184 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



in convincing Congress that a law should be passed permitting 

 the President to withdraw from settlement valuable timber- 

 land and put it under the administration of the Department of 

 the Interior. The law, which was to have the most profound 

 effects on the conservation of natural resources, was a brief 

 and obscure "rider" attached to an appropriation bill. In 1897 

 Congress created in the Department of the Interior a division 

 to study forest problems. This was later put under the Depart 

 ment of Agriculture. 



At first the lumbermen fought these withdrawals of timber- 

 land. In spite of this, during the administrations of Presi 

 dents Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley, about 60,000,000, 

 acres of forest land in Colorado, California, Wyoming, and 

 Oregon was closed to settlement. 5 Unfortunately, this was not 

 enough to stop the rapid destruction of the forests. When Presi 

 dent Theodore Roosevelt came into office, Gifford Pinchot, head 

 of the newly created Forest Service, persuaded him to increase 

 the forest reservations to 172,000,000 acres. 



The important thing about the depletion of the forests was 

 the effect it had upon the land itself and the people who de 

 pended on the land. Take, for example, northern Wisconsin, 

 where there was one of the finest stands of white pine in the 

 world. A generation ago the lumber companies came into that 

 region and cut every available stick of wood. There seemed 

 to be so much of it that they went on cutting as if there never 

 would be an end. But the end did come in a very short time. 

 In the wake of these lumbering operations were left millions 

 of acres of land with nothing on them but highly inflammable 

 slash, that is, the branches and tops of trees which had been cut 

 down. This slash was tinder box, and in the dry season it burned 

 furiously. The fires destroyed rich humus layer of the soil and 

 whatever young trees had escaped destruction by the logging. 



5 Van Hise and Havemeyer, op. cit., p. 243. 



