The patriarch of the plains: Cottonwoods, long a sign of water amid dry grasses, are struggling to survive. (Restoring).

Frontiersmen crossing the plains during the early 1800s had their own vision of heaven: the soft green crowns of cottonwoods rising above the yellow sweep of sun-parched grass in a land where rain was scarce and potable water scarcer.

A lone cottonwood on the plains might mark a hillside seep or a spot where the water table was within digging distance. Or, a cottonwood grove could shade a permanent spring, even though the waterhole was likely trampled by thousands of buffalo hooves. Water was water, and the plains cottonwood rose like a banner above almost every reliable accumulation.

Towering patriarch trees offered shade from a searing summer sun, provided scarce firewood, and even yielded nourishing hark for hungry horses when snows covered dormant grasses. Cottonwood groves provided turkey roosts; nesting platforms for hawks and owls; broken, hollowed branches for cavity dwellers; seeds, twigs and buds to feed grouse along with prairie chickens, moose, porcupine, and black hears. Cottonwood limbs and twigs supported the straw-and-daub nests of brilliantly plumed summer visitors ranging from orioles to yellow warblers.

Cottonwoods even made the expanding West more hospitable. Trees that towered over prairie rivers were transformed into pirogues (hand-hewn canoes for trappers and traders), stockades for early military forts, and vigas or ceiling beams for adobe homesteads. And for settlers, and especially their wives, cottonwood groves hearkened back to more genteel landscapes left behind, a shimmer of green in summer and gold in autumn amid what must have seemed an endless expanse of grass.

Cottonwoods are a cosmopolitan tree, often overlooked in the wooded eastern states before growing dominant in the open country west of the 100th Meridian. The eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoids) ranges from New England across mid-America to the foothills of the Rockies. The narrowleaf cottonwood (Populus angustifolia) is a tree of Rocky Mountain streams, while the Fremont cottonwood (Populus fremonlu) is common in the Southwest. Black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa) grows along the coast of the Pacific Northwest south to Baja California and inland to the northern Rockies.

Although appreciated, these beautiful and useful trees were rarely conserved during the roughshod days of frontier expansion. Determined to settle fertile riparian land, pioneers felled the original cottonwood groves for fuel, shelter, and cropland. In more contemporary times, land use practices in the arid West have created environmental obstacles that make it difficult for new generations of cottonwoods to mature. Dams have altered the hydrology of rivers, irrigation has caused water tables to drop and, in many cases, the periodic inundation of riverside benches and terraces has been eliminated by flood control projects.

And as native vegetation waned, introduced alien species such as salt cedar (Tamarix spp.) and Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) have virtually exploded along western rivers.

As a result, cottonwoods are now scarce to nonexistent along certain mid-western and southwestern watercourses where they once thrived. Helping the cottonwood regain lost ground is going to take some visionary action by caring individuals who comprehend the importance of the cottonwood as a keystone species in the parched western scheme of things.

In Oregon, that effort is coming from the Applegate River Watershed Council and the Bureau of Land Management, which have combined forces with AMERICAN FORESTS to plant more than 112,000 trees along the waterway. The 5-year-old project unites landowners, schoolchildren, environmental professionals and volunteers with a common desire to restore water quality and fish habitat through the planting of tree seedlings and root cuttings.

According to the BLM's Harv Koester, Applegate and its tributaries suffered years of riparian abuse from overgrazing, timber harvest, and destructive flooding from diminished steamside vegetation. "Deteriorating conditions threatened native fish that depend upon the Applegate drainage as well as overall water quality."

Today as many as 100 landowners work with the BLM to limit grazing along the river, while locals involve themselves with planting and tending a variety of restorative trees and shruhs. "We've managed to achieve a 75-80 percent survival rate in our plantings, and we're extremely pleased with the overall success of our efforts," Koester adds. "Basically we've made progress due to teamwork uniting both the public and the private sector."

In California, cottonwoods and other species are invigorating degraded habitat along the Mohave River. Since launching this project in 1992. AMERICAN FORESTS has returned more than 13,000 trees to the Afton Canyon area, one of only two places within the river system with a perennial flow. The rare water resource, situated between the coastal ranges and the Colorado River, serves as a magnet for migrating birds and other native wildlife.

Along with tree-planting efforts, crews are laboring to remove the invasive salt cedar, which monopolizes water supplies and crowds out natives. Imported into western states to retard erosion, salt cedar mines water via a deep taproot that allows it to remain hardy even during drought. The shrub's sheer tenacity makes it difficult to eradicate as it forms dense thickets that retard native trees' growth.

Another invader along the eastern fringe of the plains is a quick-spreading native commonly called redcedar (Juniperus virginiana). This tree, quite beautiful in its own right along the rocky breaks of prairie rivers, has moved onto the grasslands, growing tall beneath the branches of remaining cottonwood groves.

Historically, wildfire checked the spread of redcedar. Trees on the open prairie rarely reached knee-high before some conflagration consumed their highly inflammable foliage. But now, in the absence of fire, redcedars grow 15-20 feet tall in tight circles around mature cottonwoods.

Evolution prepared the gray-barked giants to withstand the fast-burning low flames of grassfires. But fiery outbreaks amid a half dozen or more closely spaced mature redcedars sends superheated flames shooting into the cottonwood's upper branches, causing lasting damage.

Plant scientists remind us that if riparian cottonwood forests were allowed to regenerate and mature, most likely these rightful riverbank heirs would shade out any potential for reproductive success by invaders like salt cedar. Yet due to a complicated renewal procedure erased by man's activities in recent years, cottonwood reintroduction often requires help.

More than anything, the prolifically seeding cottonwood needs flooding to prepare a fertile seedbed. According to researchers with the National Geographic Survey, without flood-induced river channel scouring, tilling and silt spillage, cottonwood forests soon revert to grassland.

Flood prevention curtails reproduction from buried twig and branch nodes along with sprouting from root systems. A lack of floodwater sweeping across riverside benches and terraces virtually eliminates any chance of seed germination.

Those of us who have spent our lives along broad yet shallow prairie rivers never cease to marvel at the prodigious output of cottonwood seeds scattered by the winds every spring. Subsiding floodwaters are followed by an eruption of tiny green cottonwood seedlings as thick as turnips in a garden, spreading over acres and acres of sand. Yet by midsummer these same sprouts serve as a tempting green salad for cattle and deer, and by early autumn the once-verdant sandbars can be totally devoid of cottonwood recruits.

Ailing riparian woodlands are a major limiting factor for native wildlife populations, according to a scientific review of national grasslands in the Dakotas conducted in 1999. A team of university range scientists and wildlife biologists found that as much as one-third of the woody habitat along streams and in ravines lacks enough young trees to be self-sustaining.

"We think that's too much," says national grasslands district ranger Spike Thompson. "We're not going to have every woody draw in sustainable condition, but I think one-third is way too much."

Even ranchers across the Plains states are openly disturbed by the loss of their cottonwoods, along with the wildlife habitat and shade the spreading trees provide. Sue Selman, owner of 14,000 prairie acres along Buffalo Creek in northwestern Oklahoma, is concerned by the number of beautiful old cottonwoods dying along her stream--each receding into history with little evidence of succession.

Selman's cottonwood recruitment has been beset by salt cedar invasion, deer browsing, and heavy grazing by cattle on lush bottomland grasses. Losing the trees stirs childhood memories, but Selman also knows each aging, dying tree represents potential economic losses as well.

Like many western ranchers, Selman depends on lease and day fees from hunters to help defray the costs of her cattle operation. Each cottonwood loss adds to the dwindling number of turkey roosts along her streams and eventually to dwindling turkey hunter dollars.

In Nevada, it's fish species that suffer from the cottonwood's demise. The Mary's River in Nevada is known for its population of endangered Lahontan trout. Critical to the survival of these rare fish is the reestablishment and maintenance of riparian forest along the riverbanks through the successful Bring Back the Natives program, which includes the planting of black cottonwoods along the banks of the Mary's.

The project, underway since 1994, has included plantings by AMERICAN FORESTS and later American Rivers and the Bureau of Land Management with financial assistance from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Without the assistance of cooperative projects like this one, it's doubtful cottonwoods could successfully regenerate and grace the banks of arid western rivers.

The species is important to cities and towns as well. AMERICAN FORESTS has teamed with community resource and development organizations in Oklahoma to establish cottonwoods on reclaimed landfills in five cities in the western half of the state. More than 15,000 trees have been planted since 1995 to stabilize the area and retard erosion. Eventually these reclaimed sites will become community parks and playgrounds, with help from a tree that continues to figure prominently in providing quality life on the plains.

But then how could anyone not love and appreciate a tree that does what the cottonwood does where it does, and does it year after year with so much grace and beauty? Having grown up in the shade of a cottonwood on the parched plains, I can personally attest to the beauty of a spring of good water shaded by a huge old tree that spreads its limbs over a small. sparkling pool like a wizened priest giving benediction. When the July sun pushes the temperature past 100, that's about as close to heaven as a country kid can get.

Gary Lantz writes from his home in Norman, Oklahoma.

RELATED ARTICLE: ReLeaf for Cottonwoods

In the 1800s explorers Jebediah Smith and Kit Carson visited Afton Canyon, a spectacular gorge in California's Mojave Desert near Barstow and stumbled upon an Eden-esque scene: vermilion flycatchers and summer tanagers flitted between robust cottonwoods lining the bank.

Fish swam in cottonwood-shaded pools. Desert bighorn sheep sipped from the river-one of only two stretches of the Mojave River with year-round water-and desert tortoises roamed nearby.

More than 100 years later another foreigner arrived at this perennial oasis This traveler monopolized the river's sandy shores and water-disrupting the cottonwood's benign reign. AMERICAN FORESTS has stepped in to help remove this invader, salt cedar, from 700 acres of degraded land along the Mojave River, More than 15,600 willows and cottonwoods have been returned to the Mojave's shores as part of AMERICAN FORESTS' Global ReLeaf program.

Hundreds of miles north, along the Applegate River in Oregon, another invasive species-Home sapiens-threatens cottonwoods by fragmenting, degrading, or destroying their ecosystems. In its fifth year, AMERICAN FORESTS' Applegate River Global ReLeaf project has planted more than 110,000 black cottonwoods Oregon ash, and other suitable riparian species. These trees will help reduce harmful sediment loads in the river, home to the threatened Coho salmon.

To plant trees for $1 each in either the Mojave or Applegate river project, log onto www.americanforests.org, call 800/545-TREE, or write AMERICAN FORESTS, PO Box 2000, Washington, DC 20013.

Becky Trout