234 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



wind down the steep western slope of the Continental Divide 

 into Butte, you will see beside the tracks patches of grey earth 

 shot with streaks of green and blue. On the flat lands to the 

 west of the town these patches cover hundreds of acres. And 

 through them all you will notice sluggish little streams of these 

 same green and blue colors. The vegetation that touches the 

 borders of these strange fields and streams is dead and grey. 

 This is the waste from the great copper mines. And in the dis' 

 tance you can see the clouds of yellow smoke coming from the 

 chimneys of the copper smelters themselves. 



When you go west from Butte to California, drive from 

 Klamath Falls to Eureka on the Pacific Coast. If you don't 

 get dizzy when you ride on winding narrow roads that look 

 down a thousand feet of precipice into a cascading river, take 

 the Klamath River Road. In one of the narrow valleys you 

 pass through you will surely see a dredge eating up the green 

 earth before it and leaving in its wake nothing but a mass of 

 stones the size of a man's head. This dredge is digging up the 

 earth, sorting out the gold, and then burying the earth under 

 the gravel which has been dug up with it. 



The road from Los Angeles to San Diego runs through two 

 very different kinds of forests, both of which have been planted 

 by men. The first of these forests is made up of green, umbrella- 

 shaped orange trees. The other forest consists of a mass of 

 tall, gaunt oil derricks. In the irrigation ditches under the orange 

 trees, water is flowing. Around the oil wells the ditches are 

 filled with black crude oil. These are the Los Angeles Basin oil 

 fields which produce 8 per cent of our petroleum. 



When you have ended this journey, you will have made a 

 tour of some of the most important mineral resources of the 

 United States. When you remember what the country looked 

 like around these mines and wells, one thing will stand out. The 

 ore pits and the placer mines and the oil derricks look vastly 

 different from the green Wisconsin fields, the blue Lake Mead 



