196 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



PROTECT THE HEADWATERS OF NAVIGABLE STREAMS 



THE wisdom of purchasing forest land at the head- 

 waters of navigable streams under the Weeks Law 

 has been demonstrated. When, therefore, the appropria- 

 tions have been used up, and the question arises of con- 

 tinuing the policy, the appeal is wide and strong. New 

 bills in Congress propose two million dollars a year for 

 five years. 



But Congress does not grant large sums without know- 

 ing the reason, especially in the face of an expected 

 deficit of three billion dollars in the year's payment on 

 the war debt. It is up to the friends of this measure to 

 show its transcendant importance, and this can be 

 done. It involves not only the timber supply in the 

 Eastern country where population is dense, and the pres- 

 ervation of the soil over vast tracts of mountain range 

 from fire and erosion, but also the even flow of streams 

 and the regulation of water powers in more than twenty 

 states with hundreds of thousands of operatives depend- 

 ent upon steady power at the millwheels. 



Take, for instance, the regulation of stream flow in any 

 single valley in New England like the Connecticut or the 

 Merrimac. Each has hundreds of factories and electric 

 plants. What myriads of electric lights depend upon an 

 even flow from the great White Mountain watersheds. 

 Or, take the Ohio River. Any one who has experienced 

 the terror of floods at Pittsburgh or Cincinnati when mil- 

 lions of property are destroyed and many hundreds 

 of people driven from their homes, realize how essen- 

 tial is control in the mountains of West Virginia. Forest 

 soil is said to hold back five times its own weight in 

 water. It is this extraordinary fact that keeps mighty 



rivers flowing. Members of Congress and everybody else 

 should know that this precious mountain soil is inflam- 

 mable and that a slash fire destroys it ten thousand acres 

 at a time. Whole mountains are reduced to barren rock. 



Or take the matter of timber supply. In the country 

 as a whole, as everybody knows, we are using up our 

 timber much faster than it grows. Already we are 

 feeling the pinch of excessive prices, due to the exhaus- 

 tion of certain species. Lumber prices have greatly ad- 

 vanced and yet felling operations throughout the highest 

 mountain slopes are advancing as- never before. Near the 

 summit of Mt. Mitchel, in North Carolina, at an elevation 

 higher thaq Mt. Washington, one beholds the worst timber 

 slash in Eastern America, with the black crisp soil where 

 fires have swept over thousands of acres. Pitiable and 

 damnable are the adjectives most appropriate; pitiable 

 because the country has not seen the facts, and damnable 

 because the results are everlasting. 



The American Forestry Association has supported the 

 Weeks Law first, last and all the time. It stood for the 

 original appropriation of eleven million dollars that was 

 passed by Congress and approved by President Taft in 

 191 1. It urged in 1916, the reappropriation of the three 

 million dollars that did not become available under the 

 first act. It favored action by the present Congress that 

 made an appropriation of $600,000 last July to continue 

 purchases for the current fiscal year. 



If the American people believe in this enterprise, now 

 is the time to say so in tones that Congress cannot fail 

 to understand. Nothing but a majority of votes in both 

 Houses of Congress will secure its continuation. 



TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE FARMER 



COMPARATIVELY little attention has been called 

 ^"* to the profiteering in timber which some small saw- 

 mill operators, owning chiefly portable or semi-portable 

 mills, have been practicing in this country. Reference is 

 made to their buying stumpage at low rates largely from 

 farm woodland owners. It is not a new form of taking 

 an undue profit. There is no way of telling what per- 

 centage of small operators practice it, but it would 

 seem that many of the operators in various sections 

 resort to it. The effect upon the honest operators is 

 obvious, it lays them open to suspicion, makes it more 

 difficult for them to do business with timber owners, 

 and puts them at a disadvantage financially. It is to their 

 interests, to the interests of farm woodland owners, and 

 in the interests of the practice of forestry in the United 

 States, that this profiteering be stopped. 



Standing timber on farms lends itself easily to profi- 

 teering, due in the main to three facts. 



The first is that, in the very nature of things, there 

 being so many variable factors, the value of stumpage 



can not be determined with the closeness of the value of 

 a calf or a crate of eggs. 



The second is due to the common methods of selling 

 it, by the lump sum for the tract, or at a stated price per 

 acre without estimate on the part of the owner. 



The third is the average farm woodland owner's un- 

 familiarity with the business of sawing and selling lumber 

 and other products, a business in itself. 



One cannot blame the sawmill man for buying as 

 cheaply as he can. The writer knows one firm which 

 never attempts to force down a farmer's price. This 

 particular firm was offered, and it purchased, several 

 million feet in well located small tracts in the last year 

 at about $6.00 per thousand feet on the stump. Quite 

 a proportion of this timber was second growth white 

 pine and white oak. It would have been cheap at twice 

 the figure paid. The attempt, however, to force down 

 figures by claiming a high percentage of the timber to be 

 defective when such is not the case, of grossly under stat- 

 ing the total amount of stumpage and assuring the owner 

 positively of the truth of the figures, of trying to "beat 



