8 Miscellaneous Circular 19, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture. 
of all the values which the forest possesses. *The irrigation water, 
the very life blood of the region, depends upon the proper covering 
of the watersheds. Destroy:the forest, and the irrigated farming, 
together with the visible timber and forage, is destroyed. 
TIMBER VALUES DESTROYED. 
The difficulty of putting a value in dollars and cents upon the tim- 
ber destroyed arises partly from the fact that some of the timber 
is remote and has little present commercial value. Nevertheless, it 
will all have value at some time, and a high value at that, because a 
period of timber shortage is approaching. 
Timber is being sold for about $3 per thousand feet. It does not, 
therefore, seem out of the way to place a value of about $1.25 per 
thousand feet on the timber which is annually destroyed by fire. 
Fig. 5.— Desolation follows fire. 
Looking over the records for the past 15 years it is seen that forest 
fires in this region have destroyed practically 600,000,000 feet of 
timber. This is as much timber as there is on some of the national 
forests, and it means a tremendous loss both now and for the future. 
The value of this timber amounts to about $750,000 at the conserva- 
tive figure of $1.25 per thousand feet. 
At the same time that present timber values are being destroyed 
the fires are wiping out vast amounts of reproduction, the little trees 
that would some day have made good stands of timber for the people 
of the future, who will probably need timber fully as much, and 
perhaps more than we do now. What people will be paying for it in 
a hundred years can not be estimated, and therefore it is impossible 
(o say What it is worth now. Even if timber were estimated to be no 
more valuable then than it is now, we find that forest fires during the 
last 15 years have destroyed reproduction valued at $500,000. 
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