ii2 FORESTS AND MANKIND 



forests taken from the bargain counter of private exploitation 

 and set aside for public use. For many years there was very 

 definite opposition to this administration of timber land by 

 the Government. Their purposes were deliberately distorted 

 and misunderstood. Their dual purpose was to supply timber 

 in perpetuity and to protect the purity of streams terms that 

 must have sounded rather visionary and impractical to our 

 busy, rapidly-expanding nation back in the late eighteen hun- 

 dreds. 



In the early days of western settlement the Government's 

 policy in regard to its public lands had been a policy of gift 

 and sale get them into private ownership as quickly as pos- 

 sible. This, of course, was a logical, an inevitable policy for a 

 nation with many square miles of undeveloped land and bil- 

 lions of dollars worth of natural resources still untouched. 



To become powerful and prosperous we needed to encourage 

 the building of railroads and the extension of industries and 

 settlement into the waste places of the west. To obtain these 

 things we had to offer special inducements to private enter- 

 prise and the one inducement that the Government could hold 

 out was the gift of land. So, to the railroads it offered and gave 

 millions of acres in return for their pioneering in building 

 transcontinental lines. To the western settler it gave large areas 

 in exchange for cultivating the soil and for building homes. 



Gradually, as the years passed, a mass of makeshift laws 

 came into existence having to do with methods of acquiring 

 and exchanging Government land by individuals and com- 

 panies until a crazy-quilt patchwork of uncoordinated and 

 often conflicting legislation had been spread over our entire 

 public domain. So far as the public timberlands were concerned 



