March, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
177 
many people, and to the destruction of no 
other existing industry. The game is 
gone from the Cumberlands—it is not now 
worth bothering about. But the introduc¬ 
tion of sheep would save hundreds of 
thousands of human beings. Do we find 
sheep there? No. We Americans find 
them on the forest reserves around the 
great game refuge, where of all places in 
the world they are most dangerous and de¬ 
structive. 
The Cumberlands offer summer and win¬ 
ter range almost in one. In the greater 
part of that country sheep would not need 
to be fed more than a month—sometimes 
they never are fed at all. The mountain 
sides are rich in a way—not suitable for 
corn fields, as they have been employed for 
a century or more, but quite suitable for 
the ranging of sheep. Grass, weeds, under¬ 
growth, grow entirely to the top of these 
rude, rolling hills. There is an enormous 
acreage and an enormous amount of food— 
and it is unused, and will never be used 
by the existing population. 
Long ago the great coal companies and 
the great timber companies invaded the 
Cumberlands in search of coal rights and 
white oak and poplar timber. You may 
travel through the heart of the moonshine 
district as I have, learn the Rattlesnake, 
and the Buffalo Fork, the Bull Skin, the 
Middle Fork, and Flell-for-Sartin, as I 
have, and you will find that it is an old 
country, not- a new one, a country not 
understood, not valued, and not now used. 
Oil rights and timber rights and coal rights 
—these have been hardly taken or are now 
in process of taking. All is simple, prim¬ 
itive, ignorant, well nigh hopeless! And 
yet every way you look you can see those 
hundreds of thousands of acres lying idle 
and unused, held in large blocks by tim¬ 
ber companies, coal companies, or in small 
blocks by little settlers in mountain coves 
who are doing as their great grandfathers 
did before them. Most of these settlers 
sold all their sheep when sheep got high. 
A few years ago, when I was trying to 
do some stories in a way of investigating 
the rising cost of beef, I was told by more 
than one great packer that the beef of the 
country was not going to be raised in the 
Far West, but in the Middle West and the 
East. “The farmer with a little pasture 
and some corn, the man who owns his land 
and has it fenced, is going to be the beef 
producer of the country,” said one great 
packer to me in Chicago. “The day of 
the large herd and the open range is gone. 
Why argue about it, and why try to con¬ 
tinue it?” 
Now, setting aside all possible rabid 
prejudice on the part of this writer; set¬ 
ting aside all of his foolish sentiment for 
the old times and for the open country; 
setting aside all the political and local 
arguments one way or the other, and get¬ 
ting down simply to business facts and 
clean logic, why not listen to what this 
packer said, and what the public man said 
whose words I have quoted above in re¬ 
gard to sheep? Why not- admit—as ulti¬ 
mately we are going to be obliged to admit 
—that the sheep of the future must be 
raised just as the cow of the future must 
be raised—not in large bands in the West, 
but in little herds here and there over the 
country? 
Why try to raise sheep for a little while 
in the forest reserves—with no profit to 
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T \ fly fish 
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