2 or 3 inches in length and crowded together at the base of the stems.  The flower stalk is about a foot in height, but on grazed lands are eaten off and but seldom seen.  The leaves are narrow and inclined to curl, and lie close to the ground.  Instead of developing a continuous growth, this grass grows in small, irregular patches, usually about the size of a man’s hand, with narrow strips of perfectly bare ground between them.  The grass curls closely upon the ground, in a woolly carpet or cushion, greatly resembling a layer of Florida moss.  Even in spring-time it never shows more color than a tint of palest green, and the landscape which is dependent upon this grass for color is never more than “a gray and melancholy waste.”  Unlike the soft, juicy, and succulent grasses of the well-watered portions of the United States, the tiny leaves of the grama grass are hard, stiff, and dry.  I have often noticed that in grazing neither cattle nor horses are able to bite off the blades, but instead each leaf is pulled out of the tuft, seemingly by its root.

Notwithstanding its dry and uninviting appearance, this grass is highly nutritious, and its fat-producing qualities are unexcelled.  The heat of summer dries it up effectually without destroying its nutritive elements, and it becomes for the remainder of the year excellent hay, cured on its own roots.  It affords good grazing all the year round, save in winter, when it is covered with snow, and even then, if the snow is not too deep, the buffaloes, cattle, and horses paw down through it to reach the grass, or else repair to wind-swept ridges and hill-tops, where the snow has been blown off and left the grass partly exposed.  Stock prefer it to all the other grasses of the plains.

On bottom-lands, where moisture is abundant, this grass develops much more luxuriantly, growing in a close mass, and often to a height of a foot or more, if not grazed down, when it is cut for hay, and sometimes yields 11/2 tons to the acre.  In Montana and the north it is generally known as “buffalo-grass,” a name to which it would seem to be fully entitled, notwithstanding the fact that this name is also applied, and quite generally, to another species, the next to be noticed.

Buchloë dactyloides (Southern buffalo-grass).—­This species is next in value and extent of distribution to the grama grass.  It also is found all over the great plains south of Nebraska and southern Wyoming, but not further north, although in many localities it occurs so sparsely as to be of little account.  A single bunch of it very greatly resembles Bouteloua oligostachya, but its general growth is very different.  It is very short, its general mass seldom rising more than 3 inches above the ground.  It grows in extensive patches, and spreads by means of stolons, which sometimes are 2 feet in length, with joints every 3 or 4 inches.  Owing to its southern distribution this might well be named the Southern buffalo grass, to distinguish it from the two other species of higher latitudes, to which the name “buffalo” has been fastened forever.