FOREST FIRES IN NORTH AMERICA 279 



Naturally, before the nature of these latest fires can be determined in all 

 their details we must wait for a more exact determination of the facts. The 

 area covered by them must have reached well over 250,000 acres, and that the 

 forest reservations in spite of their good patrol service have suffered extremely 

 heavily is already established. But hardly anyone would advocate the restric- 

 tion of the forest service on this account. Rather after this new disaster, will 

 measures be taken in the future to place twice or three times the number of 

 rangers on guard over the dangerous districts in years in which summer 

 drought sets in early and is particularly severe. 



In the eastern half of the union climatic conditions are quite different 

 from those in the western half, both as regards the character of the trees and 

 also that of the fires, and taking it all in all, it is much easier to maintain an 

 effective fire guard there. Only once in many years is there a complete drying 

 out of the forest-floor like that of Idaho or Colorado, and natural fire lanes are 

 provided by broad rivers and numerous lakes and marshes, and moreover the 

 land is rendered much more accessible by roads and trails than in the moun- 

 tainous districts of the west. Nevertheless whenever a fire breaks out in the 

 vast white and black pine woods of Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minne- 

 sota, the danger of its spreading over a wide area is still very great, and 

 especially in dry years the guards have a much more difficult task to extin- 

 guish fires than in Europe. Even in those districts the forest-floor is drier 

 on the average in late summer than it is in Europe, and the woods are clogged 

 with fallen and standing dead trunks. 



Similar conditions exist in the turpentine woods of the great coast plain 

 which extends from New Jersey to Texas. In these woods the great pitch 

 content of the trees increases the danger, while the presence of broad stretches 

 of marsh along all of the streams diminishes it. 



In the mountain forests of the southern Appalachians, in which oak, 

 hickory and other foliage trees predominate, fires are still frequent, yet on 

 account of the greenness of the fuel they seldom do the same damage as in 

 other parts of the country. Ayres and Ashe have established the fact that in 

 the Appalachian area four and one-half million acres, about 80 per cent of 

 the total, have been damaged by earlier or later brush-fires, but only 78,000 

 acres totally destroyed. In the mountain woods of the northern Appalachians, 

 where conifers predominate, fires are generally of a more devastating char- 

 acter, and even in the Adirondack state reservation of New York as many as 

 467,500 acres suffered heavy damage from fire in 1904. 



Relatively small was the fire-destruction in the northwestern coast forests, 

 according to the investigations of the United States forest service, that of 

 the Olympian peninsula amounting to only 112,500 acres, consisting wholly 

 of conifer stands in the north and northeast portions. The interior of this 

 wilderness has not yet been penetrated by white settlers. In the Canadian 

 west, where already numerous miners, hunters, and lumbermen pursue their 

 calling, conditions were the same as in the neighboring portions of the United 

 States, and the fires of the current year in British Columbia have reached the 

 same degree of destructiveness, and for similar reasons. 



