ally careless our people living in the forest regions 

 are. 



The following account of some fires in the Northern 

 Rockies, in a region where the fire fighting is very 

 thoroughly organized, written by a forest officer who 

 saw active service in the w r ork, will help to give us 

 the proper perspective and enable us to judge the 

 work in our own state more justly. One might get 

 the impression that the situation there was pretty 

 bad and the work more or less hopeless, and yet they 

 know that they have made almost incredible progress, 

 that conditions are far better than they used to be, 

 and the losses lessened by many times the cost of 

 the fire service. Let us be reasonable. 



The letter goes on to say: 



After a fire has gained such proportions (as the 

 Cloquet-Moose Lake fire), and number of men are 

 usually powerless to check it, as has been proven re- 

 peatedly throughout our experience here. It seems 

 a miracle that no lives were lost in this District dur- 

 ing the past season through men being actually burn- 

 ed, for a great deal of equipment was lost. Crew 

 after crew of firefighters were compelled to abandon 

 camps or bury them on the Clearwater and Selway 

 Forests and in other localities also. There were a 

 few casualties among the men working in the way 

 of broken bones, or cuts, etc., which is to be expected, 

 and in all about six deaths, from falling trees and 

 other accidents. The fact that all of our great fires 

 this year were quite remote from settlements would, 

 of course, tend to keep down the loss of life, still 

 there were many narrow escapes involving Forest 



26 



