The American Forests
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great
delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole
continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored
above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe. To prepare the
ground, it was rolled and sifted in seas with infinite loving
deliberation and fore-thought, lifted into the light, submerged and
warmed over and over again, pressed and crumpled into folds and ridges,
mountains, and hills, subsoiled with heaving volcanic fires, ploughed
and ground and sculptured into scenery and soil with glaciers and
rivers,—every feature growing and changing from beauty to beauty,
higher and higher. And in the fullness of time it was planted in
groves, and belts, and broad, exuberant, mantling forests, with the
largest, most varied, most fruitful, and most beautiful trees in the
world. Bright seas made its border, with wave embroidery and icebergs;
gray deserts were outspread in the middle of it, mossy tundras on the
north, savannas on the south, and blooming prairies and plains; while
lakes and rivers shone through all the vast forests and openings, and
happy birds and beasts gave delightful animation. Everywhere,
everywhere over all the blessed continent, there were beauty and melody
and kindly, wholesome, foodful abundance.
These forests were composed of about five hundred species of trees, all
of them in some way useful to man, ranging in size from twenty-five
feet in height and less than one foot in diameter at the ground to four
hundred feet in height and more than twenty feet in diameter,—lordly
monarchs proclaiming the gospel of beauty like apostles. For many a
century after the ice-ploughs were melted, nature fed them and dressed
them every day,—working like a man, a loving, devoted, painstaking
gardener; fingering every leaf and flower and mossy furrowed bole;
bending, trimming, modeling, balancing; painting them with the
loveliest colors; bringing over them now clouds with cooling shadows
and showers, now sunshine; fanning them with gentle winds and rustling
their leaves; exercising them in every fibre with storms, and pruning
them; loading them with flowers and fruit, loading them with snow, and
ever making them more beautiful as the years rolled by. Wide-branching
oak and elm in endless variety, walnut and maple, chestnut and beech,
ilex and locust, touching limb to limb, spread a leafy translucent
canopy along the coast of the Atlantic over the wrinkled folds and
ridges of the Alleghanies,—a green billowy sea in summer, golden and
purple in autumn, pearly gray like a steadfast frozen mist of
interlacing branches and sprays in leafless, restful winter.
To the southward stretched dark, level-topped cypresses in knobby,
tangled swamps, grassy savannas in the midst of them like lakes of
light, groves of gay, sparkling spice-trees, magnolias and palms,
glossy-leaved and blooming and shining continually. To the northward,
over Maine and Ottawa, rose hosts of spiry, rosiny evergreens,—white
pine and spruce, hemlock and cedar, shoulder to shoulder, laden with
purple cones, their myriad needles sparkling and shimmering, covering
hills and swamps, rocky headlands and domes, ever bravely aspiring and
seeking the sky; the ground in their shade now snow-clad and frozen,
now mossy and flowery; beaver meadows here and there, full of lilies
and grass; lakes gleaming like eyes, and a silvery embroidery of rivers
and creeks watering and brightening all the vast glad wilderness.
Thence westward were oak and elm, hickory and tupelo, gum and
liriodendron, sassafras and ash, linden and laurel, spreading on ever
wider in glorious exuberance over the great fertile basin of the
Mississippi, over damp level bottoms, low dimpling hollows, and round
dotting hills, embosoming sunny prairies and cheery park openings, half
sunshine, half shade; while a dark wilderness of pines covered the
region around the Great Lakes. Thence still westward swept the forests
to right and left around grassy plains and deserts a thousand miles
wide: irrepressible hosts of spruce and pine, aspen and willow,
nut-pine and juniper, cactus and yucca, caring nothing for drought,
extending undaunted from mountain to mountain, over mesa and desert, to
join the darkening multitudes of pines that covered the high Rocky
ranges and the glorious forests along the coast of the moist and balmy
Pacific, where new species of pine, giant cedars and spruces, silver
firs and Sequoias, kings of their race, growing close together like
grass in a meadow, poised their brave domes and spires in the sky,
three hundred feet above the ferns and the lilies that enameled the
ground; towering serene through the long centuries, preaching God’s
forestry fresh from heaven.
[Illustration: In a Puget Sound Forest.]
Here the forests reached their highest development. Hence they went
wavering northward over icy Alaska, brave spruce and fir, poplar and
birch, by the coasts and the rivers, to within sight of the Arctic
Ocean. American forests! the glory of the world! Surveyed thus from the
east to the west, from the north to the south, they are rich beyond
thought, immortal, immeasurable, enough and to spare for every feeding,
sheltering beast and bird, insect and son of Adam; and nobody need have
cared had there been no pines in Norway, no cedars and deodars on
Lebanon and the Himalayas, no vine-clad selvas in the basin of the
Amazon. With such variety, harmony, and triumphant exuberance, even
nature, it would seem, might have rested content with the forests of
North America, and planted no more.
So they appeared a few centuries ago when they were rejoicing in
wildness. The Indians with stone axes could do them no more harm than
could gnawing beavers and browsing moose. Even the fires of the Indians
and the fierce shattering lightning seemed to work together only for
good in clearing spots here and there for smooth garden prairies, and
openings for sunflowers seeking the light. But when the steel axe of
the white man rang out on the startled air their doom was sealed. Every
tree heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of smoke gave the sign in the
sky.
I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of
things they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might
have been made without barbarous wickedness. Likewise many of nature’s
five hundred kinds of wild trees had to make way for orchards and
cornfields. In the settlement and civilization of the country, bread
more than timber or beauty was wanted; and in the blindness of hunger,
the early settlers, claiming Heaven as their guide, regarded God’s
trees as only a larger kind of pernicious weeds, extremely hard to get
rid of. Accordingly, with no eye to the future, these pious destroyers
waged interminable forest wars; chips flew thick and fast; trees in
their beauty fell crashing by millions, smashed to confusion, and the
smoke of their burning has been rising to heaven more than two hundred
years. After the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia had been mostly
cleared and scorched into melancholy ruins, the overflowing multitude
of bread and money seekers poured over the Alleghanies into the fertile
middle West, spreading ruthless devastation ever wider and farther over
the rich valley of the Mississippi and the vast shadowy pine region
about the Great Lakes. Thence still westward, the invading horde of
destroyers called settlers made its fiery way over the broad Rocky
Mountains, felling and burning more fiercely than ever, until at last
it has reached the wild side of the continent, and entered the last of
the great aboriginal forests on the shores of the Pacific.
Surely, then, it should not be wondered at that lovers of their
country, bewailing its baldness, are now crying aloud, “Save what is
left of the forests!” Clearing has surely now gone far enough; soon
timber will be scarce, and not a grove will be left to rest in or pray
in. The remnant protected will yield plenty of timber, a perennial
harvest for every right use, without further diminution of its area,
and will continue to cover the springs of the rivers that rise in the
mountains and give irrigating waters to the dry valleys at their feet,
prevent wasting floods and be a blessing to everybody forever.
Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care
for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go
on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.
In its calmer moments, in the midst of bewildering hunger and war and
restless over-industry, Prussia has learned that the forest plays an
important part in human progress, and that the advance in civilization
only makes it more indispensable. It has, therefore, as shown by Mr.
Pinchot, refused to deliver its forests to more or less speedy
destruction by permitting them to pass into private ownership. But the
state woodlands are not allowed to lie idle. On the contrary, they are
made to produce as much timber as is possible without spoiling them. In
the administration of its forests, the state righteously considers
itself bound to treat them as a trust for the nation as a whole, and to
keep in view the common good of the people for all time.
In France no government forests have been sold since 1870. On the other
hand, about one half of the fifty million francs spent on forestry has
been given to engineering works, to make the replanting of denuded
areas possible. The disappearance of the forests in the first place, it
is claimed, may be traced in most cases directly to mountain pasturage.
The provisions of the Code concerning private woodlands are
substantially these: no private owner may clear his woodlands without
giving notice to the government at least four months in advance, and
the forest service may forbid the clearing on the following grounds,—to
maintain the soil on mountains, to defend the soil against erosion and
flooding by rivers or torrents, to insure the existence of springs or
watercourses, to protect the dunes and seashore, etc. A proprietor who
has cleared his forest without permission is subject to heavy fine, and
in addition may be made to replant the cleared area.
In Switzerland, after many laws like our own had been found wanting,
the Swiss forest school was established in 1865, and soon after the
federal forest law was enacted, which is binding over nearly two thirds
of the country. Under its provisions, the cantons must appoint and pay
the number of suitably educated foresters required for the fulfillment
of the forest law; and in the organization of a normally stocked
forest, the object of first importance must be the cutting each year of
an amount of timber equal to the total annual increase, and no more.
The Russian government passed a law in 1888, declaring that clearing is
forbidden in protected forests, and is allowed in others “only when its
effects will not be to disturb the suitable relations which should
exist between forest and agricultural lands.”
Even Japan is ahead of us in the management of her forests. They cover
an area of about twenty-nine million acres. The feudal lords valued the
woodlands, and enacted vigorous protective laws; and when, in the
latest civil war, the Mikado government destroyed the feudal system, it
declared the forests that had belonged to the feudal lords to be the
property of the state, promulgated a forest law binding on the whole
kingdom, and founded a school of forestry in Tokio. The forest service
does not rest satisfied with the present proportion of woodland, but
looks to planting the best forest trees it can find in any country, if
likely to be useful and to thrive in Japan.
In India systematic forest management was begun about forty years ago,
under difficulties—presented by the character of the country, the
prevalence of running fires, opposition from lumbermen, settlers,
etc.—not unlike those which confront us now. Of the total area of
government forests, perhaps seventy million acres, fifty-five million
acres have been brought under the control of the forestry department,—a
larger area than that of all our national parks and reservations. The
chief aims of the administration are effective protection of the
forests from fire, an efficient system of regeneration, and cheap
transportation of the forest products; the results so far have been
most beneficial and encouraging.
It seems, therefore, that almost every civilized nation can give us a
lesson on the management and care of forests. So far our government has
done nothing effective with its forests, though the best in the world,
but is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a
magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his fields and
meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at
will, depending on their inexhaustible abundance. Now it is plain that
the forests are not inexhaustible, and that quick measures must be
taken if ruin is to be avoided. Year by year the remnant is growing
smaller before the axe and fire, while the laws in existence provide
neither for the protection of the timber from destruction nor for its
use where it is most needed.
As is shown by Mr. E. A. Bowers, formerly Inspector of the Public Land
Service, the foundation of our protective policy, which has never
protected, is an act passed March 1, 1817, which authorized the
Secretary of the Navy to reserve lands producing live-oak and cedar,
for the sole purpose of supplying timber for the navy of the United
States. An extension of this law by the passage of the act of March 2,
1831, provided that if any person should cut live-oak or red cedar
trees or _other timber_ from the lands of the United States for any
other purpose than the construction of the navy, such person should pay
a fine not less than triple the value of the timber cut, and be
imprisoned for a period not exceeding twelve months. Upon this old law,
as Mr. Bowers points out, having the construction of a wooden navy in
view, the United States government has to-day chiefly to rely in
protecting its timber throughout the arid regions of the West, where
none of the naval timber which the law had in mind is to be found.
By the act of June 3, 1878, timber can be taken from public lands not
subject to entry under any existing laws except for minerals, by _bona
fide_ residents of the Rocky Mountain states and territories and the
Dakotas. Under the timber and stone act, of the same date, land in the
Pacific States and Nevada, valuable mainly for timber, and unfit for
cultivation if the timber is removed, can be purchased for two dollars
and a half an acre, under certain restrictions. By the act of March 3,
1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take
timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction
purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred
times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run in the
woods. The settlement laws, under which a settler may enter lands
valuable for timber as well as for agriculture, furnish another means
of obtaining title to public timber.
With the exception of the timber culture act, under which, in
consideration of planting a few acres of seedlings, settlers on the
treeless plains got 160 acres each, the above is the only legislation
aiming to protect and promote the planting of forests. In no other way
than under some one of these laws can a citizen of the United States
make any use of the public forests. To show the results of the
timber-planting act, it need only be stated that of the thirty-eight
million acres entered under it, less than one million acres have been
patented. This means that less than fifty thousand acres have been
planted with stunted, woebegone, almost hopeless sprouts of trees,
while at the same time the government has allowed millions of acres of
the grandest forest trees to be stolen or destroyed, or sold for
nothing. Under the act of June 3, 1878, settlers in Colorado and the
Territories were allowed to cut timber for mining and educational
purposes from mineral land, which in the practical West means both
cutting and burning anywhere and everywhere, for any purpose, on any
sort of public land. Thus, the prospector, the miner, and mining and
railroad companies are allowed by law to take all the timber they like
for their mines and roads, and the forbidden settler, if there are no
mineral lands near his farm or stock-ranch, or none that he knows of,
can hardly be expected to forbear taking what he needs wherever he can
find it. Timber is as necessary as bread, and no scheme of management
failing to recognize and properly provide for this want can possibly be
maintained. In any case, it will be hard to teach the pioneers that it
is wrong to steal government timber. Taking from the government is with
them the same as taking from nature, and their consciences flinch no
more in cutting timber from the wild forests than in drawing water from
a lake or river. As for reservation and protection of forests, it seems
as silly and needless to them as protection and reservation of the
ocean would be, both appearing to be boundless and inexhaustible.
The special land agents employed by the General Land Office to protect
the public domain from timber depredations are supposed to collect
testimony to sustain prosecution and to superintend such prosecution on
behalf of the government, which is represented by the district
attorneys. But timber thieves of the Western class are seldom
convicted, for the good reason that most of the jurors who try such
cases are themselves as guilty as those on trial. The effect of the
present confused, discriminating, and unjust system has been to place
almost the whole population in opposition to the government; and as
conclusive of its futility, as shown by Mr. Bowers, we need only state
that during the seven years from 1881 to 1887 inclusive, the value of
the timber reported stolen from the government lands was $36,719,935,
and the amount recovered was $478,073, while the cost of the services
of special agents alone was $455,000, to which must be added the
expense of the trials. Thus for nearly thirty-seven million dollars
worth of timber the government got less than nothing; and the value of
that consumed by running fires during the same period, without benefit
even to thieves, was probably over two hundred millions of dollars.
Land commissioners and Secretaries of the Interior have repeatedly
called attention to this ruinous state of affairs, and asked Congress
to enact the requisite legislation for reasonable reform. But, busied
with tariffs, etc., Congress has given no heed to these or other
appeals, and our forests, the most valuable and the most destructible
of all the natural resources of the country, are being robbed and
burned more rapidly than ever. The annual appropriation for so-called
“protection service” is hardly sufficient to keep twenty-five timber
agents in the field, and as far as any efficient protection of timber
is concerned these agents themselves might as well be timber.[7]
[7] A change for the better, compelled by public opinion, is now going
on,—1901.
That a change from robbery and ruin to a permanent rational policy is
urgently needed nobody with the slightest knowledge of American forests
will deny. In the East and along the northern Pacific coast, where the
rainfall is abundant, comparatively few care keenly what becomes of the
trees so long as fuel and lumber are not noticeably dear. But in the
Rocky Mountains and California and Arizona, where the forests are
inflammable, and where the fertility of the lowlands depends upon
irrigation, public opinion is growing stronger every year in favor of
permanent protection by the federal government of all the forests that
cover the sources of the streams. Even lumbermen in these regions, long
accustomed to steal, are now willing and anxious to buy lumber for
their mills under cover of law: some possibly from a late second growth
of honesty, but most, especially the small mill-owners, simply because
it no longer pays to steal where all may not only steal, but also
destroy, and in particular because it costs about as much to steal
timber for one mill as for ten, and, therefore, the ordinary lumberman
can no longer compete with the large corporations. Many of the miners
find that timber is already becoming scarce and dear on the denuded
hills around their mills, and they, too, are asking for protection of
forests, at least against fire. The slow-going, unthrifty farmers,
also, are beginning to realize that when the timber is stripped from
the mountains the irrigating streams dry up in summer, and are
destructive in winter; that soil, scenery, and everything slips off
with the trees: so of course they are coming into the ranks of
tree-friends.
Of all the magnificent coniferous forests around the Great Lakes, once
the property of the United States, scarcely any belong to it now. They
have disappeared in lumber and smoke, mostly smoke, and the government
got not one cent for them; only the land they were growing on was
considered valuable, and two and a half dollars an acre was charged for
it. Here and there in the Southern States there are still considerable
areas of timbered government land, but these are comparatively
unimportant. Only the forests of the West are significant in size and
value, and these, although still great, are rapidly vanishing. Last
summer, of the unrivaled red-wood forests of the Pacific Coast Range,
the United States Forestry Commission could not find a single
quarter-section that remained in the hands of the government.[8]
[8] The State of California recently appropriated two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars to buy a block of redwood land near Santa Cruz
for a state park. A much larger national park should be made in
Humboldt or Mendocino county.
Under the timber and stone act of 1878, which might well have been
called the “dust and ashes act,” any citizen of the United States could
take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land, and by paying two
dollars and a half an acre for it obtain title. There was some virtuous
effort made with a view to limit the operations of the act by requiring
that the purchaser should make affidavit that he was entering the land
exclusively for his own use, and by not allowing any association to
enter more than one hundred and sixty acres. Nevertheless, under this
act wealthy corporations have fraudulently obtained title to from ten
thousand to twenty thousand acres or more. The plan was usually as
follows: A mill company, desirous of getting title to a large body of
redwood or sugar-pine land, first blurred the eyes and ears of the land
agents, and then hired men to enter the land they wanted, and
immediately deed it to the company after a nominal compliance with the
law; false swearing in the wilderness against the government being held
of no account. In one case which came under the observation of Mr.
Bowers, it was the practice of a lumber company to hire the entire crew
of every vessel which might happen to touch at any port in the red-wood
belt, to enter one hundred and sixty acres each and immediately deed
the land to the company, in consideration of the company’s paying all
expenses and giving the jolly sailors fifty dollars apiece for their
trouble.
By such methods have our magnificent redwoods and much of the
sugar-pine forests of the Sierra Nevada been absorbed by foreign and
resident capitalists. Uncle Sam is not often called a fool in business
matters, yet he has sold millions of acres of timber land at two
dollars and a half an acre on which a single tree was worth more than a
hundred dollars. But this priceless land has been patented, and nothing
can be done now about the crazy bargain. According to the everlasting
law of righteousness, even the fraudulent buyers at less than one per
cent of its value are making little or nothing, on account of fierce
competition. The trees are felled, and about half of each giant is left
on the ground to be converted into smoke and ashes; the better half is
sawed into choice lumber and sold to citizens of the United States or
to foreigners: thus robbing the country of its glory and impoverishing
it without right benefit to anybody,—a bad, black business from
beginning to end.
The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and
roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair
the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner. As soon
as a redwood is cut down or burned it sends up a crowd of eager,
hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades
attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would
finally become giants as great as the original tree. Gigantic second
and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent
temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years
old. But not one denuded acre in a hundred is allowed to raise a new
forest growth. On the contrary, all the brains, religion, and
superstition of the neighborhood are brought into play to prevent a new
growth. The sprouts from the roots and stumps are cut off again and
again, with zealous concern as to the best time and method of making
death sure. In the clearings of one of the largest mills on the coast
we found thirty men at work, last summer, cutting off redwood shoots
“in the dark of the moon,” claiming that all the stumps and roots
cleared at this auspicious time would send up no more shoots. Anyhow,
these vigorous, almost immortal trees are killed at last, and black
stumps are now their only monuments over most of the chopped and burned
areas.
The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the
western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from
beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of
nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and
closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world.
Trees from ten to fifteen feet in diameter and three hundred feet high
are not uncommon, and a few attain a height of three hundred and fifty
feet or even four hundred, with a diameter at the base of fifteen to
twenty feet or more, while the ground beneath them is a garden of
fresh, exuberant ferns, lilies, gaultheria, and rhododendron. This
grand tree, Sequoia sempervirens, is surpassed in size only by its near
relative, Sequoia gigantea, or Big Tree, of the Sierra Nevada, if,
indeed, it is surpassed. The sempervirens is certainly the taller of
the two. The gigantea attains a greater girth, and is heavier, more
noble in port, and more sublimely beautiful. These two Sequoia are all
that are known to exist in the world, though in former geological times
the genus was common and had many species. The redwood is restricted to
the Coast Range, and the Big Tree to the Sierra.
As timber the redwood is too good to live. The largest sawmills ever
built are busy along its seaward border, “with all the modern
improvements,” but so immense is the yield per acre it will be long ere
the supply is exhausted. The Big Tree is also, to some extent, being
made into lumber. It is far less abundant than the redwood, and is,
fortunately, less accessible, extending along the western flank of the
Sierra in a partially interrupted belt, about two hundred and fifty
miles long, at a height of from four to eight thousand feet above the
sea. The enormous logs, too heavy to handle, are blasted into
manageable dimensions with gunpowder. A large portion of the best
timber is thus shattered and destroyed, and, with the huge, knotty
tops, is left in ruins for tremendous fires that kill every tree within
their range, great and small. Still, the species is not in danger of
extinction. It has been planted and is flourishing over a great part of
Europe, and magnificent sections of the aboriginal forests have been
reserved as national and State parks,—the Mariposa Sequoia Grove, near
Yosemite, managed by the State of California, and the General Grant and
Sequoia national parks on the Kings, Kaweah, and Tule rivers,
efficiently guarded by a small troop of United States cavalry under the
direction of the Secretary of the interior. But there is not a single
specimen of the redwood in any national park. Only by gift or purchase,
so far as I know, can the government get back into its possession a
single acre of this wonderful forest.
The legitimate demands on the forests that have passed into private
ownership, as well as those in the hands of the government, are
increasing every year with the rapid settlement and up-building of the
country, but the methods of lumbering are as yet grossly wasteful. In
most mills only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the
ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires, which kill much of
what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings,
on which the permanence of the forest depends. Thus every mill is a
centre of destruction far more severe from waste and fire than from
use. The same thing is true of the mines, which consume and destroy
indirectly immense quantities of timber with their innumerable fires,
accidental or set to make open ways, and often without regard to how
far they run. The prospector deliberately sets fires to clear off the
woods just where they are densest, to lay the rocks bare and make the
discovery of mines easier. Sheep-owners and their shepherds also set
fires everywhere through the woods in the fall to facilitate the march
of their countless flocks the next summer, and perhaps in some places
to improve the pasturage. The axe is not yet at the root of every tree,
but the sheep is, or was before the national parks were established and
guarded by the military, the only effective and reliable arm of the
government free from the blight of politics. Not only do the shepherds,
at the driest time of the year, set fire to everything that will burn,
but the sheep consume every green leaf, not sparing even the young
conifers, where they are in a starving condition from crowding, and
they rake and dibble the loose soil of the mountain sides for the
spring floods to wash away, and thus at last leave the ground barren.
Of all the destroyers that infest the woods, the shake-maker seems the
happiest. Twenty or thirty years ago, shakes, a kind of long,
board-like shingles split with a mallet and a frow, were in great
demand for covering barns and sheds, and many are used still in
preference to common shingles, especially those made from the
sugar-pine, which do not warp or crack in the hottest sunshine.
Drifting adventurers in California, after harvest and threshing are
over, oftentimes meet to discuss their plans for the winter, and their
talk is interesting. Once, in a company of this kind, I heard a man
say, as he peacefully smoked his pipe: “Boys, as soon as this job’s
done I’m goin’ into the duck business. There’s big money in it, and
your grub costs nothing. Tule Joe made five hundred dollars last winter
on mallard and teal. Shot ’em on the Joaquin, tied ’em in dozens by the
neck, and shipped ’em to San Francisco. And when he was tired wading in
the sloughs and touched with rheumatiz, he just knocked off on ducks,
and went to the Contra Costa hills for dove and quail. It’s a mighty
good business, and you’re your own boss, and the whole thing’s fun.”
Another of the company, a bushy-bearded fellow, with a trace of brag in
his voice, drawled out: “Bird business is well enough for some, but
bear is my game, with a deer and a California lion thrown in now and
then for change. There’s always market for bear grease, and sometimes
you can sell the hams. They’re good as hog hams any day. And you are
your own boss in my business, too, if the bears ain’t too big and too
many for you. Old grizzlies I despise,—they want cannon to kill ’em;
but the blacks and browns are beauties for grease, and when once I get
’em just right, and draw a bead on ’em, I fetch ’em every time.”
Another said he was going to catch up a lot of mustangs as soon as the
rains set in, hitch them to a gang-plough, and go to farming on the San
Joaquin plains for wheat. But most preferred the shake business, until
something more profitable and as sure could be found, with equal
comfort and independence.
With a cheap mustang or mule to carry a pair of blankets, a sack of
flour, a few pounds of coffee, and an axe, a frow, and a cross-cut saw,
the shake-maker ascends the mountains to the pine belt where it is most
accessible, usually by some mine or mill road. Then he strikes off into
the virgin woods, where the sugar pine, king of all the hundred species
of pines in the world in size and beauty, towers on the open sunny
slopes of the Sierra in the fullness of its glory. Selecting a
favorable spot for a cabin near a meadow with a stream, he unpacks his
animal and stakes it out on the meadow. Then he chops into one after
another of the pines, until he finds one that he feels sure will split
freely, cuts this down, saws off a section four feet long, splits it,
and from this first cut, perhaps seven feet in diameter, he gets shakes
enough for a cabin and its furniture,—walls, roof, door, bedstead,
table, and stool. Besides his labor, only a few pounds of nails are
required. Sapling poles form the frame of the airy building, usually
about six feet by eight in size, on which the shakes are nailed, with
the edges overlapping. A few bolts from the same section that the
shakes were made from are split into square sticks and built up to form
a chimney, the inside and interspaces being plastered and filled in
with mud. Thus, with abundance of fuel, shelter and comfort by his own
fireside are secured. Then he goes to work sawing and splitting for the
market, tying the shakes in bundles of fifty or a hundred. They are
four feet long, four inches wide, and about one fourth of an inch
thick. The first few thousands he sells or trades at the nearest mill
or store, getting provisions in exchange. Then he advertises, in
whatever way he can, that he has excellent sugar-pine shakes for sale,
easy of access and cheap.
[Illustration: Sugar Pine.]
Only the lower, perfectly clear, free-splitting portions of the giant
pines are used,—perhaps ten to twenty feet from a tree two hundred and
fifty in height; all the rest is left a mass of ruins, to rot or to
feed the forest fires, while thousands are hacked deeply and rejected
in proving the grain. Over nearly all of the more accessible slopes of
the Sierra and Cascade mountains in southern Oregon, at a height of
from three to six thousand feet above the sea, and for a distance of
about six hundred miles, this waste and confusion extends. Happy
robbers! dwelling in the most beautiful woods, in the most salubrious
climate, breathing delightful odors both day and night, drinking cool
living water,—roses and lilies at their feet in the spring, shedding
fragrance and ringing bells as if cheering them on in their desolating
work. There is none to say them nay. They buy no land, pay no taxes,
dwell in a paradise with no forbidding angel either from Washington or
from heaven. Every one of the frail shake shanties is a centre of
destruction, and the extent of the ravages wrought in this quiet way is
in the aggregate enormous.
It is not generally known that, notwithstanding the immense quantities
of timber cut every year for foreign and home markets and mines, from
five to ten times as much is destroyed as is used, chiefly by running
forest fires that only the federal government can stop. Travelers
through the West in summer are not likely to forget the fire-work
displayed along the various railway tracks. Thoreau, when contemplating
the destruction of the forests on the east side of the continent, said
that soon the country would be so bald that every man would have to
grow whiskers to hide its nakedness, but he thanked God that at least
the sky was safe. Had he gone West he would have found out that the sky
was not safe; for all through the summer months, over most of the
mountain regions, the smoke of mill and forest fires is so thick and
black that no sunbeam can pierce it. The whole sky, with clouds, sun,
moon, and stars, is simply blotted out. There is no real sky and no
scenery. Not a mountain is left in the landscape. At least none is in
sight from the lowlands, and they all might as well be on the moon, as
far as scenery is concerned.
The half-dozen transcontinental railroad companies advertise the
beauties of their lines in gorgeous many-colored folders, each claiming
its as the “scenic route.” “The route of superior desolation”—the
smoke, dust, and ashes route—would be a more truthful description.
Every train rolls on through dismal smoke and barbarous, melancholy
ruins; and the companies might well cry in their advertisements: “Come!
travel our way. Ours is the blackest. It is the only genuine Erebus
route. The sky is black and the ground is black, and on either side
there is a continuous border of black stumps and logs and blasted trees
appealing to heaven for help as if still half alive, and their mute
eloquence is most interestingly touching. The blackness is perfect. On
account of the superior skill of our workmen, advantages of climate,
and the kind of trees, the charring is generally deeper along our line,
and the ashes are deeper, and the confusion and desolation displayed
can never be rivaled. No other route on this continent so fully
illustrates the abomination of desolation.” Such a claim would be
reasonable, as each seems the worst, whatever route you chance to take.
Of course a way had to be cleared through the woods. But the felled
timber is not worked up into firewood for the engines and into lumber
for the company’s use; it is left lying in vulgar confusion, and is
fired from time to time by sparks from locomotives or by the workmen
camping along the line. The fires, whether accidental or set, are
allowed to run into the woods as far as they may, thus assuring
comprehensive destruction. The directors of a line that guarded against
fires, and cleared a clean gap edged with living trees, and fringed and
mantled with the grass and flowers and beautiful seedling that are ever
ready and willing to spring up, might justly boast of the beauty of
their road; for nature is always ready to heal every scar. But there is
no such road on the western side of the continent. Last summer, in the
Rocky Mountains, I saw six fires started by sparks from a locomotive
within a distance of three miles, and nobody was in sight to prevent
them from spreading. They might run into the adjacent forests and burn
the timber from hundreds of square miles; not a man in the State would
care to spend an hour in fighting them, as long as his own fences and
buildings were not threatened.
Notwithstanding all the waste and use which have been going on
unchecked like a storm for more than two centuries, it is not yet too
late—though it is high time—for the government to begin a rational
administration of its forests. About seventy million acres it still
owns,—enough for all the country, if wisely used. These residual
forests are generally on mountain slopes, just where they are doing the
most good, and where their removal would be followed by the greatest
number of evils; the lands they cover are too rocky and high for
agriculture, and can never be made as valuable for any other crop as
for the present crop of trees. It has been shown over and over again
that if these mountains were to be stripped of their trees and
underbrush, and kept bare and sodless by hordes of sheep and the
innumerable fires the shepherds set, besides those of the millmen,
prospectors shake-makers, and all sorts of adventurers, both lowlands
and mountains would speedily become little better than desert, compared
with their present beneficent fertility. During heavy rainfalls and
while the winter accumulations of snow were melting, the large streams
would swell into destructive torrents, cutting deep, rugged-edged
gullies, carrying away the fertile humus and soil as well as sand and
rocks, filling up and overflowing their lower channels, and covering
the lowland fields with raw detritus. Drought and barrenness would
follow.
In their natural condition, or under wise management, keeping out
destructive sheep, preventing fires, selecting the trees that should be
cut for lumber, and preserving the young ones and the shrubs and sod of
herbaceous vegetation, these forests would be a never failing fountain
of wealth and beauty. The cool shades of the forest give rise to moist
beds and currents of air, and the sod of grasses and the various
flowering plants and shrubs thus fostered, together with the network
and sponge of tree roots, absorb and hold back the rain and the waters
from melting snow, compelling them to ooze and percolate and flow
gently through the soil in streams that never dry. All the pine needles
and rootlets and blades of grass, and the fallen, decaying trunks of
trees, are dams, storing the bounty of the clouds and dispensing it in
perennial life-giving streams, instead of allowing it to gather
suddenly and rush headlong in short-lived devastating floods. Everybody
on the dry side of the continent is beginning to find this out, and, in
view of the waste going on, is growing more and more anxious for
government protection. The outcries we hear against forest reservations
come mostly from thieves who are wealthy and steal timber by wholesale.
They have so long been allowed to steal and destroy in peace that any
impediment to forest robbery is denounced as a cruel and irreligious
interference with “vested rights,” likely to endanger the repose of all
ungodly welfare.
Gold, gold, gold! How strong a voice that metal has!
“O wae for the siller, it is sae preva’lin’!”
Even in Congress a sizable chunk of gold, carefully concealed, will
outtalk and outfight all the nation on a subject like forestry, well
smothered in ignorance, and in which the money interests of only a few
are conspicuously involved. Under these circumstances, the bawling,
blethering oratorical stuff drowns the voice of God himself. Yet the
dawn of a new day in forestry is breaking. Honest citizens see that
only the rights of the government are being trampled, not those of the
settlers. Only what belongs to all alike is reserved, and every acre
that is left should be held together under the federal government as a
basis for a general policy of administration for the public good. The
people will not always be deceived by selfish opposition, whether from
lumber and mining corporations or from sheepmen and prospectors,
however cunningly brought forward underneath fables and gold.
Emerson says that things refuse to be mismanaged long. An exception
would seem to be found in the case of our forests, which have been
mismanaged rather long, and now come desperately near being like
smashed eggs and spilt milk. Still, in the long run the world does not
move backward. The wonderful advance made in the last few years, in
creating four national parks in the West, and thirty forest
reservations, embracing nearly forty million acres; and in the planting
of the borders of streets and highways and spacious parks in all the
great cities, to satisfy the natural taste and hunger for landscape
beauty and righteousness that God has put, in some measure, into every
human being and animal, shows the trend of awakening public opinion.
The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even
good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity; but
straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we
confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest
reservations. There will be a period of indifference on the part of the
rich, sleepy with wealth, and of the toiling millions, sleepy with
poverty, most of whom never saw a forest; a period of screaming protest
and objection from the plunderers, who are as unconscionable and
enterprising as Satan. But light is surely coming, and the friends of
destruction will preach and bewail in vain.
The United States government has always been proud of the welcome it
has extended to good men of every nation, seeking freedom and homes and
bread. Let them be welcomed still as nature welcomes them, to the woods
as well as to the prairies and plains. No place is too good for good
men, and still there is room. They are invited to heaven, and may well
be allowed in America. Every place is made better by them. Let them be
as free to pick gold and gems from the hills, to cut and hew, dig and
plant, for homes and bread, as the birds are to pick berries from the
wild bushes, and moss and leaves for nests. The ground will be glad to
feed them, and the pines will come down from the mountains for their
homes as willingly as the cedars came from Lebanon for Solomon’s
temple. Nor will the woods be the worse for this use, or their benign
influences be diminished any more than the sun is diminished by
shining. Mere destroyers, however, tree-killers, wool and mutton men,
spreading death and confusion in the fairest groves and gardens ever
planted,—let the government hasten to cast them out and make an end of
them. For it must be told again and again, and be burningly borne in
mind, that just now, while protective measures are being deliberated
languidly, destruction and use are speeding on faster and farther every
day. The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips are flying thick as
snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of priceless forests,
with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery, and religion,
are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the national
parks, not one forest guard is employed.
All sorts of local laws and regulations have been tried and found
wanting, and the costly lessons of our own experience, as well as that
of every civilized nation, show conclusively that the fate of the
remnant of our forests is in the hands of the federal government, and
that if the remnant is to be saved at all, it must be saved quickly.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could,
they would still be destroyed,—chased and hunted down as long as fun or
a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or
magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would
planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble
primeval forests. During a man’s life only saplings can be grown, in
the place of the old trees—tens of centuries old—that have been
destroyed. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the
trees in these Western woods,—trees that are still standing in perfect
strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the
Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s
time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them
from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling
tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools,—only Uncle Sam
can do that.
APPENDIX
I. NATIONAL PARKS
Map
No. Name Location Established Characteristic Area: Acres Private Revenue Appropriation, Visitors
Features Claims: 1908 1909 1908
Acres11
1 Yellowstone1 Wyoming March 1, 18723 Unique volcanic
mountain scenery 22,142,720.00 None $4,125.65 $73,000.0018 19,542
2 Hot Springs1 Arkansas June 16, 18803 Medicinal springs,
wooded mountains 911.63 None 28,090.00 None 898,00422
14,418
3 Sequoia1 California Sept. 25, 18903 “Big Trees” 161,597.00 3,716.9612 59.72 15,550.00 1,251
4 Yosemite1 8 California Oct. 1, 18903 Unique glacial valleys
and snow mountains 719,622.00 19,827.0013 18,260.98 30,000.00 8,850
5 Gen. Grant1 California Oct. 1, 18903 “Big Trees” 2,536.00 160.0012 None 2,000.00 1,773
6 Casa Grande1 Arizona June 22, 18924 Prehistoric dwellings 480.009 None None 900.00 No count
7 Mt. Rainier2 Washington March 2, 18993 Snow peak and glaciers 207,360.00 18.2014 1,064.84 28,000.0019 2,826
8 Crater Lake1 Oregon May 22, 19023 Lake in extinct volcano 159,360.0010 1,914.22 15.00 3,000.00 5,27523
9 Platt6 Oklahoma July 1, 19023 Mineral springs 848.22 None 72.00 16,000.0020 26,00024
10 Wind Cave1 So. Dakota Jan. 9, 19033 Caverns 10,522.00 719.3915 400.00 2,500.00 3,17124
11 Sully’s Hill5 No. Dakota June 2, 19045 Wooded hills and lake 780.00 None None None21 25023
12 Mesa Verde1 Colorado June 29, 19063 Prehistoric dwellings 42,376.00 2,080.0016 None 7,500.00 8025
5-mile strip
surrounding
Mesa Verde1 Colorado June 29, 1906 Prehistoric dwellings 175,360.00 50,346.1417
TOTALS 3,624,9472.85 78,781.9111 $52,088.19 $178,450.00
13* Glacier Montana Pending 915,000.00 6,000.00
_Name, location, and establishment:_
1 Constituted from unpatented lands of the public domain.
2 Constituted from unpatented lands of National Forests.
3 By direct Act of Congress.
4 By executive order authorized by Sundry Civil Act, March 2, 1889.
5 By executive order authorized by Act of April 27, 1904, amending
agreement with Devil’s Lake Indians. A cash purchase.
6 Cash purchase from Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, acts of July 1,
1902, and April 21, 1904. Renamed in honor of late Senator Platt of
Connecticut, long member of Indian Affairs Committee, by Act of June
29, 1906.
7 A small percentage of park laps over into Montana and Idaho.
8 Yosemite _Valley_ set aside June 30, 1864, as a _State_ park. Receded
to United Sates by California, March 3, 1905, and accepted by acts of
Congress, March 3, 1905, June 11,1906.
9 Extension recommended to include neighboring ruins.
10 Extension recommended by Superintendent to include lower slopes of
mountain to supply winter sanctuary for game.
_Private Lands:_
11 Three areas are included in total areas of parks. Total private
claims amount to about 2.8% of total park areas. State school lands may
be exchanged if same lie within any government reservation, under