For almost a century the unoccupied government lands of the West have
been used as a public commons. The stockmen have used the grass and
water; the mining, sawmill, and railroad men the timber; until--simply
because no one made it his business to object to the spoliation that was
going on--what had been done wholly on the suffrance of the national
government had come to be regarded and most lustily defended as an
inherent privilege and right.
[Illustration: GIFFORD PINCHOT]
And so when, a decade ago, the tall, pleasant-voiced young man from the
far East, now known throughout the United States as Gifford Pinchot, the
national forester, appeared in the West, and suggested to the stockmen
that they were ruining the country by over-grazing, they laughed him to
scorn.
He told the mining and sawmill men that through reckless and extravagant
methods of lumbering they were bringing on a timber famine by great
strides; he characterized their whole policy as one of utter disregard
for the future of the country; and he demanded forcible and immediate
action on the part of the Federal authorities. These pioneers had seen
uncounted millions of buffalo melt away because no one took enough
interest in the matter to stop the wanton waste. They had seen great
billowy prairies, once knee-deep in the most splendid covering of grass
and vegetation, grazed down until they were hardly more than dust heaps;
and mountains that were clothed with magnificent forests swept
bare--first by the woodsman's ax and later by forest fires that burned
each year millions and millions of feet of the finest timber a country
ever possessed, while no one raised a hand even to quench the fire
because "it was only government land."
_The Fight against the "Pinchot Policies"_
These hard-headed, adventurous Western pioneers, indignant at the
thought of any curtailment of their freedom; resentful of interference
in what they were pleased to call their "inalienable right" to do as
they pleased with the country they had conquered; utterly regardless of
its future, and thinking but of the present and their own selfish
interests, arose in their wrath and protested vigorously against what
they called the "Pinchot policies" of the government.
That the writer, then a range cattle-raiser in Arizona, was one of the
first to feel the effects of the new forest policy gives him all the
more right to speak as he does of these things; that he joined with loud
tongue and bitter pen in the general denunciation of the "Pinchot
policies" makes it all the more a pleasure to him now to defend and
explain them in so far as he can.
Although there had been a small start toward forest preservation, it was
not until Mr. Pinchot was placed at the head of the movement in 1898
(six years after the first reserve was made), and organized and
reconstructed the force of officials, that we really had any national
forest policies worth mentioning.
His enemies first attacked his motives. He was a "notoriety seeker," a
"political adventurer" looking for personal advancement. To their
surprise they found that he showed not the slightest disposition to
exploit himself; that, having millions at his command, he could expect
to gain nothing financially by his course; and that he was absolutely
devoid of any political ambitions.
They then took another point of attack. "He is an Eastern swell who
knows nothing of forests, or the West and its needs. By what right does
he tell us how to use the public lands?"
And again they found him invulnerable, for, after graduating from Yale
in 1889, he had made a systematic and thorough study of forestry. He
traveled in Europe, through Russia, on the great steppes of Siberia, in
the Philippines, and in every part of the United States where there were
forests he investigated conditions and studied the water problem, the
grazing of cattle and sheep, and the effect of lumbering and forest
fires. There is hardly a corner of our whole Western country from the
Missouri to the Pacific where forests are found that he has not visited
and inspected. Days, weeks, and months spent on horseback and on foot in
the roughest, most inaccessible portions of the Rocky Mountain region
from the Canadian to the Mexican line have made him familiar with every
problem of forest preservation. He has studied the attendant and equally
important question of watershed protection and utilization of the
mountains for conserving the sources of all our great Western streams,
by which millions of acres are to be irrigated and millions of homes
built up in the West. He was from the first no "tenderfoot" adventurer,
no visionary enthusiast, but a practical, hard-headed man far more
earnestly and disinterestedly concerned in the Westerners' future than
they themselves had ever been.
Born in Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1865, of old New England ancestry, Mr.
Pinchot is just in the prime of life. A man of tremendous energy and
resourcefulness, tactful, quick to see a point, frank to admit his
errors, open and friendly in his intercourse with all men, and in the
game of politics the equal of any one in Washington, he is giving the
best years of his life to a cause that will bring him no personal
advantage save a place in our national history greater than that of
great generals and war captains. For while their armies destroy, his
little army is saving and preserving; while their forces are ever
non-productive, he and his small force are making "two blades of grass
grow where one grew before"; are building up and developing to the
uttermost the great region lying around and about the national forest
areas.
_Training an Army of Foresters_
Mr. Pinchot rapidly gathered about him a force of expert assistants. The
forest schools in the East were just turning out their first crop of
young men, trained and educated as scientific foresters, and he brought
them into the work. A year or two in the forests, mapping, scaling,
estimating, and studying the western timber conditions, made them
practical as well as scientific. The old sawmill men, themselves
educated in the college of "Hard Knocks," first laughed at these
college-bred foresters, but soon learned to respect and trust them. They
began to adopt their plans and follow their suggestions, and to-day one
of the most serious embarrassments the forester has to meet is the
continual hiring away from him of his best men by the Western lumber and
sawmill men, who offer salaries far beyond what the government pays.
To handle the stockmen's interests--by far the most difficult and
perplexing of all the problems connected with the administration of the
national forests--Pinchot went to the Southwest and persuaded one of the
most intelligent and level-headed young stockmen in the country to
become head of the grazing department. A. F. Potter had been for years a
cow-boy and range cattleman, then for several years a sheep owner, and
not only knew every branch of the stock business through practical
experience, but had the administrative ability to handle successfully
the intricate and perplexing questions of ranges, priority of rights,
effects of grazing, and methods of handling stock that must be passed
upon. With this corps of assistants, and with Mr. Overton W. Price, a
man second only to himself in ability, as his chief lieutenant, Mr.
Pinchot began in earnest in the year 1898 the work of saving the
remaining forested areas of the United States.
A few years ago the mining men, lumbermen, and the stockmen were almost
united in their opposition to the policies of the Government Forest
Service. Then the mining men found to their surprise that instead of
being ruined and forced out of business they were being helped. If a
miner had a valuable claim on some national forest lying idle, the
forest ranger of that district saw that not one stick of timber upon it
was cut by unauthorized persons. In the past, when a miner returned to
his claim after a year's absence, he generally found it stripped of the
timber which some day he would need for its development. Under the new
service, he discovered also that, when there was no timber on his own
claim, he could buy at a reasonable figure all the timber he desired for
the development of his mine. In many cases, in southern Arizona, for
instance, where the wood haulers were in the habit of taking from the
miners' claims fuel which they would be likely to need for their engines
sooner or later, the rangers stopped the practice and gave the wood
haulers other areas from which to cut, where no such injury to the
miners would result.
_Land Piracy Checked_
Of course, where mining companies, organized solely to obtain vast areas
of timber land, under cover of the mining laws, especially the Timber
and Stone Act, and the Placer Mining laws, found their work exposed by
the activity and watchfulness of the forest officers, they naturally
raised a cry against the Service that woke the echoes.
The Placer laws allow a company to obtain title to twenty acres of land
simply by showing five hundred dollars' worth of mining work done upon
it. No signs of mineral need be shown, no further attempt to develop it
is required. Prove that five hundred dollars' worth of work has been
done, and the patent is issued. The takers are not limited to a single
tract, but can have just as many tracts as they have sums of five
hundred dollars to invest. Under this Placer law whole townships,
covered with the finest timber on the Pacific coast, were taken up
solely to obtain title to the land for the timber upon it.
Wherever the final patents had not been issued on these lands, the
Forest Service stepped in and put a stop to it, thus saving thousands of
acres of timber land for the people. Small wonder that these licensed
pirates look upon a forest ranger as the embodiment of all that is bad,
and the forest policy as an encroachment upon sacred vested rights!
_The Case of the Wood Haulers_
And the poor wood haulers! How they complained because they thought
their divine right to cut and slash as they chose was to be invaded!
What happened to them? To-day they are better off than ever. True, they
pay a little for the wood--from as low as ten cents a cord in some
forests up to fifty cents in others. But what do they get in return for
it?
If a wood hauler wants to buy ten cords of wood or any amount up to
fifty dollars' worth, he simply goes to the nearest ranger, and in ten
minutes the deal is over; the ranger accompanies him to the area where
he wishes to cut and shows him by marks and bounds just where he may
cut; the trees are marked, and the man sets to work knowing full well
that no one else will invade this little tract or steal his wood when it
is cut and piled up waiting for him to haul it away, as was the case
over and over again in the old days of free and unlimited competition.
_How the Government Sells Timber_
What of the next class, the sawmill men? Every stick of matured,
merchantable timber in the forests, not needed for protection of
water-sheds, is for sale. By matured timber is meant a tree that has
reached its maximum growth and development, and is beginning slowly to
deteriorate, and should, like any ripe crop, be harvested. There is no
limit either high or low. In New Mexico one contract for 1907 called for
50,000 feet and another for 10,000,000, and each was made and carried
out under the same conditions; little man and big both got the same
square deal.
"But," cry some of the politicians with both eyes upon the political
barometer, "the Forest Service, in selling lumber by such methods, is
playing into the hands of the Lumber Trust and boosting prices."
What are these methods? If a citizen wants to buy some saw-logs for his
mill, he goes to the nearest forest officer and states his case,
indicating where the timber lies that he wishes to cut. A careful survey
and cruise of the timber is then made by experienced and competent men
trained especially for that work. If they report favorably upon the
cutting, a minimum price is set at which the timber will be sold, and
the sale is duly advertised for thirty days, if it amounts to more than
one hundred dollars in value. If it comes to less, the forest officer on
the ground makes the sale without delay. When the bids are opened, the
highest bidder gets the timber.
[Illustration: A SECTION OF THE BIG HORN NATIONAL FOREST, WYOMING,
SHOWING THE FOREST SERVICE METHODS OF LUMBERING. A CERTAIN PROPORTION OF
THE TREES HAVE BEEN LEFT STANDING FOR SEED PURPOSES. THE REST HAVE BEEN
CUT CLOSE TO THE GROUND, TO AVOID WASTE, AND THE BRANCHES PILED AT A
SAFE DISTANCE FOR BURNING]
There is seldom much competition on the small lots, but the large tracts
are frequently bid up to very much more than the minimum price set by
the forest expert. In New Mexico, for instance, several large sales were
made in 1907, where the keen competition ran the price up from three
dollars, set by the Service, to five and six dollars a thousand. Surely
this was not playing into the hands of the Lumber Trust.
"_Two Blades of Grass Where One Grew Before_"
Moreover, when the buyers come to cut, the ranger marks each tree,
leaving out all those below a certain size for future growth, and also a
certain number for seed purposes, that reproduction may follow. Again,
the buyers are required to cut the stumps low, generally at a height
equal to the diameter. Under old methods they cut them off high up,
where it was easier for the ax and saw men to work, thus leaving in the
stump a waste equal to more than ten per cent. of the measured value of
the tree. "Two blades of grass" here surely!
Under the old methods, if the logs had to be "snaked" out, the loggers
took the shortest cut, and if that cut led through a dense thicket of
young trees, the logs were dragged through them, so that millions of
young trees were destroyed each year by this recklessness alone. To-day
the ranger sees to it that they go around such little groves, or, if it
is absolutely unavoidable, a straight and narrow way is cut through them
to which the loggers must keep, thus reducing the damage to the minimum.
"Two blades of grass" here also.
In the old days of reckless lumbering only the best of the tree was
used. A single log was taken, and the rest left to waste. Now the
watchful "scaler" sees to it that the logs are cut with judgment, so as
to utilize every foot of saw timber.
When the logging is finished on a tract, according to the government
contract, the brush must be carefully piled by the lumberman far enough
away from other trees or young stuff to cause no damage when it is
burned by the rangers. Under the early methods the "slashings," as
cut-over areas were called, were an almost impassable mass of dead
tree-tops and logs, a most fruitful and dangerous source and auxiliary
of forest fires.
[Illustration: SECTION OF A REDWOOD FOREST IN CALIFORNIA, SHOWING
WASTEFUL AND DESTRUCTIVE METHODS OF LUMBERING. THE TREES HAVE BEEN CUT
HIGH UP, LEAVING A LARGE PROPORTION OF WASTE IN THE STUMP. THE LAND HAS
BEEN STRIPPED BARE OF ITS TIMBER, AND IS IN CONDITION TO ENCOURAGE FIRE,
EROSION, AND DESTRUCTIVE FLOODS]
_The Forest Service and the Stock-Raisers_
The only remaining class opposed to the policy of the Forest Service is
that composed of the stock-raisers; and for their interests and welfare
the Forest Service has worked harder than for all the other users of the
forests combined.
That mistakes were made in handling the livestock interests; that in
some cases individuals were unduly hampered with rules enforced by
over-zealous forest officers, is not to be denied. It was a huge task.
Almost in a day the Forest Service sprang full-fledged into the world,
charged with the care and responsibilities of more than a hundred
million acres; to-day it controls a third of the area of grazing country
in the United States, whereon graze about eight million sheep and a
million and a half cattle and horses.
Trained foresters there were to be had in plenty, but men who knew the
stockman's trade, whose training fitted them to handle the vexatious
questions of range divisions, over-grazing, and relative injury done by
cattle, sheep, and goats, were hard to find, and when found were not
willing to enter the Service for the niggardly pay allowed by the
government. However, the Forest Service, with its ranger system, is
to-day training up a class of young men, who, in a few years, will be at
once expert lumbermen, scientific foresters, and excellent all-round
frontiersmen and stockmen.
In this work there have been no precedents to follow, no rules to look
to for guidance. Instead, rules must be made and tested through use;
precedents must be established and certain fundamental principles worked
out and made a basis for future government.
[Illustration: THE EFFECT OF EROSION ON A HILLSIDE FROM WHICH THE FOREST
COVER HAS BEEN REMOVED]
Further than this, every section has its own necessities. Rules that
would apply to Oregon and Washington, with their sixty inches of
rainfall a year, would not apply to Arizona, with its ten. One great
mountain region, whose waters drained off into the ocean and could never
be used for irrigating purposes, might safely be let open to all kinds
of grazing; while another equally large section, just as well grassed,
would have to be closed to sheep and goats, with their erosive little
feet and habits of grazing in large bands, because all the drainage went
into creeks, streams, and rivers that lower down on the desert were
needed to irrigate vast areas of valuable farming lands.
_The Roosevelt Dam Case_
Take a single case: that of one national forest in Arizona. At the upper
end of this forest--which is a long, narrow tract covering a great
mountain chain--rise two or three streams; on the eastern slope, the Rio
Verde and the Salt River, on the western, the Agua Fria. A hundred miles
below these heads the government is building, at a cost of more than
$4,000,000, the great Roosevelt Dam which will furnish water to irrigate
250,000 acres of the richest of soils around the city of Phoenix in the
Salt River valley. One of the most serious problems in the construction
of the great dams in the West is the question of silt, which is washed
down in the streams and will eventually fill up and render useless these
expensive dams and reservoirs.
Careful studies of silt prove beyond doubt that its primal cause is the
removal of the forest cover, such as underbrush, weeds, and grasses,
along the streams, which allows the rainfall to run off rapidly. The
grazing over these areas by sheep and goats not only exhausts this
forest cover, but from the cutting up of the soil and the loosening
effect of the thousands of tiny hoofs, the erosive action of the rain
becomes disastrous. The wash of the hills and mountain-sides carries
with it into the streams tons and tons of silt to fill up the dams and
beds of the streams, as well as working irreparable injury to the
comparatively thin soil covering the mountains.
On this national forest the watershed on the eastern side all runs into
streams which eventually reach the Roosevelt Dam; on the western slope
the water runs unused to the Gulf of California. So the National
Reclamation Service, charged with the building and maintenance of these
huge reservoirs, said to the Forest Service: "The watershed of the
Roosevelt Dam must be protected from over-grazing, so that the forest
cover may be preserved, and the deposit of silt reduced to the very
lowest possible percentage."
[Illustration: THE SAME HILLSIDE AFTER TWO YEARS OF CAREFUL AND
SYSTEMATIC GRAZING]
The Forest Service whose duty it was under the law to protect and
preserve, not only the timber of the mountains, but the water supply as
well, had no alternative but to say to the sheep and goat men using this
area: "You cannot longer graze sheep or goats upon the eastern side of
this forest, but may do so on the western slope." But since cattle do
much less damage than sheep, in order that the grazing may not go
entirely unused, the Service allows cattle to graze there in such
numbers as will not injure the watershed.
Naturally the sheep owners set up a cry that could be heard from Dan to
Beersheba. But an analysis of the situation shows that while some fifty
individual sheep men, owning probably 100,000 sheep valued at about
$300,000, were forced to rearrange their business to meet the new
conditions, their loss was overwhelmingly offset by the benefit to the
entire population of the Salt River valley, a population to-day of not
fewer than 50,000 people, every soul of whom is absolutely dependent
upon the agricultural lands of the valley for a living; these lands
consisting of more than 100,000 acres, valued at an average of sixty
dollars an acre, already under cultivation, with 150,000 acres more
ready to be cultivated the instant the Roosevelt Dam is finished.
_Irrigation Revolutionized by National Forestry_
Surely such conditions fully justify the Forest Service in its course of
pursuing the greatest good for the greatest number. In Colorado a small
number of stock men, principally cattle owners, aided and abetted by a
few political malcontents, have attempted to discredit the Forest
Service, but no one has heard a word against the Service from the
thousands of contented irrigationists, who, with countless acres to be
watered by more than 12,000 miles of irrigation ditches, see their
source of water supply amply protected, and realize that already the
supply has increased and the flow is more regular than it has been in
the past.
In the great Kern River district about Bakersfield in southern
California, a careful measurement shows that since the restrictions on
grazing in the mountains at the heads of the streams, together with the
almost complete absence of forest fires, the flow of water in the great
canal system has become fully twenty per cent. greater in volume than
ever before. And so one could go on without end, if necessary, for all
over the West are smaller or larger areas wholly dependent upon the
rivers and streams for their water supply, and to them the Forest
Service guarantees full protection for their lands and homes.
[Illustration: HERD OF SHEEP GRAZING UPON A NATIONAL FOREST. THE SHEEP
GRAZE IN LARGE BANDS AND VERY CLOSE TOGETHER, AND THE CUTTING ACTION OF
THE THOUSANDS OF HOOFS IS VERY INJURIOUS TO THE SOIL. FOR THIS REASON,
SHEEP-GRAZING IS ONLY ALLOWED ON CERTAIN AREAS OF THE NATIONAL FORESTS.]
_The Free Grass Question_
The range stockmen of to-day are in much the same position as the
reservation Indian. The tides of civilization, advancing from east and
west, have met and threaten to overwhelm them. Like the Indian they must
meet the new conditions with new methods. They must not, and need not,
be overwhelmed, but can be assimilated in the new order of things. The
day of free grass in the State of Texas came to an end twenty years ago.
The old-timers shook their heads and prophesied all sorts of dire
happenings to the State. To-day Texas has more cattle and sheep, and
better ones, too, than ever before, and they are still growing in
numbers.
A convention of stockmen was held at Denver in 1898, at which the
burning question was the then new plan of forest reserves. The sheep men
from Wyoming, Utah, and one or two other Western States, declared with a
bitterness born of conviction that if the government made any forest
reserves in their States it would mean the total annihilation of the
sheep industry there. To-day these States are plastered with national
forests, and each has three or four times as many sheep as it had ten
years ago.
There has arisen, of course, from the men who have used these government
lands without money and without price, a continuous cry that the grazing
fees the Forest Service collects are "illegal, unjust and double
taxation," The complaint, of course, will not bear analysis. The land
belongs, not to the stockmen, but to the whole people. Why should the
government give something to a stockman in Wyoming, that belongs equally
to a stockman in Ohio, who is raising live stock on private land, in
keen competition with Western free grass men?
The fees are scarcely illegal. If the government can sell one man one
hundred acres of public land, it certainly can sell another man the
grass and forage crop produced upon any portion of the public lands. One
is no more a case of merchandizing than the other. As for the double
taxation argument, that too is equally childish, because the grazing fee
is not a tax but the price of a commodity.
As a matter of fact, the government spends annually, in trail and road
building through the forests, that the stock may more easily and safely
reach the higher grazing areas, in fighting the fires, in building
telephone lines to the very remotest corners of the forests, in hiring
hunters to exterminate the wolves and other wild animals that prey upon
the stockman's herds, in digging deep wells and erecting windmills and
other pumping engines to furnish water where there is none on the
surface, a sum almost equal to the entire amount paid in fees by the
stockmen, and all for their sole benefit and use.
The total amount of fees paid by stockmen in the year 1907 amounted to
$836,920. If the lands were under private control, the fees would be
more than double what they now are. In New Mexico, for instance, the
usual price for pasturing cattle upon the large land grants is from two
dollars to three dollars a year, while on the government forests
immediately adjoining the grant, and almost the same country, the fee is
only seventy-five cents a year per head and twenty-five cents per head
for sheep. And these are the highest fees charged on any national forest
for all-the-year-round grazing permits. In Colorado, California, Nevada,
and Arizona, the charge for sheep or cattle grazing on the large areas
of railroad and State lands is on an average fully twice as great as the
same fees upon the national forest, and in the former the stockmen get
no other return from the land owners.
The last and loudest wail was that these "great areas of segregated
lands," as the protestants love to call the national forests, were a
barrier to the settler and homesteader; that the Forest Service was
making vast areas of forest solitudes in the heart of the Western
States.
To this the Forest Service replied by throwing open to agricultural
settlement every acre of land, lying within the limits of the national
forests, which was more suitable for agriculture than forest culture.
Six thousand new homes were selected in the different forests in the
year 1907, and with vastly less red tape and delay than under the
regular homestead laws now in force upon other public lands.
If the Forest Service had done no more than keep down the fire losses,
their work would not have been in vain. In 1901 the total area burned
over in the government forests equalled 2-3/4 acres in every thousand,
while in 1907 the burned area was only 9/10 of an acre in every
thousand. No record of the money value of the earlier fire losses was
kept, but that the loss ran into the millions, no one who has seen the
miles of burned over tracts can doubt.
The following table shows the fire losses in the national forests for
the past three years:
Year Area of Acres Value of
Forests Burned Over Timber Burned
1905 85,627,000 279,592 $101,282
1906 106,999,000 115,416 76,183
1907 164,154,000 212,850 31,589
That is, in 1905 the loss from fire was more than three times as great
as in the year 1907, with an area of forests almost twice as great to
protect and control.
_$1,000,000 Saved by the Forest Hunters_
Another important feature of Mr. Pinchot's work is the employment of
experienced hunters for killing wild animals which destroy stock. In the
year 1907, according to records kept of all predatory animals killed
upon the various national forests, or on lands adjoining them, no fewer
than 1600 wolves, 19,469 coyotes, 265 mountain lions, 368 bears, and
2285 wild cats and lynxes were killed by the various hunters and
settlers. Of these, it is probably fair to credit the rangers and the
hunters employed by the Forest Service with at least one-fourth.
Now, any well-posted stockman will tell you that, on an average, a
full-grown wolf will destroy one thousand dollars' worth of stock every
year of its life. Mountain lions prefer horses to any other food, but
still they will put up with calves and sheep. They, too, are easily
chargeable with a thousand dollars' worth of damage each year. The
coyotes, bob-cats, and lynxes do less harm, and that mostly to sheep.
Yet I think it is a very conservative estimate to say that each coyote
or lynx annually destroys stock to the value of fully one hundred
dollars.
Taking these figures as a basis for comparison, it is very easily seen
that the value of the animals killed by the Forest Service men is more
than $1,000,000. Hence, so far as return for their $836,920 in grazing
fees is concerned, the stockmen get it back in full and with some to
spare.
[Illustration: _Copyrighted by E. S. Curtis, Seattle_]