Forestry Notes. 



71 



intended to protect the head-waters of the Sacramento and its 

 tributaries and the Klamath and its tributaries. Of these re- 

 serves the Modoc and the Warner Mountains reserves are in the 

 northeastern part of the State, the Klamath and Trinity reserves 

 cover portions of the watershed of these rivers respectively, while 

 the Plumas and Lassen Peak reserves occupy the northern ex- 

 tension of the Sierra Nevada and the southern part of the grea<- 

 lava region in Plumas and Lassen counties. A seventh, the Mt. 

 Shasta Forest Reserve, twelve townships from Mt. Shasta south- 

 westward, was created in October, 1905. The boundaries of these 

 reserves " have been drawn so as to include only lands suited to 

 forest reserve purposes." The bitter opposition in 1902 to the 

 proposed reserves will be recalled perhaps. It was apparently 

 local, but was probably wholly due to the paid agents of certain 

 lumber interests foreign to California, which were interrupted 

 in their plans, already well advanced, for rapidly monopolizing 

 the valuable stands of timber in Northern California through 

 misuse of our several unfortunate land laws. The movement 

 of capital from the exhausted white-pine land of Minnesota to 

 Northern California was begun as early as 1899. The writer, 

 who had traveled through these forests in that year, endeavored 

 to interest the Interior Department in a reservation of the public 

 forest domain from Nevada County northward to include the 

 head-waters of all the Sacramento tributaries. A resolution to 

 that elfect was accepted and adopted in the meeting of the 

 American Forestry Association, which met at Los Angeles that 

 year, but the right time to check the vast amount of fraudulent 

 acquirement of these lands by Eastern lumbermen passed with- 

 out anj' movement on the part of Binger Hermann, then Com- 

 missioner of the General Land Ottice, now under indictment for 

 conspiracy with minor land speculators to defraud the United 

 States ; and it is difficult to see how any of the forest land now 

 included in at least four of the Northern California reserves 

 could have been saved from private greed, except for the oppor- 

 tune interest and action of President Roosevelt in 1902. That 

 these private interests have attained a powerful hold on North- 

 ern California, and that their influence is a thing to be con- 

 stantly reckoned with, is evidenced by the protest of State 

 Mineralogist Aubury to the General Land Office, published in 

 December, 1905, stating that an effort is now being made at Wash- 

 ington, through the agents of these few land monopolists, to have 

 seven townships segregated from the reserve in Plumas County. 

 It also states that the work of acquiring an enormous amount of 

 small holdings, evidently for timber purposes, through a fraudu- 

 lent use of the placer-mining laws is still being carried forward 

 by an old offender, H. H. Yard. As an illustration of the extent 



