194 



CONSERVATION 



chances of putting a fraudulent home- 

 stead claim in splendid pine timber 

 were gone forever. He meant a lot of 

 little things, the taking the lumber from 

 an abandoned cabin, the securing a lit- 

 tle deserted orchard somewhere, the 

 grazing of a small band of goats or 

 sheep. Such men as these must be 

 handled with the utmost skill and pa- 

 tience. Time and good will are the ele- 

 ments of the game. 



There was once a mountaineer who 

 owned a few head of cattle. He re- 

 fused openly to take out a permit. He 

 kept on friendly terms with the super- 

 visor and all the rangers, and every one 

 liked him, too. But he said that the 

 regulation was nonsense and that he 

 needed the $2 more than the Govern- 

 ment did. It put the supervisor in a 

 hole, for the mountaineer was vastly 

 popular, and yet the offence was fla- 

 grant. Should he be arrested and taken 

 into court for $2? Should his fee be 

 paid by the supervisor, and a receipt 

 sent him with a letter explaining that 

 somebody had to do it, and that in all 

 other respects he was too good a man 

 to be hastily dealt with? 



Just then the mountaineer's cattle 

 broke down the supervisor's fence one 

 day, and two of them, worth over fifty 

 dollars, ate nitrate out of a sack of gar- 

 den fertilizer under a shed, which 

 killed them incontinently; and they 

 were buried where they fell in the 

 coming orchard by the meadow. 



The mountaineer said "he couldn't 

 blame nobody." "But," he added, "I 

 expect ye might balance them steers 

 agin that two dollars that ye thinks I 

 owe ye fur a permit." 



These things may seem trivial, but 

 really they are not, because after awhile 

 more serious issues come up. Neither 

 ten nor a hundred mountaineers will 

 ever break out into open war against a 

 forest on these little items, nor on the 

 general basis of inability to see the local 

 value of a forest system. But after 

 awhile, in one corner or another, a few 

 men, from motives of self-interest, 

 work deftly upon this raw material ; it 

 smokes a while, then it bursts into 



fiame. A local politician wants an issue 

 that leads men's thoughts from some- 

 thing more dangerous ; a land-claimant 

 has good reason to believe that his pa- 

 pers will be cancelled ; a stock man de- 

 sires to be allowed to run more cattle 

 than the forest officer thinks best for 

 the range, or fair to other neighbors. 



In a thickly settled and prosperous 

 region, time, experience and intelligent 

 leadership have developed systematic 

 methods of sifting baseless charges and 

 foolish complaints from any genuine 

 grievances which such a community 

 has learned to present with force and 

 dignity, through the proper channels. 

 But the mountaineer, when stirred up, 

 justly or unjustly, too often uses every 

 available weapon, burns all his powder, ■ 

 and acts on the old principle that if one 

 only throws enough mud at his op- 

 ponent, some of it is sure to stick. 



A supervisor of my acquaintance was 

 once met by a highly excited friend, 

 who said: "I nearly thrashed a couple 

 of men on your account. There were 

 a lot of teamsters down in the village. 

 They were talking about you, and one 

 of them said that you were in the habit 

 of burning the cabins of poor, inof- 

 fensive Indians. Then another said 

 that he heard that you had been ar- 

 rested by a Government detective for 

 stealing over $2,000,000 last year from 

 the income of your forest. And both 

 those men knew that you handled no 

 Government money ; that all the checks 

 came from Washington. Bbth of them 

 had teamed for the Government, and 

 had been promptly paid. And both of 

 them said you were a square man. 



A little more questioning showed the 

 supervisor that both these stories had 

 been originated by a little group of 

 land claimants, whose so-called "home- 

 steads" were being "brought into 

 court." It was merely a part of the 

 price which one pays as he goes along, 

 for the privilege of making things bet- 

 ter and not worse. The supervisor 

 (and his superiors) had philosophy 

 enough to laugh about it, and the su- 

 pervisor remarked that he fortunately 



