PUTTING A STOP TO GUN-PLAY
Wilbur was sitting in the writing-room of the hotel where he was staying
while in Washington, just finishing a letter home telling of his
good-fortune and his appointment, when a bell-boy came to tell him that
his uncle, Mr. Masseth, was downstairs waiting to see him. This uncle
had been a great inspiration to Wilbur, for he was prominent in the
Geological Survey, and had done some wonderful work in the Canyon of the
Colorado. Wilbur hurried down at once.
"Congratulations!" the geologist said, as soon as the boy appeared. "So
you came through with flying colors, I hear."
"Every one was just as fine as could be," answered the lad. "But how did
you know about it, uncle?"
"You wrote me that you were going to call on the Chief Forester to-day,
and so I took the trouble to telephone to one of the men in the office
who would be likely to know the result of your interview."
"Isn't it bully?"
"Yes," said the older man with a quiet laugh, "I think it is 'bully,' as
you call it. But I didn't call only to congratulate you; I thought
perhaps you would like to come with me to-night and meet some of the men
in the Forest Service who are really doing things out West. If you do,
there's no time to waste."
"You bet I do," the boy replied hastily. "But what is it all about?"
"It's a lecture on forestry in China, but it happens to come at the same
time as a meeting of the District Foresters, so they're all in town.
Trot along upstairs and get your hat, and we can talk about it on the
way."
The geologist sauntered over to an acquaintance who was standing in the
hotel lobby near by, but he had hardly exchanged half a dozen sentences
with him when Wilbur reappeared, ready to go.
"You see," said Masseth as they left the hotel, "it is a good plan for
you to meet as many of the leaders of your profession as you can, not
only because their friendship may be useful to you, nor yet only because
they are all pleasant fellows, but because forestry is a profession, a
very large and complex one, and it is a revelation sometimes to see what
can be made of it. I know myself, whenever I meet a great geologist I
always feel a little better to think I can say, 'I am a geologist, too.'
So you, I hope, may be able to say some day, 'I am a Forester, too.'"
"I'm one now," said Wilbur elatedly.
"You're not, you're only a cub yet," corrected his uncle sharply; "don't
let your enthusiasm run away with your good sense. You are no more a
Forester yet than a railroad bill-clerk is a transportation expert."
"All right, uncle," said Wilbur, "I'll swallow my medicine and take that
all back. I'm not even the ghost of a Forester--yet."
"You will meet the real article to-night. As I told you, the District
Foresters are East for a conference, and this lecture is given before
the Forestry Association. So you will have a good chance of sizing up
the sort of men you are likely to be with."
"Will the Forest Supervisors be there, too?"
"I should imagine not. There may be one or two in town. But the
Supervisors alone would make quite a gathering if they were all here.
There are over a hundred, are there not? You ought to know."
"Just a hundred and forty-one now--about one to each forest."
"And there are only six District Foresters?"
"Yes. One is in Montana, one in Colorado, one in New Mexico, one in
Utah, one in California, and one in Oregon. And they have under their
charge, so I learned to-day, nearly two hundred million acres of land,
or, in other words, territory larger than the whole state of Texas and
five times as large as England and Wales."
"I had forgotten the figures," said the geologist. "That gives each
District Forester a little piece of land about the size of England to
look after. And they can tell you, most of them, on almost every square
mile of that region, approximately how much marketable standing timber
may be found there, what kinds of trees are most abundant, and in what
proportion, and roughly, how many feet of lumber can be cut to the acre.
It's always been wonderful to me. That sort of thing takes learning,
though, and you've got to dig, Wilbur, if you want to be a District
Forester some day."
"I'm going to get there some day, all right."
"If you try hard enough, you may. By the way, there's one of them going
in now. That's the house, on the other side of the Circle."
The boy looked across the curve and scanned all the men going in the
same direction, quite with a feeling of companionship. One of the men
who overtook and passed them, giving a hearty greeting to Masseth as he
went by, was Roger Doughty, a young fellow who had distinguished himself
in the Geological Survey, having taken a trip from south to north of
Alaska, and Wilbur's companion felt a twinge of regret that his nephew
had not entered his own service.
Wilbur, however, was always a "woods" boy, and even in his early
childish days had been possessed with a desire to camp out. He had read
every book he could lay hands on that dealt with "the great outdoors,"
and would ten thousand times over rather have been Daniel Boone than
George Washington. Seeing his intense pleasure in that life, his father
had always allowed him to go off into the wilds for his holidays, and in
consequence he knew many little tricks of woodcraft and how to make
himself comfortable when the weather was bad. His father, who was a
lawyer, had wanted him to enter that profession, but Wilbur had been so
sure of his own mind, and was so persistent that at his request he had
been permitted to go to the Colorado Ranger School. From this he had
returned even more enthusiastic than before, and Masseth, seeing that by
temperament Wilbur was especially fitted for the Forest Service, had
urged the boy's father to allow him to enter for it, and did not attempt
to conceal his satisfaction with Wilbur's success.
"Why, Masseth, how did you get hold of Loyle?" asked the Chief Forester
as the two came up the walk together.
"Didn't you know he was my nephew?" was the surprised reply.
"No," answered their host as they paused on the threshold, "he never
said anything to me about it."
The geologist looked inquiringly at his young relative.
"I thought," said Wilbur, coloring, "that if I said anything about
knowing you, before I was appointed, it would look as though I had done
it to get a pull. I didn't think it would do me any good, anyhow; and
even if it had, I felt that I'd rather not get anything that way."
"It wouldn't have helped you a bit," said the Chief Forester, "and, as
you see, you did not need it. I'm glad, too, that you did not mention it
at the time." He nodded his appreciation of the boy's position as they
passed into the room beyond.
The place was thoroughly typical of the gathering and the occasion. The
walls were hung with some magnificent trophies, elk and moose heads, one
stuffed fish of huge size was framed beside the door, and there were
numberless photographs of trees and forests, cross-sections of woods,
and comparisons of leaves and seeds. Although in the heart of
Washington, there was a breath and fragrance in the room, which, to the
boy, seemed like old times in the woods. The men, too, that were
gathered there showed themselves to be what they were--men who knew the
great wide world and loved it. Every man seemed hearty in manner and
thoroughly interested in whatever was going on.
Masseth was called away, soon after they entered the room, and Wilbur,
left to himself, sauntered about among the groups of talkers, looking at
the various trophies hung on the walls. As he drew near to one of the
smaller groups, however, he caught the word "gun-play," so he edged up
to the men and listened. One of them, seeing the lad, moved slightly to
one side as an unspoken invitation to be one of them, and Wilbur stepped
up.
The man who was speaking was comparing the present peaceful
administration of the forests with the conditions that used to exist
years ago, before the Service had been established, and when the Western
"bad man" was at the summit of his power.
"It was during the cattle and sheep war that a fellow had to be pretty
quick on the draw," said one.
"The Service had a good enough man for that, all right," suggested
another member of the same group, "there wasn't any of them who could
pull a bead quicker than our grazing Chief yonder." Wilbur turned and
saw crossing the room a quiet-looking, spare man, light-complexioned,
and apparently entirely inoffensive. "I guess they were ready enough to
give him a wide berth when it came to gun-play."
"Talking about the cattle war," said the first speaker, "the worst
trouble I ever had, or rather, the one that I hated to go into most, was
back in those days. I was on the old Plum Creek Timber Land Reserve,
now a portion of the Pike National Forest. A timber trespass sometimes
leads to a very pretty scrap, and a cattle mix-up usually spells 'War'
with a capital 'W,' but this had both."
"You get them that way sometimes," said a middle-aged, red-headed man,
who was standing by.
"Had some down your way, too, I reckon?"
"Plenty of 'em. But go ahead with the yarn."
"Well, this bunch that I'm speaking of had skipped out from Montana;
they were 'wanted' there, and they had come down and started cutting
railroad ties in a secluded canyon forming one of the branches of West
Plum Creek. They were hated good and plenty, these same tie-cutters,
because they had a reputation of being too handy with their guns, and
consequently causing a decrease in the calf crop. The cattlemen used to
drop in on them every once in a while, but the tie-cutters were foxy,
and they were never caught with the goods. Of course, there was a moral
certainty that they weren't buying meat, but nothing could be proved
against them, and the interchanges of compliments, while lively and
picturesque enough, never took the form of lead, although it was
expected every time they met."
"Had this been going on long?"
"Several months, I reckon," answered the former Ranger, "before I heard
of it. This was just before that section of the country was taken over
by the Forest Service. As soon as notice was given that the district in
question was to be placed under government regulations, a deputation to
the tie-cutters loped down on their cow-ponies to convey the cheerful
news. Expressing, of course, the profoundest sympathy for them, the
spokesman of the cattle group volunteered the information that they
could wrap up their axes in tissue paper, tie pink ribbons on their
rifles and go home, because any one caught cutting timber on the
reserve, now that it was a reserve, would go to the Pen for fifteen
years."
"What a bluff!"
"Bluff it certainly was. It didn't work, either. One of the tie-cutters
in reply suggested that the cowmen should go back and devote their time
to buying Navajo saddle-blankets and silver-mounted sombreros, since
ornamenting the landscape was all they had to do in life; another
replied that if a government inspector ever set eyes on their cattle
he'd drive them off the range as a disgrace to the State; and a third
capped the replies with the terse answer that no ten United States
officers and no hundred and ten cattlemen could take them out alive."
"That wouldn't make the cow-camp feel happy a whole lot," remarked the
red-headed man.
"There wasn't any shooting, though, as I said before, though just how it
kept off I never rightly could understand. At all events they fixed it
so that we heard of it in a hurry. Then both sides awaited developments.
The tie-cutters kept their hands off the cattle for a while, and the
cowmen had no special business with railroad ties, so that, aside from
snorting at each other, no special harm was done.
"But, of course, the timber trespass question had to be investigated,
and the Supervisor, who was then located at Colorado Springs, arranged
to make the trip with me to the tie-cutters' camp from a small station
about fifty miles north of the Springs. I met him at the station as
prearranged. We were just about to start when a telegram was handed him
calling him to another part of the forest in a hurry."
"Tough luck," said one of the listeners.
"It surely was--for me," commented the narrator. "The camp to which we
had intended going was twenty-six miles into the mountains, and going up
there alone didn't appeal to me a little bit. However, the Supervisor
told me to start right out, to get an idea of how much timber had been
cut, and in what kind of shape the ground had been left, and in short,
to 'nose around a little,' as he put it himself."
"That was hardly playing the game, sending you up there alone," said one
of the men.
"I thought at the time that it wasn't, but what could he do? The matter
had to be investigated, and he had been sent for and couldn't come with
me. But he was considerate enough, strongly urging me not to get killed,
'as Rangers were scarce.'"
"That was considerate!"
"Yes, wasn't it? But early the next morning I started for the canyon
where the outlaws were said to be in hiding. The riding was fair, so I
made good time on the trail and got to the entrance of the canyon about
the middle of the day. A few hundred feet from the fork of the stream I
came to a little log cabin, occupied by a miner and his family. I took
lunch with them and told them my errand. Both the man and his wife
begged me not to go up to the camp alone, as they had heard the
tie-cutters threaten to kill at sight any stranger found on their land."
"Why didn't you propose that the miner should go up to the camp with
you?"
"I did. But he remarked that up to date he had succeeded in keeping out
of the cattlemen-lumbermen trouble, and that he was going to keep right
along keeping out. He suggested that if there was going to be any
funeral in the immediate vicinity he wasn't hankering to take any more
prominent part than that of a mourner, and that the title-rôle of such a
performance wasn't any matter of envy with him. However, I succeeded in
persuading him to come part of the way with me, and secured his promise
that he would listen for any shooting, and if I should happen to resign
involuntarily from the Service by the argument of a bullet, that he
would volunteer as a witness in the case."
"I don't altogether blame him, you know," said the red-headed man; "you
said he had a wife there, and interfering with other folks' doings isn't
healthy."
"I didn't blame him either," said the first speaker, "but I would have
liked to have him along. A little farther up the canyon I came to a
recently built log cabin, covered with earth. An old man stood at the
door and I greeted him cheerily. We had a moment's chat, and then I
asked him the way to the cabin where the tie-cutters lived. Judge of my
surprise when he told me this was their cabin, and that they lived with
him. By the time I had secured this much information the two younger men
had come out, and one of them, Tom, wanted to know what I was after. I
stated my business, briefly. There was a pause.
"'Ye 'low as ye're agoin' to jedge them ties,' he said slowly. 'Wa'al I
'low we'll sort 'er go along. Thar's a heap o' fow-el in these yar
parts, stranger, an' I 'low I'll take a gun.'
"The other brother, who seemed more taciturn, turned and nodded to two
youngsters who had come out of the cabin while Tom was speaking. The
elder of the two, a boy about thirteen years old, went into the shack
and returned in a moment bringing out two rifles. I turned the broncho's
head up the trail, but Tom interposed.
"'I 'low,' he said, 'that ye'll hev ter leave yer horse-critter right
hyar; thar ain't much of er trail up the mount'n.'
"I wasn't particularly anxious to get separated from my horse, and that
cabin was just about the last place I would have chosen to leave him;
but there was no help for it, and as I would have to dismount anyway to
get into the timber, I slipped out of the saddle and put the hobbles on.
But when we came to start, the two men wanted me to go first. I balked
at that. I told them that I wasn't in the habit of walking up a mountain
trail in front of two men with guns, and that they would have to go
first and show the way. They grumbled, but, seeing that I meant it, they
turned and silently walked up the mountainside ahead of me.
"They stopped at an old prospect shaft that was filled to the brim with
water, and wanted me to come close to the hole and look at it, telling
me some cock-and-bull story about it, and calling my attention to some
supposed outcrop of rich ore that could be seen under the water. But I
refused flatly to go a step nearer than I then was, telling them that I
wished to get to those ties immediately.
"At an old cabin they halted again, and Tom wanted to know which was
'the best shot in the bunch.' I was not in favor of trying guns or
anything of that sort, especially when there seemed no reason for it,
knowing how easy it would be for a shot to go wide, and so I urged them
to lead on to the ties. But Tom insisted upon shooting, and though his
brother did not seem quite to follow the other's plans, still he chimed
in with him, and the only thing I could do was to agree with what grace
I could. But I decided to make this a pretext for disposing of some of
their superfluous ammunition.
"Pulling my six-shooter, I told Jim to put an old sardine can, that was
lying on the ground near by, on the stump of a tree about twenty-five or
thirty yards distant. Then I told him to lean his rifle against the
cabin while placing the can on the tree. This he did. I stepped over to
the cabin and took the gun as though to look after it. Then I walked
over to where Tom stood, telling him to blaze away at the can on the
tree. While he was doing so I slipped the cartridges out of Jim's gun
and put them in my pocket.
"By the time that Tom had fired three shots Jim came up and I told the
former to hand over the rifle and let his brother try. Quite readily he
did so. Of course, there were only two cartridges left in the gun, for
it was a half-magazine, but Jim expected to take the third shot with his
own rifle. When he had fired twice, however, and reached out his hand
for the other gun, I handed it to him with the remark that it was empty.
For a minute or two things looked black, because both men saw that they
had been tricked. But I had the drop on them, and since they were both
disarmed I felt considerably easier."
"How did it end up?" asked the red-haired listener.
"It was easy enough after that, as long as I didn't turn my back to them
or let either get too near. We went together and counted the ties,
returning to the cabin where I had left my horse. When the tie-cutters
found, however, that the cattlemen had deliberately exaggerated the
penalty for timber trespass in the hope that they would resist and thus
get themselves into serious trouble with the government, their anger was
diverted from me. By joining in with them in a sweeping denunciation of
the cow-camp, and by pointing out that no harsh measures were intended
against them, they came to look on me as friend instead of foe."
"What was done about the trespass?"
"It was pretty early in the days of the Service, and, as you remember,
we let them down easily at first so that no undue amount of friction
should be caused. I think some small fine, purely nominal, was exacted,
and the tie-cutters got into harmonious relations with the Supervisor
later. But those same boys told me, just as I was starting for home,
that they intended to drop me in that old prospect shaft, or, failing
that, to pump me full of holes."
The speaker had hardly finished when a scattering of groups and an
unfolding of chairs took place and the lecturer for the evening was
announced. He won Wilbur's heart at once by an appreciative story of a
young Chinese boy, a civil service student in his native province, who
had accompanied him on a portion of his trip through China in order to
learn what might be done toward the improvement of his country.
"He was a bright lad, this Fo-Ho," said the lecturer, "and it was very
largely owing to him that I extended my trip a little and went to
Fou-Ping. I visited Fo-Ho's family home, where the graves of his
ancestors were--you know how powerful ancestor-worship still is in
China. Such a scene of desolation I never saw, and, I tell you, I was
sorry for the boy. There was the town that had been his father's home
deserted and in ruins.
"Two hundred years before, in this same place now so thickly strewn with
ruins, there had been no one living, and the mountains were accounted
impassable because of the dense forests. But in 1708 a Mongol horde
under a powerful chieftain settled in the valley, and the timber began
to be cut recklessly. Attracted by the fame of this chieftain, other
tribes poured down into these valleys, until by 1720 several hundred
thousand persons were living where thirty years before not a soul was to
be seen. The cold winters of Mongolia drew heavily upon the fuel
resources of the adjacent forests, and a disastrous fire stripped
hundreds of square miles. Farther and farther afield the inhabitants had
to go for fuel, until every stick which would burn had been swept clear;
bleaker and more barren grew the vicinity, until at last the tribes had
to decamp, and what was once a dense forest and next a smiling valley
has become a hideous desert which even the vultures have forsaken."
Masseth leaned over toward Wilbur and whispered:
"You don't have to go as far away as China. There are some terrible
cases of deforestation right here in the United States."
The lecturer then launched into a description of the once great forests
of China, and quoted the words of writers less than three centuries ago
who depicted the great Buddhist monasteries hid deep in the heart of
densely wooded regions. Then, with this realization of heavily forested
areas in mind, there was flashed upon the screen picture after picture
of desolation. Cities, once prosperous, were shown abandoned because the
mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there
because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been
washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up
with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as
torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and the lower
levels became flooded.
"Nature made the world a garden," said the speaker, "and man is making
it a desert. Our children and our children's children for countless
generations are to enjoy the gardens we leave, or bewail the deserts
we create."
Startling, too, was the manner in which the lecturer showed the unhappy
fate of countries which an unthinking civilization had despoiled. The
hills and valleys where grew the famous cedars of Lebanon are almost
treeless now, and Palestine, once so luxuriant, is bare and lonely.
Great cities flourished upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates where
were the hanging gardens of Babylon and the great hunting parks of
Nineveh, yet now the river runs silently between muddy banks, infertile
and deserted, save for a passing nomad tribe. The woods of ancient
Greece are not less ruined than her temples; the forests of Dalmatia
whence came the timber that built the navies of the ancient world are
now barren plateaus, shelterless and waste; and throughout a large part
of southern Europe and northern Africa, man has transformed the smile of
nature into a mask of inflexible severity.
"But," said Wilbur, turning excitedly to his uncle, as soon as the
lecturer had closed, "isn't there anything that can be done to make
those places what they were before?"
"Not often, if it is allowed to go too far," said the geologist. "It
takes time, of course, for all the soil to be washed away. But wherever
the naked rock is exposed the case is hopeless. You can't grow anything,
even cactus, on a rock. Lichens, of course, may begin, but hundreds of
thousands of years are required to make soil anew."
"But if it's taken in time?"
"Then you can reforest by planting. But that's slow and costly. It
requires millions of dollars to replant a stretch of forest which would
have renewed itself just by a little careful lumbering, for Nature is
only too ready to do the work for nothing if given a fair chance."
By this time the gathering had broken up in large part and a number of
those who had come only to hear the lecture had gone. Some of the Forest
Service men, however, were passing through the corridors to the
dining-room. At the door Wilbur paused hesitatingly. He had not been
invited to stay, but at the same time he felt that he could hardly leave
without thanking his uncle, who at the time was strolling toward the
other portion of the house, deeply engrossed in conversation. In this
quandary the Chief Forester, all unknown to the lad, saw his
embarrassment, and with the quick intuition so characteristic of the
man, divined the cause.
"Come along, Loyle, come along in," he said, "you're one of us now."
Wilbur, with a grateful look, passed on into the reception-room. A
moment later he heard his name called, and, turning, came face to face
with a tall young fellow, bronzed and decisive looking.
"My name's Nally," he said, "and I hear you're going to one of my
forests. Mr. Masseth was telling me that you're his nephew. I guess
we'll start right in by having our first feed together. This is hardly
camping out," he added, looking around the well-appointed and handsome
room, "but the grub shows that it's the Service all right."
The District Forester motioned to the table which was heaped with dozens
upon dozens of baked apples, flanked by several tall pitchers of milk.
"There you have it," he continued, "back to nature and the simple life.
It's all right to go through a Ranger School and to satisfy the powers
that be about your fitness, but that isn't really getting to the inside
of the matter. It's when you feel that you've had the chance to come
right in and take the regular prescribed ritual of a baked apple and a
glass of milk in the house of the Chief Forester that you can feel
you're the real thing in the Service."
[Illustration: THE TIE-CUTTERS' BOYS.
Two young members of the outlaw gang which defied the cattle man and
threatened the Forest Service.
_Photograph by U. S. Forest Service._]
[Illustration: DEFORESTED AND WASHED AWAY.
Example of laborious artificial terracing in China to save the little
soil remaining.
_Courtesy of U. S. Forest Service._]
[Illustration: AS BAD AS ANYTHING IN CHINA.
Final results of deforestation in Tennessee, due to cutting and to fumes
from a copper smelter.
_Photograph by U. S. Forest Service._]