1900. 



AMERICAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION. 



fornia, Oregon, Nevada and Washington. 

 The scope of the act was extended August 

 4, 1892, to all the public land States. It 

 resulted in bringing such lands into the 

 possession and under the control of a few 

 wealthy syndicates, saw-mill operators and 

 lumber dealers. 



Judicial rulings under these laws could 

 not be enforced because the laws them- 

 selves were impracticable. Section 2461 

 U. S. R. S., for instance, is so severely re- 

 strictive as to be a dead letter. Again, its 

 conflict with Section 4 of the Timber and 

 Stone Act, regarding penalties, renders 

 the latter law also ineffective. Under 

 Section 2461 the penalty for theft is not 

 less than triple the value of the timber re- 

 moved and imprisonment not exceeding 

 12 months, while for the same offense 

 under the later act the penalty is a fine of 

 not less than $100 nor more than $1,000, 

 without imprisonment. A glaring defect 

 of the Mineral Act was its compromise of 

 theft. It provided that in cases of prose- 

 cution under Section 2461 relief there- 

 from and from further liability might be 

 obtained by payment, at the rate of $2.50 

 per acre, for the land from which the 

 timber had been cut or removed. Such a 

 provision was virtually an invitation to un- 

 scrupulous lumbermen to take the chances 

 and cut their choice of public timber from 

 the designated lands. If they were de- 

 tected, compromise at $2.^0 per acre for 

 less than the timber was worth was a 

 mild punishment enough; and if they es- 

 caped, so much the better. Like the 

 earlier acts, the Mineral Act thus hastened 

 the waste of the public forests. 



The situation was further complicated 

 by the passage in iSSS of an act (25 Stat., 

 1 66) which provided yet another penalty 

 for the theft of public timber. By an act 

 known as the "Permit Act" (26 Stat. L., 

 1093), passed in 1891, residents of the 

 States of Colorado, Montana, Idaho, North 

 Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Ne- 

 vada, and Alaska, were authorized to ob- 

 tain permits from the Department of the 

 Interior to cut timber free .of cost from 

 mineral lands therein for purpose of sale 

 and traffic ; while miners, farmers, and 

 other bonafide residents, who had not a 



sufficient supply of wood on their lands or 

 claims for developing the same, or for fire 

 \vood, were permitted to procure the 

 needed timber from public lands without 

 a permit. February 13, 1893, New Mexico 

 and Arizona were also brought under this 

 act. 



V. THE TIMBER CULTURE LAWS. 



Beginning with an act passed in 1873, 

 Congress, aroused at length to a sense of 

 its own folly, enacted a series of laws 

 known collectively as the " Timber Cul- 

 ture Law." Broadly speaking, this law 

 was supplementary to the Homestead Law 

 and, like it, was intended to facilitate the 

 settlement and improvement of unoccupied 

 public lands. But it strove to offset the 

 fraud and the waste of timber that had re- 

 sulted from the Homestead Law T by pro- 

 visions, how r ever, which in their turn failed, 

 from their impracticable nature and want 

 of safeguards, to effect that end. 



The Timber Culture Law gave lands to 

 settlers on the condition that a specified 

 proportion of their claims, within a fixed 

 period, should be planted and cultivated to 

 certain varieties of forest trees. The orig- 

 inal law was scarcely passed before the need 

 of amendment became only too manifest. 

 Settlers were required to do so much that, 

 even when disposed to carry out the terms 

 of the act, they found compliance impos- 

 sible. Again, trees could only be planted 

 at a distance from one another that was 

 far too great to result in the creation of 

 forest conditions according to the object of 

 the law. Among further difficulties was 

 the want of knowledge both on the part of 

 government and on the part of the planter 

 as to a right choice of trees for local con- 

 ditions and their proper care. And when, 

 soon after, it became law that the settler 

 who had taken out a "tree claim" might 

 commute it into an ordinary Homestead 

 entry, he very commonly took this channel 

 of escape between the Scylla of the law 

 and the Charybdis of failure. Conse- 

 quently, though several million trees were 

 set out in Kansas and Nebraska alone, and 

 though great number of trees still grow in 

 the Prairie States as the result of this law, 

 yet true forest conditions were nowhere 



