THE NATIONAL FORESTS 



By C. M. GRANGER, Director, Forest Survey 



CONTENTS 



Page 



Creation and contribution of the national forests 565 



How the property was built up 569 



Further additions from the public domain and by exchange. __^ 571 



The acquisition program 574 



Management and use of the resources of the national forests 577 



The principle and practice of correlated use under unified control 577 



Timber use 579 



Forage use 586 



Water conservation 589 



Recreation use 590 



Wild-life preservation 



Miscellaneous uses 595 



National-forest protection 595 



Fire 595 



Forest insects 600 



Forest-tree diseases 60 1 



Business administration of the national forests 602 



THE CREATION AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE 

 NATIONAL FORESTS 



In 1891, the people of the United States said to themselves some- 

 thing like this: 



We have been parceling out the public timberlands right and left for, lo! these 

 many years; we have believed that the quickest and best way to build up this 

 country was to get all the publicly owned natural resources into private hands 

 as quickly as possible; the results have been mixed. On the one hand, we have 

 seen private initiative in the forests furnish the lumber that built the farm houses 

 and the towns in the great Mississippi Valley; the timberland bonuses we gave to 

 railroad builders helped us to get some of our transcontinental railroads; many 

 cleared acres have gone under the plow. But, on the other hand, there has been 

 too much on the wrong side of the ledger; we have seen the lumbermen cut out 

 and get out of New York and Pennsylvania, move into Michigan, Wisconsin, 

 and Minnesota and go most of the way through the same process there; the 

 experience promises to be repeated in the South, and it is only a matter of time 

 until the same things happen in the great western forests. We don't like these 

 deserted towns that remain in the wake of the sawmill, these vast areas of stumps. 

 Where are we going to get our timber in the future if nobody takes an interest 

 in where the next crop is coming from? We have hardly any public timberlands 

 left in the East, in the Lake States, in the South, but we still have some in the 

 West; we shall keep some of them, set up our own forestry enterprise, and see if 

 we cannot do a better job of insuring the satisfaction of our present and our 

 future needs for timber and for watershed protection. 



So began the national forests the symbol of a belated recognition 

 of the economic error committed by the Nation in passing so much 

 of its forest area to private ownership and of the intent of the people 

 to better safeguard their forest welfare by direct action. 



At first the national forests, then called forest reserves, were just 

 just what the latter name implies reserves. Then in 1897 Congress 

 provided authority to administer them, to sell their timber, and 



565 



