30 
thing is not done to prevent it great injury will result to our timber interests. This 
is a subject that demands your attention, and some means must be devised for better 
enforcement of our laws. 
The State of.Oregon has passed a stringent fire law, the United 
States Government has passed a still more stringent fire law.' and 
although no criminal convictions have as yet been made under these 
acts, a knowledge that they would be made on sufficient evidence has 
been a strong factor in preventing fires from being set openly. Some 
notices of these laws have been posted at camping places through the 
forests, but not by any means to such an extent as is desirable. It is 
undoubtedly true, also, that.the popular accusation of sheepmen as fire 
setters has acted as an effective warning to them. They realize that 
unless the reasons for this accusation are removed there is a strong 
probability of their exclusion from the reserve, and this has led them 
both to be more careful with fires and to insist publicly that they are 
careful. 
The necessity of forest fires to the summer grazing industry has 
undoubtedly been overestimated both by the general public and fre- 
quently by stockmen themselves. A fire on an occupied range is 
objectionable, because it both burns up the forage and menaces the 
sheep herder’s camp, and often the sheep themselves. Cases are known 
in which a whole camp outfit and provisions have been burned by the 
accidental spreading of a fire while a herder was away from camp with 
his sheep, and other cases are known in which sheep have narrowly 
missed being caught and burned up in a forest fire. Besides this a 
single fire in the black-pine belt, for example, is followed after a few 
years by such a growth of saplings among fallen logs as to make it exceed- 
ingly difficult to drive a band of sheep through. If the logs are charred, 
the wool of the sheep becomes blackened by the charcoal dust to such 
an extent as to decrease the value of the wool often a cent a pound. 
Furthermore, as already stated under the head of the effect of fires in 
the upper portion of the yellow-pine belt, a fire is often followed by a 
dense growth of underbrush, which in itself prevents a growth of for age 
and makes traveling across such an area almost impossible. 
Against these statements, however, may be set the indisputable fact 
thata large amount of the grazing in the Cascades is upon old burns 
and that had these fires never occurred the available grazing area. 
would have been reduced by precisely that amount. 
The statement is often heard among sheep herders that close grazing 
iS a positive benefit to the forests, because it prevents the spread of 
forest fires by the removal of the leaves and branches that later make 
up the dry forest litter. That the forests may be kept clean in this 
manner is unquestionable, but it is equally unquestionable that this 
means of preventing forest fires would prove very costly in the end. 
This has already been discussed under the head of overgrazing. 
1 For the full text of these laws, see pages 37 and 38. 
