424 United States. 



to a forest commissioner, who was charged to organize 

 county commissioners and road overseers throughout the 

 State as forest officers in their respective localities, to act 

 as a police force in preventing depredations on timbered 

 school lands and in enforcing the fire laws. Col. E. T. 

 Ensign, who had been most instrumental in bringing 

 about this legislation, was appointed commissioner, and, 

 with singular devotion, in spite of the enmity aroused 

 by his activity, which eventually led to a discontinuance 

 of appropriations, tried, for a number of years, to exe- 

 cute this law. With his resignation from the office, 

 this legislation also fell into innocuous desuetude. 



In New York, concern in the water supply for the 

 Erie Canal, had led such a far sighted statesman as 

 Horatio Seymour, twice Governor of the State and once 

 running for the Presidency, to conceive the need of 

 preserving the Adirondack watershed in State hands. 

 Accordingly a law was passed, in 1872, naming seven 

 citizens, with Horatio Seymour chairman, as a State 

 park commission, instructed to make inquiries with the 

 view of reserving or appropriating the wild lands lying 

 northward of the Mohawk, or so much thereof as might 

 be deemed expedient, for a State park. The commis- 

 sion, finding that the State then owned only 40,000 

 acres in that region, and that there was a tendency on 

 the part of the owners of the rest to combine for the 

 enhancement of values should the State want to buy, 

 recommended a law forbidding further sales of State 

 lands, and their retention when forfeited for the non- 

 payment of taxes. 



It was not until eleven years later, in 1883, that this 

 recommendation was acted upon, when the State through 



