YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 



GAME LAWS FOR WILD FLOWERS 



Travelers from the East frequently exclaim and gasp 

 over the abundance of flowers they find in Yellowstone Park 

 and other mountain sanctuaries of the West — roadsides lined 

 with forget-me-nots, whole fields of fringed gentians, moun- 

 tain-sides solidly massed with lupines and wild sunflowers. 

 The flowers seem almost miraculous, supernatural, they are 

 so many and so beautiful. 



Yet this beauty is only that of any natural, virgin terri- 

 tory that has never known the plow, or careless and de- 

 structive lumbering, or grazing animals other than its nat- 

 ural population of deer and elk. What visitors from the 

 older parts of the country seem not to realize is that in their 

 great-grandfathers' day the land where their cities now 

 spread bore just such a covering of beautiful and interesting 

 plant life as this that they now cross half a continent to see; 

 that once on a time any random acre in the Ohio Valley, or 

 the Atlantic States, or New England would not have suffered 

 by comparison with any acre in the Rocky Mountains. 



It was, of course, only natural and indeed inevitable that 

 this condition should pass. A crowded population cannot live 

 on wild-flowers; cows and plows, and even factory chimneys, 

 are very necessary, and good in their kind. The mischief 

 arises when men let their material desires crowd down the 

 other things that make them men. He who is no longer 

 willing to "sell one loaf to buy white hyacinths for his soul" 

 is no longer quite human. Where commercial exploitation is 

 wiping out the last remnants of the natural beauty-spots 

 civilization has begun to back-track. 



The danger of such a retrogression has become a very 

 real one within the past few years in many of our older 

 settled states. In one place, quarrying interests threaten the 

 last stand of an almost extinct fern; in another, lumbermen 

 have cut the best trees In a forest supposedly reserved for 



