(The following is an extract from a letter written by a St. 

 Paul newspaper man to "The North Woods." The section he 

 visited is along the Canadian border and while more extensive 

 than other fire-ridden districts, depicts in a great measure the 

 conditions existing in woods which have been swept by con- 

 iiag'rations.) 



THE loneliest place in all America, the most forbidding, 

 is found in the depths of a forest once swept by fire. 

 Tales may be told of the stillness that terrifies the 

 traveler on sun-baked Sahara and draws the mirage to haunt 

 his eye and brain; the solitude of the polar regions where 

 the ice floes stretch for miles unbroken, may be cited as 

 spots where loneliness is greatest felt, but neither compares 

 in its dread to the feeling which comes to one who spends a 

 day or a night in a fire-swept forest land. 



There is a sense of awe, a desire to run away away to 

 green fields and green trees and friends and companionship 

 and life and people and be back with the big pulsing world, 

 which is almost irresistible. The giant pine trees, stripped 

 of their limbs, motionless and dead; the unbending trunks of 

 great spruce and tamarack trees, blackened and burned by 

 the yellow tongue of fire, standing as wrecks of what once 

 were forest kings, and all about them naught but desolation 

 and silence, makes one want to turn and go where the hand 

 of destruction has not placed a blot upon the earth. 



Spends a Night in a District Twice Swept By Fire. 

 A short time ago, I had occasion to spend a week in North- 

 ern Minnesota in a section denuded by fire in 1909 and again 

 in 1910. The trip was made from Duluth by boat on Lake 

 Superior to a point far up the shore toward the international 

 border. A "buckboard" drawn by a strong team took me 

 with my guide into the wilderness. We drove most all day 

 over logging roads and trails and at night stopped by the side 



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