have them completely under subjection, and must see that they do no harm to whatever grows by the wayside.
In this country, cattle-driving, except on a small scale, and for short distances, has nearly been superceded by railroads. The great droves formerly reaching the Atlantic seaboard on foot, from Ohio or further West, are now huddled into cars and hurried through in far less time, and with less waste of flesh; but they reach us fevered, bruised, and every way unwholesome. Every animal should be turned out to grass, after a railroad journey of more than twelve hours, and left there a full month before he is taken to the slaughter-pen. We must have many more deaths per annum in this city than if the animals on which we subsist were killed in a condition which rendered them fit for human food.