550 BOARD or AGRICULTURE. 



will have a lot of scrub oak which will at least be fine for fuel. It may 

 be interesting to you to l^^now that an oak fence post is considered better 

 than cedar. Cedar will not outlast oak, as is usually supposed, but oak 

 will outlast cedar. I think we have plenty to show for this. Then all 

 the money that we are spending hiring men to go about and watch lest 

 fires break out, will be justified by this growth which is right there now. 

 We have now two Forest Rangers under the direction of a trained young 

 man, who is the Forester; and, by the way, our young man Emory, is 

 the first man in the State of Michigan ever employed in all its history to 

 protect its gi'eatest property. That may seem singular, and it will be 

 a remarkable statement to make when someone writes up the history of 

 our State. 



In the year 1903, fifty years after the great slashing of our forests, 

 we began to look around to see if this great property, the property worth 

 billions of dollars— not millions, but billions— would not be worth pro- 

 tecting and looking after, and whether or not it would not be worth 

 while to give the citizens something in return for the taxes they should 

 have been paying year after year over into the treasury of our State. As 

 I said before, we have two Rangers and one Forester. The Rangers 

 are Chiefs of Police, and see that no fire breaks out. When a fire breaks 

 out, they immediately start to work to havs it put out, and the neighbors 

 are enlisted to co-operate with them. They will hire men to help put 

 the fire out. We are practically at the end of the second season without 

 having a single fire that was worth taking into account, and I assure 

 you that the man who told you that the fires could not be kept out 

 of the forests does not know what he is talking about. They can be 

 kept down, and they will. The old country people have demonstrated 

 it for the last five or six years. Prussia, France, Switzerland and Den- 

 mark have demonstrated this by protecting against forest fires, and they 

 consider it a terrible calamity when one-half of a small fire for us is 

 consumed in a single year. They have men especially to watch. They 

 watch not only for the vandals who seek to destroy the property, but 

 also for the careless nian. When we sell timber we do not propose that 

 a man should make a fourteen-foot road when four feet would do just 

 as well. We do not propose they shall do nothing but destroy our forests 

 and not build them up. We do this much, anyway. We make a study 

 of the land and see what the different portions are suited for. For let 

 it be understood, that the State of Michigan does not want to block the 

 farmer from this land. We want him there more tlmn anywhere else. 

 Every acre of good farm land will be only too gladly turned over to a 

 real settler. We are getting the land classified to know the good from 

 the bad, and also to know what to do. Those who live on a farm will 

 realize how difficult it is to know what is going on on fifty acres of 

 woodland. If it is hard to look after fifty acres properly, what do you 

 think of looking iifter several hundred thousand? Most people do not 



