49 INJURY BY SMELTER WASTES. 
A trip was made-up Foster Creek for about 5 miles to a point 
approximately 124 miles from the smelter. For the first 3 miles, 
on the east side of the creek, practically all of the red firs were dead 
or dying. Evidences of fires about twenty, twenty-three, and fifty 
years ago were found at various points in this territory, but it was 
evident that they were not responsible for the injury to the red firs 
for the following reasons: (1) The red firs were still dying in the 
summer of 1908, at least twenty years after any fire, and (2) the 
small branches remained on the dead trees, which would not have 
been the case if they had been killed twenty years before. The fire 
of fifty years previous evidently killed the lodgepole pines and only 
scarred the red firs, showing that if a fire was just intense enough to 
kill the former, it would probably only injure the latter. This, of 
course, is largely due to the greater thickness of the red fir bark. 
From the end of the third to the end of the fifth mile Foster Creek 
Canyon was evidently visited by a fire approximately twenty-two 
years ago, which killed practically all of the timber. | 
A careful examination was made of the mountain, which stands 
between Warm Springs and Foster creeks. This mountain is ap- 
proximately in secs. 7, 17, and 18, T. 5 N., R. 12 W., and is about 124 
miles from the smelter. About twenty-two years ago the same fire 
which ran across the northern end of the Foster Creek basin also ran 
up the western slope of this mountain, badly burning a strip about 
200 yards wide (all red firs and lodgepole pines being killed in this 
narrow path), and then passed down the eastern slope of the moun- 
tain into Foster Creek basin. This.fire spread, though with less 
intensity, over most of the remaining sections of the mountain, and 
scarred the timber, but did not kill it. The marks of fires which 
occurred approximately fifty and a hundred years ago were also noted 
at various points on the mountain. The lodgepole pines all over this 
mountain appeared to be uninjured, except on the narrow strip pre- 
viously mentioned. The red firs were nearly all either dead or badly 
injured. <A large part of the northern slope of the mountain was 
entirely untouched by fire, and yet practically all the red firs were dead 
or dying. On the western slope the red firs were severely injured, 
but not so badly as on the eastern slope. On the western slope they 
were dying, but on the eastern slope nearly all were dead. The con- 
clusion that it was not fire that killed most of these red firs, but some 
cause acting during the summer of 1908, when this mountain was 
investigated, is reached for the following reasons: (1) At the north 
end of the mountain, where there had been no fire, the red firs were 
dead and dying; (2) the small branches remaining on large numbers 
of the dead trees showed that they could not have been killed more 
than eight or ten years before the inspection was made, entirely too 
late to be attributed to the fire of twenty-two years previous; (3) the 
