ot 
forest fires in this region increase proportionately to the increase of 
human occupancy, whether the occupants are sheep herders, campers, 
road builders, prospectors, or any other class of men. 
Travelers, campers, and Indians.—It will be of interest to give a 
somewhat detailed account of the causes of the fires observed by our 
party in the course of its travels through the mountains. The great- 
est number of fires should be attributed to the class of people known as 
“travelers,” families without a definite place of residence, usually illit- 
erate and poor, who journey about in covered wagons from one State 
to another or from one portion of a State to another, grazing their 
horses on the public lands and occasionally by an odd job earning a 
little money with which to buy provisions. Repeatedly camp fires were 
seen which had been left by these people and which under suitable con- 
ditions might have caused disastrous forest fires. At the time of year 
when the forest litter and the underbrush are dry a strong wind sud- 
denly springing up very frequently causes one of these abandoned 
camp fires to develop into a highly destructive agency. 
It is clear that a very large majority of the fires in the Cascade for- 
ests are due to carelessness rather than to maliciousness, and the 
efforts of the Interior Department must undoubtedly be chiefly directed 
rather toward preventing carelessness in handling fires than toward 
the detection of malicious fire setters. From the people who showed a 
willingness to give information as to the causes of fires it was extremely 
rare to learn of a case in which a fire had been known to be set mali- 
ciously, though fires known to have been due to carelessness were mat- 
ters of every-day comment. 
Camping parties, particuiarly those made up of young and inexperi- 
enced people from towns, are a fertile source of forest fires. These 
parties commonly go into the woods for a summer outing, often making 
the chief object of their pleasure the hunting and fishing afforded by 
the region. Some of these parties are made up of young men who go 
into the woods for the special purpose of hunting, but who have little 
experience in woodcraft and no knowledge of the proper method of 
handling a camp fire. They are often referred to as hunters, but it is 
known that real hunters of experience and that old campers of experi- 
ence are extremely careful in these matters. Perhaps the designation 
‘alleged hunters” applied to them by an old rancher and woodsman 
of eastern Oregon will sufficiently distinguish them from real hunters. 
The Indians from the.two Indian reservations at the east base of the 
mountains, the Klamath Reservation and the Warm Springs Reserva- 
tion, still go into the mountains in the autumn to pick huckleberries 
and to hunt. Information was given of the most diametrically opposite. 
character regarding these Indians with reference to forest fires, it being 
stated by some that the Indians were invariably careful to put out a 
fire before leaving, by others that they set fires indiscriminately. There 
was little opportunity to learn definitely how many fires should be 
