ONE VIEW OF THE FOREST RANGER 



By Paul G. Redington 

 Forest Supervisor, Sierra National Forest 



A 



LREADY much has been written 

 about the forest ranger — some 

 good poetry — more bad; some 

 true-to-life fiction, more that 

 widely misses the mark. To those people 

 who have never come in contact with 

 the forest ranger — easterners and those 

 of the west who do not frequent his 

 habitat — his life is one of romance, 

 adventure, danger. To them he is a 

 mighty man of brawn, clad in the stage 

 habilaments of a frontiersman or cow- 

 boy, superbly mounted, travelling in 

 a country where heretofore "the hand 

 of man has never set foot;" classes in 

 the same category as a member of the 

 Northwest Mounted Police of Canada; 

 an officer of a great government, clothed 

 with the stem and unyielding authority 

 of the law as he does his business with 

 the grazer, the miner, the lumberman 

 and the settler. This poorly drawn pic- 

 ture of a forest ranger has been displayed 

 before the eyes of many people by 

 noted authors and writers of fiction and 

 one cannot blame the uninitiated if he 

 fails utterly to comprehend that com- 

 monplace and hard, grinding work also 

 are to be found in the daily life of a 

 ranger; that this government officer 

 seldom has to resort to force to carry 

 out the law under which he works; that 

 he is the friend and not the enemy of the 

 men with whom he transacts business; 

 that he is a respected member of a 

 community; in most cases a man with 

 a family, with the cares in this respect 

 of the average American citizen on his 

 shoulders; that he does his work from 

 a sense of duty and because he wants to 

 see it well done rather than because of 

 arbitrary instructions of a superior 

 officer. These people fail to appreciate 

 — because they do not know — that a 

 large part of the work of the ranger is 

 of his own initiating; that within cer- 

 tain limits he plans the greater part of 

 the work which is to keep him busy, 

 unhampered by dictation from any 



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higher authority. There will always be 

 romance in the ranger's life, and it is 

 safe to say that his work and his life 

 will furnish the basis for many of the 

 really readable novels of the future. I 

 have often thought of what a chance any 

 man in the field force of the Service, 

 blessed with the knack of throwing 

 together a good novel, has of putting the 

 forest ranger into a story that would 

 deal with the romantic and the hum- 

 drum, the humorous and the pathetic; 

 a story that would give to the public a 

 clearer idea of the real work of the 

 average ranger than has been conveyed 

 in the writings hitherto. How many 

 little anecdotes each one of us knows, 

 which, if put into properly embellished 

 English, would make one of the most 

 interesting . groups of short stories in 

 existence. But I am going to side- 

 track this phase of a many-sided sub- 

 ject, and try to tell just what I think 

 of the forest ranger and his future as 

 viewed from a few short but pleasant 

 years of contact with him and from the 

 angle of a good many different positions. 

 The forest ranger is, though he may 

 not fully appreciate it, the foundation 

 of the Forest Service, on which the vast 

 establishment absolutely depends for 

 support. He is the real forester in this 

 great government machine. If not, in 

 technical parlance, now, he will be not 

 many years in the future. The practice 

 of the profession of forestry must natur- 

 ally be based on, first, a chance for the 

 largest possible amount of field work, 

 and, second, on observation; assuming, 

 of course, that the man practising it has 

 had sufficient of the theory of forestry 

 to allow him to do proper and accurate 

 work in the woods. As I say, the work 

 must be done in the field where results 

 can be watched for and studied. This 

 cannot be done by an administrative 

 officer of the Service, who necessarily 

 has to devote a great bulk of his time 

 to office work in connection with proper 



