ADDRESSES OF MAJOR LACEY 71 



on fire, lighting the country for miles around. These 

 vast stores of nature's forces are being rapidly ex- 

 hausted. 



* i 

 The extermination of the buffalo is too recent and too 

 shameful to speak of excepting in the highest terms of in- 

 dignation. Instead of taking these vast herds and, after 

 giving them proper marks of identity, dividing them up 

 and assuming proprietary rights over them, they have 

 been slaughtered by the hundred thousand for the sheer 

 pleasure of killing, until now a little handful of two or 

 three hundred is all that is left of the millions which 

 roamed the plains forty years ago; and this was called 

 sport. It required nothing like the expert skill of the 

 pig-sticker who, covered with blood, presides over the 

 scenes of carnage in one of our great slaughter-houses. 



But it is to the forests that we wish more particularly 

 to direct our attention at this time. . . In the early 

 days men often cut down trees for the wild fruit that 

 grew upon them. The beautiful service-berry has been 

 well nigh exterminated by this barbarous practice. This 

 was a sin against nature. A few years ago I visited the 

 great region of the northern Pacific Coast, where today 

 is perhaps the grandest forest now remaining on the face 

 of the earth. It can no longer be described as 



The continuous woods 



Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 



Save his own dashings; 



for the hand of man is busily engaged in building up new 

 states in that splendid country. 



Splendid trees, five and six feet in diameter and hun- 

 dreds of years of age, were being destroyed. Auger 

 holes were bored in the tree near the ground, coal oil 



