30 
Just how many of the old burns in the Cascade reserve are to be 
attributed to the Indians it is impossible to say, but several fire- 
elades were seen which must have antedated by several decades the 
settlement of the country by whites, fire-glades in which the evi- 
dence of fire was confined to pieces of charred wood that lay beneath 
the surface of the ground, hardly showing the lines of the long-since 
rotten, logs to which they belonged. Such fire-glades occur on the 
ridges south of Huckleberry Mountain, southwest of Crater Lake, which 
is well known to have been a favorite resort of the aborigines for many 
generations. In general, however, the number of fires of sufficient age 
to be attributable to this period is small. The Indians probably can not 
be accused of starting fires to a large extent accidentally, or of setting ~ 
fires indiscriminately, but it is undoubtedly true that at certain seasons 
it was their custom to set fires in the mountains intentionally and sys- 
tematically, in connection with their fall hunting excursions, when deer 
were driven together and killed in large numbers. 
A second great source of fires in the Cascades was the early road 
building across the mountains to connect eastern with western Oregon. 
A broad band of fires usually accompanied such an enterprise. At that 
time the amount of destruction thus caused was not appreciated, because 
most of those who were connected with the building of these roads were 
from the Eastern States, where timber was abundant and where the first 
prerequisite of agricultural progress was to burn off timber in order 
to clear the land for farming purposes. The details of an interesting 
method of felling large trees of Douglas spruce (Pseudotsuga mucronata) 
were learned from some of the old inhabitants. The trees are large, 
commonly 6 feet in diameter at maturity, and to cut them was too 
expensive and difficult a task. The method of felling the tree was to 
bore a hole with a long auger diagonally downward to the heart of 
the tree and to bore another similar hole diagonally upward from the 
base of the tree, connecting with the first. A live coal was then dropped 
into the hole, and the draft through the two auger holes causing the 
wood to take fire, a roaring conflagration followed which burned away a 
large portion of the tree trunk. It was seldom that an axe had to be 
used to fell the tree, as the fire almost always ate away a sufficient por- 
tion of the trunk to cause it to fall. 
These early causes of fires, however, are now matters of history and 
need to be taken into consideration at the present time only in so far as 
they explain the origin of many of the old well-known burns that ante- 
date the era of sheep grazing in the Cascades. 
RECENT FIRES IN THE RANGES AND THEIR CAUSES. 
Of the fires of the present period it may be said in the first place 
that they are by no means confined to the sheep-grazing areas. Parts 
of the southern Cascades in which sheep have never been grazed were 
found to be riddled with fires, and in general it may be stated that 
