10 MICHIGAN FORESTRY. i 



ment and the best of law must fail, if but for reason of poverty alone. 

 We might as well expect a few pioneer settlers to build macadam roads as to 

 inaugurate a proper system of forest protection. 



Abundance of timber and vast opportunities in many directions prevented 

 an early change in sentiment for the better. Although earnest agitation in 

 favor of forest protection and preservation began as early as the sixties, 

 we have still some states in which one man suffers imprisonment for stealing 

 $5, while another goes unpunished although guilty of destroying thousands 

 of dollars' worth of timber by fire. And, strange as it may seem, we have 

 even had the governor of one of our states veto a bill for forest protection on 

 the plea that he did not believe in the state spending money to protect the 

 property of private persons or corporations. And yet what do these people 

 pay taxes for if it is not primarily to get protection? -<9? 



Perhaps more as a matter of legal learning than of appreciation of the 

 forest, laws have been introduced in most states of the Union forbidding the 

 setting of forest fires; but even here we see the difference of opinion and ap- 

 preciation. In Minnesota the malicious setting of forests fires is punishable 

 by ten years in the penitentiary; in Wyoming by thirty days in jail. 



In keeping with the slow change in sentiment the forest fire laws of all of 

 our states have remained a dead letter. In spite of the losses amounting to 

 hundreds of millions of dollars ; in spite of catastrophies like the Hinckley, 

 the Phestigo and our Michigan forest fires, where hundreds of homes were 

 destroyed and hundreds of lives were sacrificed, there is not a single state in 

 the Union which has ever risen to the occasion and attempted with a will to 

 prevent a recurrence of these disasters or to provide for the proper protection 

 of forest property. If, during a strike, a factory, a mine or a few thousand 

 dollars' worth of property are in jeopardy, the sheriff is expec'ted to call out 

 help, and even the state is expected to respond by sending troops at great 

 expense to protect this property. But here in our state, in Wisconsin, in 

 Minnesota and other states we have hundreds of thousands of such 

 properties in the form of forests attacked by a far more serious enemy, an 

 enemy too certain to come regularly and properly announced by dry weather 

 and definite seasons, and yet did any state ever call out its troops to guard 

 against or to fight this enemy; to protect these properties; to give these tax- 

 payers anything for the millions of dollars which they have paid into the 

 coffers of town, county and state? No. Up to 1903 the state of Michigan 

 never spent one cent providing for the protection of its second greatest prop- 

 erty. Onljr eighteen out of the forty-five states of our Union have any system 

 of protection against forest fires. In a few it is left as an indefinite duty to 

 the sheriffs, in others to the game wardens; in a few it is made the duty of 

 those poor overworked and underpaid officers, the town supervisors; in 

 others it is an affair of the town constables, while only in a few states there 

 exists a definite system of fire wardens with a central head and a regulated, 

 although altogether insufficient, appropriation for doing the work. 



In our own state a man receiving a yearly salary of $500 is supposed to direct 

 the work of the fire wardens (town supervisors and extras, since one is to be 

 appointed for each surveyed township). This chief fire warden is to prepare 

 instructions for, inspect, direct and help in a work where today there is need 

 for active effort of 2,000 men, while tomorrow a good rain imay reduce the 

 danger to a point where 100 men can do all that is needed. Experience, 

 energy, administrative capacity to direct 800 men and more and full under- 

 standing of the country and the woods — all this the state supposes to get for 

 $500 a year! 



