FOREST FIRES. 283 



railroads, a great many from carelessness, and some from 

 maliciousness. I was at Montreal last August, at the 

 meeting of the American Forestry Congress, where there 

 were gentlemen from various p.irts of the United States and 

 Canada (the organization including members from Canada 

 a-i well as the United States) ; a great many essays were 

 read, and a great many things said, by men who had ample 

 opportunities for observation in regard to this matter. 

 There was one man who said he was cutting lumber near 

 the head-waters of the Ottawa River, near the divide or 

 water-shed between the St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay 

 basins. He was operating on a tract of land fifty miles 

 square. He pays a royalty or stumpage to the government. 

 He said this tribute to the government was a source of 

 revenue of millions of dollars, in the aggregate on all the 

 forest lands which were called the Crown lands. He said 

 that he was satisfied that the loss caused by the destruction 

 of timber by fire in Canada was ten times more than the loss 

 by the legitimate cutting of timber. He said: "There is 

 no comparison ; we cannot tell the extent of the destruction 

 by fire." 



This is not a new thing. Before lumber had any value, 

 fires swept through the country, and destroyed immense 

 tracts of forest. In 1880, I was among the Rocky Moun- 

 tains in Colorado, at the same time Mr. Sargent was there, 

 although not in his party. He made extensive surveys, 

 that, no doubt led to the ideas presented in his paper. At 

 some points, as far as the eye could distinguish anything, 

 nine-tenths of the forest had been burned over within 

 comparatively few years. There were some dead standing 

 trees, and much fallen timber, but generally nothing but 

 rocks remained, where it did not seem that trees could grow 

 again. But nature is persevering, and young pines and 

 spruce w^ere again covering the rocks. I was on the east- 

 ern side of the Rocky Mountains, and, in company with 

 others, ascended Pike's Peak, which is 14,345 feet high, — 

 more than 8,000 feet higher than Mt. Washington in New 

 Hampshire. Timber grows up these mountain slopes more 

 than 12,000 feet above the sea-level. We passed through 

 miics of timber that fire had been through within a few 



