THE FOKESTS 199 



Most of the Fresno group are doomed to feed the 

 mills recently erected near them, and a company 

 of lumbermen are now cutting the magnificent for 

 est on King's Eiver. In these milling operations 

 waste far exceeds use, for after the choice young 

 manageable trees on any given spot have been felled, 

 the woods are fired to clear the ground of limbs and 

 refuse with reference to further operations, and, of 

 course, most of the seedlings and saplings are de 

 stroyed. 



These mill ravages, however, are small as com 

 pared with the comprehensive destruction caused 

 by " sheepmen." Incredible numbers of sheep are 

 driven to the mountain pastures every summer, and 

 their course is ever marked by desolation. Ev 

 ery wild garden is trodden down, the shrubs are 

 stripped of leaves as if devoured by locusts, and the 

 woods are burned. Running fires are set every 

 where, with a view to clearing the ground of pros 

 trate trunks, to facilitate the movements of the 

 flocks and improve the pastures. The entire forest 

 belt is thus swept and devastated from one ex 

 tremity of the range to the other, and, with the 

 exception of the resinous Pinus contorta, Sequoia 

 suffers most of all. Indians burn off the underbrush 

 in certain localities to facilitate deer-hunting, moun 

 taineers and lumbermen carelessly allow their camp- 

 fires to run; but the fires of the sheepmen, or 

 muttoneers, form more than ninety per cent, of all 

 destructive fires that range the Sierra forests. 



It appears, therefore, that notwithstanding our 

 forest king might live on gloriously in Nature's 

 keeping, it is rapidly vanishing before the fire and 



