210 Forestry Quarterly 



provides for the salary of two $2,000 men, who would be trans- 

 ferred from the District Office to the Supervisor's Office. One 

 of them would specialize in timber sales, the other in engineering. 

 Apparently, there are no obstacles to such a consolidation under 

 the head of geography, topography, climate, communication or 

 transportation. While the volume of business would be large, 

 it can, for the most part, be systematized so as to be reduced to 

 mere routine work. If the consolidation were made, the work 

 would be divided into three heads — silviculture, grazing, lands 

 and engineering, which would include both permanent improve- 

 ments and fire protection. Silviculture and lands and engineer- 

 ing would each be in charge of a specialist, while the supervisor 

 would probably specialize in grazing. It is significant that, when 

 the Forest Service first took over the then-called Forest Re- 

 serves, the Jemez, Pecos, and Taos Reserves were administered 

 by three supervisors, all located in Santa Fe, but, at that time, 

 there was no organized office machinery to speak of, practically 

 no telephone conveniences, Forest Service policies were poorly 

 defined, map and status data were meagre, the rangers were in- 

 ferior, and the supervisors had no stafif. Under present condi- 

 tions all this has been changed. 



In the words of a local officer, the specialist idea as applied to 

 the Santa Fe-Carson is exemplified as follows: 



"In the first place, it is not the idea to relieve the ranger of 

 his present duties, or in other words to depend upon a lower class 

 of rangers. They already have more than they can do properly 

 and the specialist idea would not relieve them materially. An en- 

 gineer, for instance, would be busy for two years in adjusting 

 boundary disputes with grants. Important trails should be sur- 

 veyed and instructions given, — even in a lesser important trail 

 construction ; as a matter of fact, there is no end of engineering 

 questions which would come up to a good specialist. It was the 

 idea that fire protection, all sorts of improvements, and survey 

 work which the district rangers have not time to handle, even 

 if they are qualified, would be handled by the engineer. A lands 

 specialist would be nothing new — we have had two of them for 

 the past two years, and with the occupancy permit work staring 

 us in the face, we will have more work than one land specialist 

 can handle of that class of work alone in the future. The graz- 

 ing man would not count cattle, nor would he be an office man. 

 With 500 grazing permits, it may easily be seen that there is 

 enough administrative work in connection with these permits 

 and the attending complications to keep one man from the 



