138 SURVEYS OF FC^REST RESERVES. 



In connection with the relation of forest fires and sheep grazing it 

 was necessary to examine with the greatest care into the causes of 

 forest fires. 



EAELY FOREST FIRES. 



Historically considered, we must look to the Indians as the first 

 manipulators of forest fires in this region. It is a clearly established 

 fact, based on observation, that the Indians of the Willamette Valley, 

 in western Oregon, were accustomed, before the advent of white men in 

 that region to as late a period as the early forties, to set fire to the 

 grass for the purpose of burning it off. Their object ia doing this is 

 supposed to have been chiefly (1) to cause a fresh growth of grass in 

 the autumn upon which enormous quantities of wild fowl descended to 

 feed, particularly geese, and (2) for the purpose of killing and roasting 

 for food the great quantities of grasshoppers that in certain years fed 

 upon the grass. Similar uses of fire by the aborigines in other parts of 

 the western United States have been recorded, by which they were 

 enabled to keep certain large areas denuded of timber. Upon the ces- 

 sation of these fires, by reason of the intervention of white settlers, 

 the timber has begun again to encroach upon such areas, and in the 

 Willamette Valley, for example, we now see frequent groves of Douglas 

 spruce and white fir about fifty years of age, of remarkably uniform 

 and symmetrical growth, which have developed through their natural 

 seeding without human assistance. 



Just how many of the old burns in the Cascade Reserve are to be 

 attributed to the Indians it is impossible to say, but several fire glades 

 were seen which must have antedated by several decades the settlement 

 of the country by whites — fire glades in which the evidence of fire was 

 confined to pieces of charred wood that lay beneath the surface of the 

 ground, hardly showing the lines of the long-since rotten logs to which 

 they belonged. Such fire glades occur on the ridges south of Huckle- 

 berry Mountain, southwest of (Jrater Lake, which is well known to have 

 been a favorite resort of the aborigines for many generations. In gen- 

 eral, however, the number of fires of suflflcient age to be attributable to 

 this period is small. The Indians probably can not be accused of start- 

 ing fires to a large extent accidentally, or of setting fires indiscrimi- 

 nately, but it is undoubtedly true that at certain seasons it was their 

 custom to set fires in the mountains intentionally and systematically in 

 connection with their fall hunting excursions, when deer were driven 

 together and killed in large numbers. 



A second great source of fires in the Cascades was the early road- 

 buildiug across the mountains to connect eastern with western Oregon. 

 A broad band of fires usually accompanied such an enterprise. At that 

 time the amount of destruction this caused was not appreciated because 

 most of those who were connected with the building of these roads were 

 from the Eastern States where timber was abundant, and where the first 

 prerequisite of agricultural progress was to burn off timber in order to 

 clear the land for farming purposes. The details of an interesting 

 method of felling large trees of Douglas spruce {Pseudotsvga mucronafa) 

 were learned from some of the old inhabitants. The trees are large, 

 commonly 6 feet in diameter at maturity, and the cutting of them was 

 too expensive and diflScult a task. The method of felling the tree was 

 to bore a hole with a long augur diagonally downward to the heart of 

 the tree, and to bore another similar hole diagonally upward from the 

 base of the tree, connecting with the first. A live coal was then dropped 

 into the hole, the draft through the two augur holes causing the wood 



