EDITORIALS 



Shall Sheep Powerful influence will be brought to bear this winter in 

 Despoil an effort to have the national parks thrown open to sheep 



National grazing. War pressure and the necessity for additional 

 Parks?* mutton and wool will be urged as the excuse for this ad- 

 ditional entering wedge. But if these natural wonder- 

 lands are ever again invaded by the "hoofed locusts," the fable of the 

 camel and the Arab's tent will be repeated. Once allowed to enter, 

 these destructive agencies will hold on like grim death, even when the 

 asserted need is over. It took the courage and foresight of a John Muir 

 and years of effort to "drive these money changers out of the temple," 

 and no man was ever better qualified to judge the damage these wander- 

 ing hordes did to the wild gardens of the Sierra and other mountain 

 parklands. He accompanied a band of sheep on his first trip into the 

 Sierra, and in all his wanderings was impressed with the desert-like de- 

 struction they left in their wake. To use his own words : 



In the summer of 1889, I took one of the editors of the Century 

 Magazine out for a walk in Yosemite . . . and when we were 

 camped one day at the Big Tuolumne Meadows, my friend said, 

 "Where are all these wonderful gardens you wrote so much 

 about ?" And I had to confess — woe's me — that uncountable sheep 

 had eaten and trampled them out of existence. 



The axe is not yet at the root of every tree, but the sheep is, or 

 was before the national parks were established . . . the sheep 

 consume every green leaf, not sparing even the young conifers, 

 when they are in a starving condition from crowding, and they 

 rake and dibble the loose soil of the mountain sides for the spring 

 floods to wash away, and thus at last leave the ground barren. 



And to think that the sheep should be allowed in these lily 

 meadows ! after how many centuries of Nature's care planting and 

 watering them, tucking the bulbs in snugly below the winter frost, 

 shading the tender shoots with clouds drawn above them like cur- 

 tains, pouring refreshing rain, making them perfect in beauty, and 

 keeping them safe by a thousand miracles. . . . 



A few years later he wrote : 



On this ramble I was careful to note the results of the protec- 

 tion the region had enjoyed as a park under the care of the Fed- 

 eral Government. . . . When I had last seen the Yosemite Na- 

 tional Park region, the face of the landscape in general was brok- 

 en and wasted, like a beautiful human countenance destroyed by 

 some dreadful disease. Now it is blooming again as one general 

 garden, in which beauty for ashes has been granted in fine wild 

 measure. . . . 



* The National Park Service has opened the parks to a limited number of cattle. 

 While the necessity for even this is to be regretted, no permanent harm can result 

 if the numbers are restricted, for cattle are not nearly so destructive to vegetation 

 as sheep. 



