446 MINNESOTA STATE IIORTICULTIjKAL SOCIIOTY. 



MINNESOTA FORESTRY. 



GEN. C. C. ANDREWS, CHIEF FIRE AVARDEN. 



I am glad to see the veterans of forestry and horticulture 

 here from year to year. I presume one of the things that pre- 

 judices forestry especially in the northern part of the state is 

 the apprehension on the part of many people that the forestry 

 people want to create a great, dense wilderness in northern 

 Minnesota. A forest is not a wilderness. The Black Forest of 

 Baden and Wurtemburg is ninety miles long, not quite as far as 

 to Carlton, and only about thirty miles, on an average, in breadth, 

 3^et in the midst of that Black Forest live one million people. 

 There is a city in the Black Forest of over six thousand in- 

 habitants. There are railroads running through it and many 

 splendid highways. Pennsylvania has seven hundred thousand 

 acres of forest reserve, but it is in forty different places, in 

 different parts of the state. There is no dense wilderness there. 

 Even our Pillsbury reserve here in Minnesota of one thousand, 

 acres is not in one parcel, but it is in three pieces, one and two 

 miles apart. All that forestry wants is just the land that is 

 too hilly or too rocky for agriculture. There are no very great or 

 extensive areas of such land, and we must take it where we find 

 it, a few thousand or a few hundred acres here and there, and 

 it will not be a dense wilderness that obstructs civilization. 

 The people in the northern part of the state want to get that 

 error out of their minds. 



One of the things that European forestry does is to protect 

 game. The forester has charge of the game as well as the forest. 

 He is educated, and he is scientifically educated. He knows all 

 about game. He is a skilled marksman, and he is versed in the 

 best ways of destroying noxious animals, such as wolves; and 

 tinder such methods within a reasonable time forestry in Min- 

 nesota will take care of the game as well as the forests. Having 

 a forester will help to destroy the wolves. We pay out in this 

 state twenty thousand dollars a year in bounties for the killing 

 of wolves, which is almost twice as much as the state pays for 

 forest preservation. When we have forestry organized as it 

 ought to be organized the foresters will take care of the wolves, 

 and we shall not need to pay a bounty for their killing. 



We have a law on the statute book authorizing the forestry 

 board to buy land for forestry purposes, but not exceeding two 

 hundred and fifty thousand acres of land and not exceeding one- 

 eighth of the area of one town, and one-quarter part of the 

 revenue of that land is always to be given to the town and 

 county in lieu of taxes. That law has been on the statute books 

 for four years, and the state has not appropriated a dollar Avith 

 which to buy any land. Some six years ago we had a bill passed 



