Forests of Canada. *73 



importance, and it was willingly sacrified in the interests of 

 the settler, who came to regard it as his natural enemy. The 

 time has come when we must change all this. In the absence 

 of forest guardians and proper regulations, lumbermen have 

 often to submit to a species of blackmail from discharged 

 employees and pretending settlers in order to keep them off 

 their limits. Indians sometimes burn the forests off each 

 other's hunting-grounds from motives of revenge, but as a 

 rule the fires which they start are from carelessness or indif- 

 ference. When cautioned in a friendly way, they are willing 

 to exercise greater care, and the beneficial effects of this 

 course are already manifest in the region between Lake 

 Winnipeg and Hudson Bay, where the author had remon- 

 strated with them on the subject. He suggests that the 

 annuities which they receive from Government be withheld 

 as a punishment for burning the woods, or that a bounty be 

 paid each year that no fires occur. In this way the Indian 

 chiefs and headmen may be made the most efficient and 

 earnest forest guardians we could possibly have. 



Fires are not so liable to run in forests of full-grown white 

 and red pines, such as those of southern Ontario, which 

 have suffered comparatively little from this cause, but have 

 now been mostly cut down and utilized by the lumbermen. 

 Hai'dwood forests are seldom burnt to any great extent, 

 except where the soil is shallow and becomes parched in 

 summer, as, for instance, on the flat limestone rocks of Grand 

 Manitoulin Island and the Indian peninsula of Lake Huron, 

 through much of which fires have run, burning the vegetable 

 mould and killing the roots, thus causing the trees to fall 

 over even before they have decayed. Hence the term "fire- 

 falls " applied in such cases. 



If we had educated and intelligent conservators of forests 

 in Canada, appointed by the Government, their duties, in 

 addition to preventing the destruction of the timber by fire 

 and otherwise, might be directed to promoting the growth 

 of existing timber, encouraging transplanting, the intro- 

 duction of foreign trees which might grow in this country, 

 the dissemination of information on practical forestry, etc., 

 investigating the causes of diseases among trees, directing 



