Even a forest fire rias something good about it. The greatest 

 enemy of the bankrupt land area, second or even equal to the hurry-up 

 lumber operator, has been fire; but fire also has been the servant 

 of the farmer in clearing, and it has been the agency of nature in 

 helping restock denuded lands. Fire that may destroy the seed of the 

 remnant, solitary white pine, cooks the hard cone of the jack pine, 

 pops out the seed and aids that species, for one, to propagate. 



THE JACK PINE'S DAY. 



This fire susceptibility of the white pine and fire resistance of the 

 jack pine helps to account for the spread of the latter humbler and 

 less valuable species on areas where once the majestic White pine 

 flourished. But the once despised jack pine is not so despicable nowa- 

 days. Timber shortage and famine prices have brought him well for- 

 ward in the esteem of men who once anathematized him. 



Jack Pine on white pine land is a symptom of what the fires do to 

 the soil. They do more than that. Just what, let Prof. Roth tell: 



"Fires destroy the mulch of leaves, twigs and rotting limbs. The 

 mulch varies from 500 pounds an acre in good jack pine to 2,000 

 pounds of leaves alone in a forest of beech and maple. The leaf fall 

 of 1919 is, say, a ton per acre in a good stand. This is rotted and 

 turned to leaf mold by 1923; the leaf mold of 1920, '21 and '22 mean- 

 time covering the ground as a layer of dead leaves, the more recent 

 firm and dry on top. Insects, fungi, bacteria and worms are all at 

 work and are necessary to good fertile soil. A heavy fire burns all 

 this, - often two to four inches down. 



WOULD COST $10 AN ACRE. 



"If this land were farmed at once the ashes would be too deep on 

 much land, but on the whole would be of some help; but the mulch, 

 the mold and the living things necessary to make this leaf mold are 

 all gone. It would cost not less than $10 an acre to get this land back 

 where it was, only as a good beginning; and it would take a number 

 of years. The poorer the land the harder, the slower the recovery." 



Here the professor, without having it exactly in mind, is talking 

 about that million-acre estate of We, Us & Co. Ours is the poor land 

 poorest of all, the land "slowest to recover" from fire damage. We 

 must remember this when we come to take account of what the 

 administrators of our property are doing to protect us from fire and 

 to restock our land. 



When removal of the forest and the sawmills gave the average 

 lumber town of North Michigan a jolt backwards, beginning along 

 in the early '90s and continuing down to today; when fires came up 

 through the slashings and the wasted lands that had grown up to 

 scrub oak and poplar; and when they burned up many towns and 

 drove their populations into the lakes or sent them flying, scorched 

 and half naked, over the warped rails of the railroads, seeking for the 

 safety they didn't always find, the fires had not done all their damage. 

 Oscoda, in 1911, and Metz, five years before that, were tragedies so 

 great that nobody can forget. A fugitive flat-car load of people, 

 mostly women and children, burned to death near Metz. A steamer 

 happening along just save.d Oscoda's people, crowded on a wharf, while 

 the town burned up. These are only episodes in a long tale of terror. 



FERTILITY BURNED OUT. 



But, more than this, these fires burned out the fertility of the land. 

 Towns have dwindled, railroad spurs been taken up, homesteads 



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