WORK ON A NATIONAL FOREST 



No, 12, Ex^rangers 



By CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, Supervisor, Sierra National Forest 



WHEN the social history of the 

 Forest Service comes to be 

 written with sympathy and 

 knowledge by some one of the real in- 

 siders, twenty years from now, the very 

 strangest and saddest of the chapters 

 will be crowded with stories of rangers 

 w r ho fell by the wayside and did not 

 manage to get up again who, in fact, 

 deserved no consideration because they 

 were weaklings and good-for-nothings. 



If a man is at home with his rangers, 

 and they are so with him, he will some- 

 times get glimpses of reasons behind 

 reasons for these failures, from the 

 stories told as one climbs a trail to the 

 snows and stars, or drops into the twi- 

 light of mighty deeps between walls 

 of granite, or sits by a mere spark of a 

 campfire islanded in an ocean of bil- 

 lowy tree-clad Sierras. 



"Everybody knows, but it isn't very 

 often that anybody tells," was the way 

 one ranger put the thing. "Why not? 

 Well, if a thing seems funny I tell it 

 in the end, if I have a chum to tell it 

 to, but sometimes it takes ten years to 

 get around to it.'' 



It was one of the oldest rangers in 

 the service who heard a youngster let- 

 ting himself go with too free and crit- 

 ical remarks about other rangers. After 

 supper, when the pipes were lit, he 

 asked me if I knew what had become 

 of the Yoacum family. They were 

 down in the valley somewhere, I said, 

 and having a hard time. The wife and 

 girls were working in a cannery, and 

 Yoacum was a railroad section hand. 

 The old ranger shook his head and med- 

 itated over. Jack Yoacum, the ex- 

 ranger. 



"Jack was a lovely talker, and so 

 was his father before him. I expect 



it had been that way for hundreds of 

 years in the Yoacum family. It wasn't 

 ill-natured talk, as a rule ; but it was 

 always kinder .theatrical, so to speak. 

 He'd hear a little and guess a little, 

 and bring lots of people into his stories. 

 When he got all through, or maybe the 

 next day, you'd feel that your confi- 

 dence in the people he'd brought in had 

 been a mite shaken by all sorts of little 

 hints. 



"I never could understand just how 

 Yoacum did it, and I couldn't make 

 up my mind whether it was done a-pur- 

 pose or mostly by accident. Still, if he 

 worked a week with a crew the men 

 just naturally pulled apart, and yet they 

 all stayed friendly with him. He was 

 always cheerful and active, taking hold 

 pretty well everywhere, and still he 

 managed to play smash with general 

 good feeling in a crowd. 



"No, it wasn't his wife. Never was 

 a better woman, nor better brought-up 

 children. It was just Jack Yoacum's 

 way. 



"I remember once the district ranger 

 went to a cattle convention, and took 

 Jack to teach him a little, I suppose. 

 It was a stiff and lively meeting, and 

 everybody had honest ideas and 

 threshed them out in public. Nobody 

 was hurt, and evervbodv felt better aft- 

 erward the stockmen understood the 

 regulations better and the rangers un- 

 derstood the troubles of the stockmen 

 better. But Jack didn't pay much at- 

 tention heard a little, misunderstood 

 a lot, and went home and gave the boys 

 little theatrical imitations of the worst 

 bits of the convention, till he got them 

 laughing fit to kill all except one big 

 young fellow. That one, the next day, 

 comes up to the district officer and says : 



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