AMERICAN FORESTRY 



755 



The possibilities may be illustrated by one instance 

 where this actually occurred, as set forth in an article 

 in the Country Gentleman for October 12, 1918, in which 

 the writer states, "Frankly I have never seen greater 

 pain written on human countenance than when I went 

 with two French forestry officers atttached to the army, 

 through what was left of one of the most magnificent 

 forests in all France. 'See' exclaimed one of the offi- 

 cers 'it is gone the work and care of a century. It 

 will take a hundred years to restore the forests of France 

 after the war.' " 



That France might be willing to stand by and permit 

 such devastation does not mean for an instant that she 

 would excuse or forgive. The French people through 

 painful experience following the Revolution learned that 

 denudation must not be permitted even in time of war. 

 What would be their thoughts had they been forced to 

 view the highly efficient lumbering of crack American 

 and Canadian forest regiments, should it happen that this 

 efficiency meant nothing more than making a clean sweep 



of their priceless forest possessions in record time? It 

 has taken them a century to acquire the art of forestry 

 which carries with it the ability to distinguish between 

 lumbering as the sole objective and lumbering as a 

 means of reproducing the forest and as the mere final 

 step in this process. They know that "clean logging" 

 such as practiced by our lumbermen on private holdings 

 nearly everywhere in this country would ruin their for- 

 ests and put them back to revolutionary times, and that 

 it is wholly unnecessary and can be, and so far, fortu- 

 nately, has been largely avoided, where men with a knowl- 

 edge of forestry have been placed in control of the cut- 

 ting on these French forests. 



The French threw open their forests to the American 

 army in the same spirit that they have given everything 

 they have to the cause of civilization and the honor of 

 our country was in the hands of these officers of the 

 Forestry units to a degree hardly less than those on the 

 firing line, and their work will stand for a century. 



THE MINNESOTA HOLOCAUST 



T? OR the third time the danger ever lurking in Minne- 

 *- sota's great expanse of forest has materialized in a 

 whirlwind of death, sweeping away property valued at 

 $100,000,000, and causing over 1,000 fatalities. Again 

 wc read the grim tale of families completely wiped out, 

 of helpless women and children burned to a crisp while 

 fleeing on foot or by team, vainly seeking shelter from the 

 flames, or of boats overturned in icy waters and be- 

 numbed unfortunates sinking to death in the waves. 



Why should these things be, when the state has had 

 this grim lesson driven home twice before at Hinckley in 

 1894, and at Baudette in 1910? The answer is not far to 

 seek. The same selfish and blind incompetency which 

 as late as the winter of 1916 sought to destroy the in- 

 dependence and integrity of the system of state forest 

 protection by making it a part of the spoils system, when 

 balked in this attempt, took revenge in so reducing the 

 appropriations for state fire protection that the mere 

 skeleton of an organization was left to cope with the 

 problem. An area of forest as large as England was left 

 in charge of so few men that each ranger had to oversee 

 districts equal to the state of Connecticut in size. The 

 appeals of the State Forester for proper support fell on 

 prejudiced ears. 



The suppression of forest fires in northern Minnesota 

 is an immense task. The worst feature is that in dry 

 times creeping fires penetrate the numerous peat bogs and 

 there burn all summer, and can only be killed out by ex- 

 pensive trenching, yet at any time, when a hurricane 

 arises, any of these fires can develop into the typical 

 cyclonic sweep of flame which travels faster than a run- 

 ning horse and leaves not a living thing in its path. 



The state forester called public attention to the exist- 

 ence of hundreds of these bog fires a few days before the 

 holocaust, and warned the public of the extreme danger 



of permitting them to burn. No funds were left in the 

 meagre state appropriation for extinguishing them. 

 Almost in echo to his warning came the unbelievably 

 frightful destruction in the region south and north of 

 Duluth. 



The first step in preventing a repetition of this tragedy, 

 doubly regrettable in war time, is the proper equipment 

 of the state forestry organization with the funds they 

 have needed and asked for. The second, without which 

 no expenditure or effort by the state force will avail, is 

 the determination of every citizen of northern Minnesota 

 that forest fire must be banished from the region. A 

 small blaze smouldering in a bog in an inaccessible tract 

 of waste land is just as dangerous in Minnesota as a 

 time fuse attached to a powder magazine in a munition 

 plant. 



Rumors have it that these fires were the work of 

 pro-German and I. W. W.'s No such explanation is 

 needed. This appalling tragedy resulted directly, first, 

 from the cynical indifference of the state legislature to 

 the welfare of the public, and second, from the culpable 

 carelessness of the settlers and residents in the ruined 

 areas in permitting "harmless" fires to burn for weeks 

 unattended, for lack of organized effort in extinguishing 

 them. 



T^XPERTS of the National Lumber Manufacturers 

 *- J Association state that yellow pine lumber sufficient 

 to lay a bridge floor 25 feet wide and 1 inch thick from 

 the United States to France with 4,000,000 feet to spare, 

 or an approximate total of 400,000,000 feet, was cut in 

 American forests and transported to ship yards on the 

 Atlantic and Mexican Gulf Coast for construction of 

 wood vessels in a little more than a year. 



