492 



THE FORESTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 



TABLE OF FOREST FIRES OCCURRING DURING THE CENSUS YEAR Continued. 



The largest number of these fires of any one class was traced to farmers clearing land and allowing their 

 brush fires to escape into the forest. The carelessness of hunters in leaving fires to burn in abandoned camps, next 

 to farmers, was the cause of the greatest injury. The railroads were responsible, too, for serious damage to the 

 forest from fires set by sparks from locomotives, while the intentional burning of herbage in the forest to improve 

 pasturage often caused serious destruction of timber. 



Only the value of the material actually destroyed by fire is included in these estimates. The loss of timber by 

 fire, great as it is, is insignificant in comparison with the damage inflicted upon the soil itself, or with the influence 

 of fire upon subsequent forest growth. If a forest is destroyed by fire all trees, old and young, giants ready for the 

 ax, and germinating seedlings the embryo forests of succeeding centuries are swept away. Undergrowth essential 

 to protect the early growth of trees, the roots of perennial herbage, and the seeds of all plants are consumed. The 

 fertility, or rather the ability of the burned soil to produce again spontaneously a similar crop of trees to the one 

 destroyed, is lost, and the subsequent recovering of burned land with the species of the original forest is only 

 accornplished, if accomplished at all, through the restoration of fertility following the slow growth and decay of 

 many generations of less valuable plants. A northern pine and spruce forest when destroyed by fire is succeeded 

 by a growth of brambles, in time replaced by dwarf birch, poplar, and bird cherries, of no eaonomic value ; scrub oaks 

 and various hard woods follow these, and pine rarely reappears except upon laud long mellowed in the various 

 operations of agriculture. 



In the south Atlantic region a gradual change in the composition of the piue forests is steadily going on under 

 the influence of fire. Less valuable species now occupy the ground once covered with forests of the long-leaved 

 pine, through which annual fires have been allowed to run to improve the scanty pasturage they afford. Stockmen 

 have been benefited at the expense of the permanency of the forest. Fire, too, changes the composition of the 

 broad-leaved forests of the Atlantic region, although its influence is here less marked than upon forests of conifers, 

 which, unlike deciduous trees, rarely grow from stump shoots, and must depend entirely upon the germination 

 of seeds "or their reproduction. Still, in regions continually burned over during a long period of time and then 

 covered again with forests, as is the case in some portions of Kentucky and Tennessee, valuable species, like the 

 white oak and the. yellow poplar, are rare or entirely wanting in the new forest growth. 



The forests of the north Pacific coast offer an exception to the law, otherwise general, for this continent at least, 

 that a change of forest crop follows a forest fire. The fir forests of western Washington territory and Oregon 

 when destroyed by fire are quickly replaced by a vigorous growth of the same species, and the fires which have 

 consumed great bodies of the Californi;i redwood have not prevented the reproduction of this species by seeds and 

 shoots. In the interior Pacific region forests destroyed by fire either do not reproduce themselves, or when, under 

 exceptionally favorable climatic conditions, a growth of trees recovers the burned surface, poplars and scrub pines 

 replace the more valuable species of the original forest. 



The damage inflicted upon the permanency of the forests of the country by browsing animals is only surpassed 

 by the injury which they receive from fire. 



The custom of turning domestic animals into the forest to pick up a scanty and precarious living, common in 

 all parts of the country, is universal in the southern and central portions of the Atlantic region iind in California. 

 Sheep, cat'lc, and horses devour immense quantities of seedling trees, the future forests of the country. They bark 

 the trunks and destroy the vigor and often the life of larger trees. Hogs root up young pines and other plants to 

 feed upon their succulent roots, and devour the edible fruit of many trees. In this way not only is the permanence 

 of the forest endangered, but in the case of deciduous forests their composition is often seriously affected. Species 

 with thin- shelled edible seeds, pines, white oaks, chestnuts, and beeches, are unable to hold their own against species 

 with bitter or unpalatable fruit, on account of the excessive destruction of their seeds by hogs and other animals. 



