342 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



for construction purposes ; and they have taken 

 it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times 

 more than they have used, mostly by allowing 

 fires to run in the woods. The settlement laws, 

 under which a settler may enter lands valuable for 

 timber as well as for agriculture, furnish another 

 means of obtaining title to public timber. 



With the exception of the timber culture act, 

 under which, in consideration of planting a few 

 acres of seedlings, settlers on the treeless plains 

 got 160 acres each, the above is the only legisla- 

 tion aiming to protect and promote the planting 

 of forests. In no other way than under some 

 one of these laws can a citizen of the United 

 States make any use of the public forests. To 

 show the results of the timber-planting act, it 

 need only be stated that of the thirty-eight mil- 

 lion acres entered under it, less than one million 

 acres have been patented. This means that less 

 than fifty thousand acres have been planted with 

 stunted, woebegone, almost hopeless sprouts of 

 trees, while at the same time the government has 

 allowed millions of acres of the grandest forest 

 trees to be stolen or destroyed, or sold for nothing. 

 Under the act of June 3, 1878, settlers in Col- 

 orado and the Territories were allowed to cut tim- 

 ber for mining and educational purposes from 

 mineral land, which in the practical West means 

 both cutting and burning anywhere and every- 

 where, for any purpose, on any sort of public land. 



