29 
sheep-grazing districts, the subject is one of such far-reaching effect 
on the welfare of a State and the communities of which it is made up, 
that to ascertain the causes of forest fires and to devise means for their 
prevention are pressing and fundamental necessities. As already 
stated, in our investigation the reserve was traversed from the southern 
to the northern end. I am confident that there does not exist in the 
whole reserve a township of forest land in some part of which forest 
fires have not occurred, and it was difficult to find even a single square 
mile in which the evidences of fire, recent or remote, were not present. 
We contemplated an estimate of the acreage of burned areas, but this 
plan for several reasons was necessarily abandoned. It is possible, 
therefore, to make only the general but no less positive statement that 
in addition to areas burned over with comparatively little damage to 
the commercial timber, the reserve contains hundreds of thousands of 
acres on which the timber has been wholly destroyed by fire. 
Especial attention was paid in our field examination to the subject of 
forest fires. Whenever possible we ascended the highest peaks and 
from them examined the adjacent country for the purpose of ascertain- 
ing the location of forest fires. In this way we saw about 40 fires in 
various parts of the reserve, some of them large, most of them small. 
The effect of fires upon different types of timber has already been 
described. (See pages 19 and 20.) 
In connection with the relation of forest fires to sheep grazing it 
was necessary to examine with the greatest care into the causes of 
forest fires. 
EARLY FOREST FIRES. 
Historically considered, we must look to the Indians as the first 
manipulators of forest fires in this region. It is a clearly established 
fact, based on observation, that the Indians of the Willamette Valley in 
western Oregon were accustomed before the advent of white men in 
that region, to as late a period as the early forties, to set fire to the 
grass for the purpose of burning it off. Their object in doing this is 
Supposed to have been chiefly (1) to cause a fresh growth of grass in 
the autumn, upon which enormous quantities of wild fowl descended to 
feed, particularly geese, and (2) for the purpose of killing and roasting 
for food the great quantities of grasshoppers that in certain years fed 
upon the grass. Similar uses of fire by the aborigines in other parts of 
the western United States have been recorded by which they were 
enabled to keep certain large areas denuded of timber. Upon the ces- 
sation of these fires, by reason of the intervention of white settlers, the 
timber has begun again to encroach upon such areas, and in the Willa- 
mette Valley, for example, we now see frequent groves of Douglas 
spruce (Pseudotsuga mucronata) and white fir (Abies grandis) about 
fifty years of age, of remarkably uniform and symmetrical growth, 
which have developed through their natural seeding without human 
— assistance, 
