28 
and so the bands follow each other about, wearing out their sheep by 
overdriving, and leaving the range with their stock in a very exhausted 
condition. 
Over most of the reserve the actual damage to the young growth of 
timber is up to the present time confined chiefly to small areas, such 
as bedding grounds and routes of travel. In such situations the young 
pines, low enough to be reached and nibbled by the sheep, may be seen 
standing crooked and incapable of developing into sound trees of a 
healthy growth, while seedlings are trampled out entirely. The trouble 
from this source, however, is constantly misunderstood on both sides. 
I passed through an area of forest land on McKay Mountain, a western 
spur of the Blue Mountains lying in a direction northeast from Prine- 
ville, where sheep had been grazed for twenty-five years. ‘This is the 
oldest sheep range in Crook County. In these forests were frequent 
areas of young saplings of thoroughly healthy and symmetrical form 
which unquestionably had not received the slightest injury from sheep 
grazing. At the same time along the road were seen frequently the 
enarled and stunted pine saplings, which showed clearly what doubt- 
less occurred over wider areas where overgrazing and trampling were 
similarly carried to an extreme. | 
The forest conditions on this Blue Mountain spur might form the text 
for a long discussion on the effects of forest grazing, but there is room 
here for only a brief comment on a phase of the question that is likely 
to escape popular notice. Under ordinary conditions when an opening 
is made in a forest by the death and fall of an old tree, and more sun- 
light comes down to the ground, a dense growth of saplings springs up 
te fillthe opening. Thesaplings, competing with each other for the light, 
send up straight, tall trunks, and the one or two trees that finally excel 
the others and fill the opening possess tall, limbless trunks, which make 
the best of saw logs. If for any reason the seedlings in such an open- 
ing are injured so that only a few live and develop into saplings they 
grow into limb-covered trees, valueless for lumber. In this Blue Moun- 
tain spur the effect of sheep grazing will be seen in the next genera- 
tion of timber. On those areas in which for any reason the sheep have 
not killed the seedlings a good quality of timber can be cut, while those 
areas on which most of the seedlings are now being tramped out every 
year will bear trees but not lumber. 
FOREST FIRES IN THE CASCADE RESERVE. 
Whatever may be the amount of damage due thus far to overgrazing, 
the popular mind has associated with the forest grazing of sheep, if 
not distinetly as an effect, certainly as a necessary accompaniment, a 
kind of forest damage immeasurably more disastrous up to the present 
time than overgrazing, and now alinost universally recognized as a 
public calamity, namely, forest fires. Without reference to the truth 
or falsity of this popular belief regarding the cause of forest fires in 
ae we 
