340 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



the denuded hills around their mills, and they, 

 too, are asking for protection of forests, at least 

 against fire. The slow-going, unthrifty farmers, 

 also, are beginning to realize that when the rim- 

 ber is stripped from the mountains the irrigating 

 streams dry up in summer, and are destructive in 

 winter ; that soil, scenery, and everything slips 

 off with the trees : so of course they are coming 

 into the ranks of tree-friends. 



Of all the magnificent coniferous forests 

 around the Great Lakes, once the property of 

 the United States, scarcely any belong to it now. 

 They have disappeared in lumber and smoke, 

 mostly smoke, and the government got not one 

 cent for them ; onlv the land thev were growing- 

 on was considered valuable, and two and a half 

 dollars an acre was charged for it. Here and 

 there in the Southern States there are still con- 

 siderable areas of timbered government land, but 

 these are comparatively unimportant. Only the 

 forests of the West are significant in size and 

 value, and these, although still great, are rapidly 

 vanishing. Last summer, of the unrivaled red- 

 wood forests of the Pacific Coast Range, the 

 L T nited States Forestry Commission could not 

 find a single quarter-section that remained in the 

 hands of the government. 1 



1 The State of California recently appropriated two hundred and 

 fifty thousand dollars to buy a block of redwood land near Santa 

 Cruz for a state park. A much larger national park should be made 

 in Humboldt or Mendocino county. 



