WHYiTHE FARMS GROW POOR 

 Bed of Sill Washed Down from the Fields by Floods, and Deposited on River Bank, to be Removed by Dredging 



tically the entire country, has brought 

 its inevitable concomitant, a series of 

 forest fires unparalleled in their de- 

 structiveness. Stretching across the 

 continent from Minnesota to Maim-. 

 and reaching down the Atlantic sea- 

 board as far as New Jersey ; crowning 

 the hills and peaks of the Adirondack- 

 and the Catskills with smoke wreaths 

 and coronets of flame ; ravaging the 

 little remaining pine timber of \Yi scon- 

 sin and Michigan, and searing the hills 

 and valleys of Pennsylvania, the fires 

 have swept on their way, until a record 

 has been set for the summer of 1908 

 that for wide-spread destructiveness 

 has, perhaps, never been exceeded. 



Estimates by men high in authority 

 in the Forest Service, and by equally 

 distinguished authorities in other 

 branches of the government these es- 

 timates compiled from painstaking re- 

 ports mac!e by agents right on the spot 

 -for the week of September 21 and 

 the preceding week, placed the damage 

 caused by these fires at $1,000,000 per 

 day. A million a day going up in the 

 smoke from our burning forests! If 

 556 



this amount of destruction was wrought 

 by flames in any city in the land, the 

 newspapers of the whole country would 

 herald the fact under double-column 

 headings! But in the case of the for- 

 est fires the newspapers print the story 

 as a routine item of news ; if the fires 

 continue, as they have continued 

 throughout this season, the news be- 

 comes more and more unimportant with 

 each day, the items grow smaller and 

 appear on inside pages, until finally the 

 news is not considered worthy of pub- 

 lication at all. Hut the destruction con- 

 tinues; each day a million dollars wortli 

 of forests from our already rapidly di- 

 minished timber resources go up in 

 smoke ; and each day the whole nation 

 every man woman, and child in the 

 United States is further improver- 

 ished ! 



In the two weeks ending September 

 22, half a score or more of towns and 

 villages were totally destroyed by 

 flames from the burning forests! Towns 

 in Minnesota: towns in northern Mich- 

 igan ; towns in Wisconsin ; towns in 

 Maine: in the Adirondacks, and in 



