the fabulous prices for them without ever thinking how they 

 were obtained. They have never even dreamed of the lonely 

 trappers threading their monotonous way from trap to trap in 

 the silent forest through the long winter months reaping the 

 harvest of furs. 



Again think of the millions of quarts of blueberries shipped 

 from the forests to the cities, and for each quart shipped there 

 are two used for home consumption. Not a blueberry in the 

 country is raised in a cultivated garden. The other wild fruit 

 does not ship so well but the strawberries, raspberries, black- 

 berries, pincherries and service berries are the sole delicacies 

 both fresh and canned in the homes of thousands of settlers. 



The forests also produce a harvest of maple sugar and maple 

 syrup worth several million dollars and the stupendous value 

 of all the by-products of the trees has never been compiled. 



Nor must we forget what is commercially the most valuable 

 of all, the harvest of timber. Thousands of men have made 

 their fortunes out of it in the past, hundreds of thousands 

 are making a living out of it now, and as many more will con- 

 tinue to make their living cut of it till the end of time if we 

 treat our forests right. Our very civilization depends upon it. 



So we must not overlook this wonderful harvest of the for- 

 est^-for it means much to the nation. Lumber, furs, game, 

 fish, berries, the thousands of open handed vacationists; the 

 returns from all these can be counted in millions of dollars, 

 in numbers not incomparable with the value of our much 

 vaunted grain harvests certainly second to nothing else. Yet, 

 over and above it all is the far greater value, the hundreds of 

 thousands of people drawn for a while to the simple, natural 

 life by the lure of the forest; a value which must be counted 

 not in dollars, but in terms of the red corpuscles in the blood 

 of a greater, a more healthy, and a more progressive nation. 



Tree planting on national forests has to be confined to com- 

 paratively short intervals in spring and fall. In spring it starts 

 when the snoiv melts and stops with the drying out of the 

 ground; in the fall it conies between the fall rains and first 

 snowfall. 



4 



