Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 23 



young nation was. First of all they needed men and women to settle 

 on the land and bring up children and have a stake in the country. 

 That was absolutely necessary before there could develop the great 

 nation which some of them saw ahead. As the population spread there 

 arose a need that great systems of transportation should be built to knit 

 the country together and provide for the interchange of its products. 

 These railroads called for iron, coal, and timber in great quantities. 

 Then began an unprecedented demand upon the forests. They could 

 not build those transcontinental railroad lines without millions upon 

 millions of railroad ties cut from the forests of the country; and they 

 could not mine the iron and coal except as the forests gave them the 

 means of timbering their mines, transporting the ore, and disposing 

 of the finished product. The whole civilization which they built up 

 was conditioned on iron, coal, and timber. As they developed their 

 continent, richer than any other, from the east coast to the west, new 

 resources became revealed to them, new interests took possession of 

 them, and they used the old resources in new ways. In the East, the 

 rivers meant to them only means of transportation ; in the West they 

 began to see that the rivers meant first of all crops ; that they must put 

 the rivers on the land by irrigation before they could grow wheat, 

 alfalfa, fruits, sugar beets, and other crops that make the West rich. 

 They found that to feed the vast population which had grown up in the 

 East they must have the vast ranges of the West to grow meat. They 

 found that the resources of soil and water which produced the wheat, 

 the cotton, and the meat of iron and coal, and of timber, together 

 made up the working capital of a great nation, and that the nation 

 could not grow unless it had all of these things. In taking possession 

 of them our nation used with greater effectiveness, greater energy and 

 enterprise, than any other nation had ever shown before. Nothing like 

 our growth, nothing like our wealth, nothing like the average happiness 

 of our people can be found elsewhere ; and the fundamental reason* for 

 this is, on the one side, the vast natural resources which we had at 

 hand, and on the other side the character, ability, and power of our 

 people. 



Now what have we done with these resources which have made us 

 great, and what is the present condition in which this marvelously 

 vigorous nation of ours finds itself? The keynote of our times is 

 "development." Every man from New York to San Francisco looks 

 to the development of the natural resources to produce the advantages 

 and the opportunities he wants for his neighbors and his friends. 

 Any one who questions the wisdom of any of the methods we are using 

 in bringing that development to pass, because he believes we are making 

 mistakes that will be expensive later on, is in danger of being considered 



