[12 J 



In the national report on sheep, to which I have referred, will be found 

 a letter of J. Parker Whitney, another kind of Boston man, who sent his 

 brother to Australia in 1855 and bought 350 such sheep, at 150.00 per head. 

 He succeeded in getting 120 of them to California, which he subsequently 

 estimated as paying him $1,000,000. They induced him to buy 20,000 acres 

 of the then cheap land in Placer county, California, which. he was selling 

 in small parcels in 1892 at $150 to |300 per acre, for peach orchards. This 

 was near JRocklin, from which district he was the first man to send a train 

 load of peaches east of the Rockies, and where I saw the Central Pacific 

 railroad company, and private parties clearing lands of the pine and other 

 scrub which had grown up on closely grazed lands within the past twenty- 

 five years, just as it has done in Western Oregon. 



The estimated area of forest land in Oregon has been considered at 

 about 16,000,000 acres in the entire state. Dr. J. E. Cardwell, commissioner 

 at large of the State Board of Horticulture, considering the economical 

 values of the coniferous growth of commercial value, estimated it at 16,000 

 square miles, or 10,000,000 acres, in 1893. This estimate Mr. A. W. Ham- 

 mond, of Wimer, Oregon, vice-president of the American Forestry Asso- 

 ciation, adopted in his report to that body in 1896. He puts "the merchant- 

 able timber on the latter area at 400,000,000,000 feet, board measure." He 

 says : " The annual out-put is now estimated at about 200,000,000 feet ; but 

 even this amount must be insignificant in comparison with the amount an- 

 nually decaying and in a sense going to waste in the forests through natural 

 causes. In many places, even about the settlements, one will see numbers 

 of the very largest and handsomest pine trees — in every respect magnifi- 

 cent specimens — 200 to 250 years old and more, dead and dying, that must 

 go to waste because of the entire absence of means of converting them into 

 lumber. 



"The annual output, in fact, represents an amount equal to about 10 per 

 cent, only of the annual growth. Whence it follows ( if the forest remains 

 stationary) that an amount equal to 90 per cent, of this new growth is an- 

 nually going to waste. This means, in other words, that if the mature 

 timber could be culled annually from the forests of this state, they could 

 be made to yield annually about 2,000,000,000 feet, board measurement, 

 without detriment." 



I quote a little farther from Mr. Hammond to show how impractical 

 a good man can be. He says: " In the opinion of the writer, what is 

 most needed here just now is, first, some efficient regulation in regard to 

 forest fires; second, proper measures to prevent the gobbling up of large 

 tracts of the most valuable portions of forests by private corporations where 

 lumbering operations are liable to be carried on without reference to future 

 needs or to future conditions of the country. The general sentiment here 

 is yet far from being sufficiently alive on this important subject. So many 



