1903 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



259 



Can you unmake man, whose first com- 

 mand was to subdue the earth ? Neither 

 can you head off the western pioneer, 

 the great American home builder, the 

 nation builder, that exceeds any pro- 

 duct of history. And what are you 

 after ? You want to run the common 

 people out of the woods in order that 

 the wild game may furnish sport for your 

 wealthy eastern dudes your "Ameri- 

 can aristocracy. " Pretexts without 

 number have been invented, but not 

 one scientific fact has been demonstrated 

 that favors the forest-reserve idea. 



The first reserve was established, and 

 what happened ? Fire followed fire. 

 Our frontiersmen said to themselves : 

 ' Dead timber makes better cabins than 

 green, and better firewood, too." So 

 they immediately set fire to the timber 

 and laid up stores enough for a lifetime ; 

 for your unlettered backwoodsman rea- 

 sons in this manner : ' ' Dead timber 

 don't make rain, nor does it make rivers 

 or shelter game; consequently I will be 

 allowed to take all I want of it." He 

 reasons that way, and whenever he is 

 shut out of the timber fires follow. The 

 more reserves we have, the more fires. 

 Out of seventeen big timber fires in 

 Colorado last summer the state official 

 who fought them says twelve were in 

 forest reserves and on the prohibited 

 state lands. The more strictly the laws 

 are enforced the bigger the fires. You 

 cannot govern western pioneers by Brit- 

 ish forest laws . They have the old spirit 

 of ' 76 yet, and the dumping of the cargo 

 of tea into Boston harbor is repeated in 

 the Rocky Mountains a dozen times a 

 a summer. 



A case happened last summer that 

 would never be published but for the 

 writer. A poor mountaineer, not even 

 owning his team, had two tons of hay 

 to feed his horses in the grassless forest 

 of a reserve while he got out dead poles 

 for neighboring ranchmen's fences. He 

 never imagined the reserve laws so 

 strict as to forbid such a harmless tres- 

 pass ; but he was arrested, and, as he 

 had nothing else in the world, his little 

 haystack was confiscated. What hap- 

 pened ? A fire that killed thousands of 

 acres of our best timber, and still other 

 fires that cost the government thou- 



sands of dollars to extinguish. The 

 government officials laid the blame on 

 the sheepmen, as usual. 



I prevented a worse fire about the 

 same time. Seven hundred and fifty 

 thousand acres of land were withdrawn 

 from settlement in order to create an- 

 other reserve. The little sawmills, 

 including my own, were shut down, 

 and the ' ' timber rats ' ' -the individual 

 timber workers, who get out posts, poles, 

 and firewood for themselves and the 

 other settlers -- were ordered off the 

 ground. I knew the people, and I 

 knew there would be war. Patrick 

 Henrys sprang up in every direction. 

 I had to do something, but instead of 

 imitating George III, I went to fighting 

 the reserve. One Irishman boldly told 

 a man he mistook for a government 

 official : "I can go up into the timber 

 and burn it all down and you cannot 

 stop me nor prove it on me." It is a 

 notorious fact -that the authorities have 

 never convicted a fire-bug. The people 

 will not testif)' against one another in a 

 common cause. I had to fight to save 

 the timber while the people were slyly 

 trying to induce me to move my mill 

 to other settings, so that they would not 

 injure a friend ; but I devoted all my 

 energies to moving the government, 

 and finally appealed directly to the 

 President. Roosevelt learned his stren- 

 uosity from our frontiersmen, and he 

 knows their love of liberty. When he 

 heard how the people felt about it, he 

 immediately vetoed the reserve. 



And yet these same despised and 

 abused ' ' timber rats ' have been pre- 

 serving our forests for years by extin- 

 guishing the fires started by the igno- 

 rance of camping tourists and eastern 

 sportsmen, who have no idea of the 

 high combustibility of green pine tim- 

 ber. They make the best of citizens 

 when it comes to popular government, 

 and the Rocky Mountains will furnish 

 all the William Tells the nation will 

 ever need. 



But the forest reserves will have to 

 go. The only reason they have not 

 already gone gone up in smoke is 

 that the Government is not enforcing 

 the reserve laws. Whenever it does 

 there is war. Nobody respects them. 



