602 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



AUA.N l)(iM-:il l-( jL-PIM ,. 



This once prosperous city has been abandoned because the once well-forested 

 and there is nothing by which to sustain the inhabitants of the city. This city 

 cleared and the district ruined. 



ing testimony of how important i'alestine was deemed by 

 the Mistress of the World before the tree-destroying 

 Turk made it a sterile waste. 



The island of Santa Cruz, off the coast of California, 

 once supported an extensive Indian population ; now that 

 it has been stripped of its forests it has no water, and 

 gives no return to the husbandman. 



In Europe attention has been turned of recent years 

 to this subject more than would be supposed by one who 

 has not given such matters investigation. In every 

 country in the Old World, save the British Islands, 

 there are schools of forestry, and such schools are notablv 

 numerous in Germany. 



In thickly-settled France, so many lives were lost and 

 so much property destroyed by the torrential rains inci- 

 dent to forest destruction that a law was enacted, and is 

 now in force, throughout that Republic, providing that, 

 if a field become bare of trees, and is, in the opinion of 

 the local authorities, better suited for arboriculture than 

 agriculture, governmental aid will be given to the owner 

 by furnishing him trees at a nominal price. If the owner 

 fails to plant the trees, or, having planted them, fails 

 to care for them, the local superintendent of tree culture 

 may take f>ossession and maintain the trees at the cost 

 of the French Republic. Within five years the owner 

 may, by paying to the government the principal and 

 interest of the outlay, redeem his field : or, by deed- 

 ing one-half to the government within that time, may re- 

 deem the other half, but if he does neither, the entire 

 field becomes governmental domain at the expiration of 

 that statutory period. These provisions of law may 

 seem like " locking the stable after the horse is stolen," 



' ni-LI PROVINCE, CHI.XA 



hills in the vicinity have been stripped bare of trees, the springs have dried up, 

 was built and the plain cultivated in 1725 and since that time the hills have been 



but sometimes, by locking the door even then, we may 

 save the balance of the livestock. 



It is certain that the arid lands we have in North 

 America have been made so by the extermination of 

 the trees through forest fires and, possibly, the destruction 

 of trees for fuel and clearing for cultivation by the 

 great pre-historic agricultural people who preceded the 

 nomadic Indians. The springing up again of these de- 

 stroyed forests may have been prevented by the resulting 

 drought, or by the young trees being killed by the fre- 

 quent prairie fires kindled by man or arising from spon- 

 taneous combustion ; or by the young trees being eaten 

 or trampled down, while yet small, by the buffalo and 

 other herbivorous quadrupeds which abounded in earlier 

 times. The Indians frequently made fires to kill the 

 tree growth to make better grazing for buffalo and deer, 

 and to thereby make their immediate localities more 

 attractive resorts for wild game. The stockman fre- 

 quentl\- does the same now to improve the pasturage 

 for his cattle and horses. 



It is a legend of the Kiowas, at San Gorgonio, Cali- 

 fornia, that many centuries ago the Indians prayed the 

 Great Spirit for a ruler, and He sent them a king who 

 was white, blue-eyed and bearded. The legend con- 

 tinues that this king governed them so successfully as to 

 convert all the lands into a garden and that orchards and 

 vineyards, watered by nmning streams, covered all of 

 what is now the Colorado desert. According to the story, 

 as told by Kiowa Indians, the people became so proud 

 that they ceased to worship the Great Spirit and made 

 an idol of their king, and to punish them their god dried 

 up the stream, destroyed the orchards and vineyard.s: 

 and made the Colorado desert. 



