CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION. 21 



It should often be an easy task to fix the responsibility for the fire on the guilty 

 party. Without any special attempt to get at the facts, we often discover the causes 

 of the fires we happen on, or at least promising clues. An officer who is a good woods- 

 man and whose time is devoted to this special work should not experience much diffi- 

 culty, provided he did not have to cover too great a territory. Active fire rangers 

 should be able to do effective work. By climbing a good look-out mountain one can 

 survey a vast stretch of country and detect fires in their incipient stages, when they 

 can be successfully fought and checked, and when their origin is easily detected. 



Locomotives should be provided with spark arresters, and section men should be 

 compelled to immediately put out fires near the railroad. 



At present one of the most serious handicaps in combating the fires is lack of 

 any organization. It seems to be nobody's business to put out fires. Only when arti- 

 ficial property is threatened is any attempt made to check the progress of a fire. Last 

 summer a fire sprang up near a town whose population was engaged in waiting for 

 capitalists. Nobody thought of doing anything 'till the fire w?-s about to enter the 

 town. 



If the laws were made more stringent, and officers were specially commissioned 

 to rigidly enforce them and to organize for fire-fighting, I do not think a great time 

 would elapse till the public actively co-operated, for the standard of intelligence is very 

 high, and the western public is quick to realize and to act. The cost of protective mea- 

 sures should not be excessive, nor should it be any barrier when so much is at stake. The 

 only districts that need to be covered are those where men are. The lone woodsman 

 is seldom the cause of a fire. In wet years no protection is required. If this associa- 

 tion will stir up the government to vigourous action, and engage in educating the 

 British Columbia public to a sense of the value of the timber as a public asset, and 

 of the enormous losses sustained through fires and in methods of limiting these, then 

 it will have conferred on British Columbia and upon the country at large a great and 

 lasting benefit. 



Mr. LEAMY. Mr. President and gentlemen: I am not a politician, nor am I ac- 

 customed to speaking before large assemblages of people, so I am afraid that I will 

 have to ask your indulgence if I do not explain myself as clearly as I might. As you 

 have been told already, I am Dominion Crown timber agent for the province of Bri- 

 tish Columbia, and am also in charge of the fire ranging in that province. The 

 portion of the province under my control comprises an area of about twenty thousand 

 square miles, and in that area we employ usually eight men as fire rangers. It is a 

 very easy matter for you to see at once that it is quite an undertaking for eight men 

 to cover this amount of ground, but as it was merely a trial or experience at first, we 

 did not go to any great expense until we could see how it was likely to work. We did 

 not in fact have anything to go on, and we did not know whether the experiment 

 would be successful or not, and consequently did not feel justified in incurring any 

 great outlay until we could ascertain the probable result of our proposed system. The 

 first season of the fire rangers was largely occupied by them in endeavouring to edu- 

 cate the people as to the value of the timber, and preventing at the same time, as 

 much as possible, 'the occurrence of any fire. As any woodsman knows, once a fire 

 gets properly started in the woods it is almost impossible to control it, and so we have 

 been acting on the old saying, ' an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure,' 

 and have always tried to stop the fires before they could get under much headway. 

 One of the duties of the fire rangers is to ascertain when prospecting parties are going 

 to (prospect the forest ranges where they suppose minerals are to be found. Now, the 

 usual practice of these people is to set fire in the locality in which they wish to pros- 



