4 JOHN MACOUN ON 



is so completely denuded of trees that even the dead and whitened trunks of some localities 

 have disappeared and nothing is to be seen for miles but bushes and young trees growing 

 in the crevices of the naked rocks, repeated tires having burned up every particle of the 

 former covering which was the accumulation of ages. 



Any traveller going west on the Canadian Pacific railway from Ottawa will pass 

 through 1,200 miles of what was once continuous forest. At present, he will see little else 

 but a dreary- wilderness of bare rock, burned and bleaching trunks or young forests trying 

 to cover up the nakedness of the land. I am not citing the line of the Canadian Pacific 

 railway as the particular line but only as an illustration, for there is no disguising the fact 

 that any line will do. In the summer of 1868 the first opening was made in the forest at 

 Port Arthur. The summer of 1870 saw Wolseley's expedition pass on its way to Win- 

 nipeg and that summer the forest at Port Arthur was burned and since then the havoc has 

 been continuous. 



We are told that we have immense forests of white pine still untouched and that gener- 

 ations will pass before we can destroy it all. The same was said of the buflalo, but they are 

 gone never to return. Sixteen years ago they darkened our interior plains in countless 

 thousands, and two j'cars later they had disappeared for ever. So will it be witli the pine 

 forests. The interested ones cry they are inexhaustible, but another decade will not elapse 

 before they cease to be a public domain, and ever after the remnants will be the patrimony 

 of the speculators who manipulated the sales. 



There was a time when the prairie region was being deforested at an enormous rate and 

 ever}^ year the fires rushing from the south and west forced their way into the still untouched 

 woodlands and extended the burnt area still farther to the north. As soon as settlement 

 took place attempts were made to stop the fires, and of late years destruction from that 

 cause has almost ceased. It is a fact, nevertheless, that at the time of Palliser and H3'nde'8 

 expeditions in 1857-59 there were districts south of the Qu'Appelle covered with heavy 

 forests of aspen that twenty 3'ears after, in 1880, I found without even a twig to show that 

 a tree ever grew there. 



Passing westward to the Rocky and Selkirk Mountains, the same tale may be told. 

 Forests of tall, graceful trees invaluable for railway and other purposes filling the valleys 

 and climbing the mountain sides in 1885, nearly all gone in 1893. When the right of way 

 ' was cut through the mountains, a lane was made through the forest and the brush and logs 

 piled on either hand. The burning of this started the fires that prepared the material for 

 succeeding years when the fires climbed the mountains so that at Hector and Stephen on 

 the summit of the Rocky Mountains not a green tree was to be seen in 1890 where they had 

 stood in myriads in 1885. This was not all, in 1885 quantities of permanent ice and snow 

 .that had completely disappeared in 1890, lay on the mountains to the north and south and 

 instead of the cool mountain slopes of six years before the ascent had to be made through a 

 blackened forest where the rustling of the dead bark and the tapping of the woodpecker 

 took the place of the songs and twitterings of the small birds seen in 1885. 



The same year the Columbia Valley from Golden down to Donald, and up Beaver Creek 

 and down the lUicilliweat to Revelstoke was an unbroken forest of tall stately trees ; to-day 

 those that are left are ragged, torn and shrivelled, and the forest beauty has departed for 

 ever.-_ Year after year the lumljorman is penetrating the valleys and the fire following in 

 his wake finishes what he begins. In a few short years desolation will reign, and the 



