Chapter 13

And again they found him invulnerable, for, after graduating from Yale in 1889, he had made a systematic and thorough study of forestry. He traveled in Europe, through Russia, on the great steppes of Siberia, in the Philippines, and in every part of the United States where there were forests he investigated conditions and studied the water problem, the grazing of cattle and sheep, and the effect of lumbering and forest fires. There is hardly a corner of our whole Western country from the Missouri to the Pacific where forests are found that he has not visited and inspected. Days, weeks, and months spent on horseback and on foot in the roughest, most inaccessible portions of the Rocky Mountain region from the Canadian to the Mexican line have made him familiar with every problem of forest preservation. He has studied the attendant and equally important question of watershed protection and utilization of the mountains for conserving the sources of all our great Western streams, by which millions of acres are to be irrigated and millions of homes built up in the West. He was from the first no "tenderfoot" adventurer, no visionary enthusiast, but a practical, hard-headed man far more earnestly and disinterestedly concerned in the Westerners' future than they themselves had ever been.

Born in Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1865, of old New England ancestry, Mr. Pinchot is just in the prime of life. A man of tremendous energy and resourcefulness, tactful, quick to see a point, frank to admit his errors, open and friendly in his intercourse with all men, and in the game of politics the equal of any one in Washington, he is giving the best years of his life to a cause that will bring him no personal advantage save a place in our national history greater than that of great generals and war captains. For while their armies destroy, his little army is saving and preserving; while their forces are ever non-productive, he and his small force are making "two blades of grass grow where one grew before"; are building up and developing to the uttermost the great region lying around and about the national forest areas.

_Training an Army of Foresters_

Mr. Pinchot rapidly gathered about him a force of expert assistants. The forest schools in the East were just turning out their first crop of young men, trained and educated as scientific foresters, and he brought them into the work. A year or two in the forests, mapping, scaling, estimating, and studying the western timber conditions, made them practical as well as scientific. The old sawmill men, themselves educated in the college of "Hard Knocks," first laughed at these college-bred foresters, but soon learned to respect and trust them. They began to adopt their plans and follow their suggestions, and to-day one of the most serious embarrassments the forester has to meet is the continual hiring away from him of his best men by the Western lumber and sawmill men, who offer salaries far beyond what the government pays.

To handle the stockmen's interests--by far the most difficult and perplexing of all the problems connected with the administration of the national forests--Pinchot went to the Southwest and persuaded one of the most intelligent and level-headed young stockmen in the country to become head of the grazing department. A. F. Potter had been for years a cow-boy and range cattleman, then for several years a sheep owner, and not only knew every branch of the stock business through practical experience, but had the administrative ability to handle successfully the intricate and perplexing questions of ranges, priority of rights, effects of grazing, and methods of handling stock that must be passed upon. With this corps of assistants, and with Mr. Overton W. Price, a man second only to himself in ability, as his chief lieutenant, Mr. Pinchot began in earnest in the year 1898 the work of saving the remaining forested areas of the United States.

A few years ago the mining men, lumbermen, and the stockmen were almost united in their opposition to the policies of the Government Forest Service. Then the mining men found to their surprise that instead of being ruined and forced out of business they were being helped. If a miner had a valuable claim on some national forest lying idle, the forest ranger of that district saw that not one stick of timber upon it was cut by unauthorized persons. In the past, when a miner returned to his claim after a year's absence, he generally found it stripped of the timber which some day he would need for its development. Under the new service, he discovered also that, when there was no timber on his own claim, he could buy at a reasonable figure all the timber he desired for the development of his mine. In many cases, in southern Arizona, for instance, where the wood haulers were in the habit of taking from the miners' claims fuel which they would be likely to need for their engines sooner or later, the rangers stopped the practice and gave the wood haulers other areas from which to cut, where no such injury to the miners would result.

_Land Piracy Checked_

Of course, where mining companies, organized solely to obtain vast areas of timber land, under cover of the mining laws, especially the Timber and Stone Act, and the Placer Mining laws, found their work exposed by the activity and watchfulness of the forest officers, they naturally raised a cry against the Service that woke the echoes.

The Placer laws allow a company to obtain title to twenty acres of land simply by showing five hundred dollars' worth of mining work done upon it. No signs of mineral need be shown, no further attempt to develop it is required. Prove that five hundred dollars' worth of work has been done, and the patent is issued. The takers are not limited to a single tract, but can have just as many tracts as they have sums of five hundred dollars to invest. Under this Placer law whole townships, covered with the finest timber on the Pacific coast, were taken up solely to obtain title to the land for the timber upon it.

Wherever the final patents had not been issued on these lands, the Forest Service stepped in and put a stop to it, thus saving thousands of acres of timber land for the people. Small wonder that these licensed pirates look upon a forest ranger as the embodiment of all that is bad, and the forest policy as an encroachment upon sacred vested rights!

_The Case of the Wood Haulers_

And the poor wood haulers! How they complained because they thought their divine right to cut and slash as they chose was to be invaded! What happened to them? To-day they are better off than ever. True, they pay a little for the wood--from as low as ten cents a cord in some forests up to fifty cents in others. But what do they get in return for it?

If a wood hauler wants to buy ten cords of wood or any amount up to fifty dollars' worth, he simply goes to the nearest ranger, and in ten minutes the deal is over; the ranger accompanies him to the area where he wishes to cut and shows him by marks and bounds just where he may cut; the trees are marked, and the man sets to work knowing full well that no one else will invade this little tract or steal his wood when it is cut and piled up waiting for him to haul it away, as was the case over and over again in the old days of free and unlimited competition.

_How the Government Sells Timber_

What of the next class, the sawmill men? Every stick of matured, merchantable timber in the forests, not needed for protection of water-sheds, is for sale. By matured timber is meant a tree that has reached its maximum growth and development, and is beginning slowly to deteriorate, and should, like any ripe crop, be harvested. There is no limit either high or low. In New Mexico one contract for 1907 called for 50,000 feet and another for 10,000,000, and each was made and carried out under the same conditions; little man and big both got the same square deal.

"But," cry some of the politicians with both eyes upon the political barometer, "the Forest Service, in selling lumber by such methods, is playing into the hands of the Lumber Trust and boosting prices."

What are these methods? If a citizen wants to buy some saw-logs for his mill, he goes to the nearest forest officer and states his case, indicating where the timber lies that he wishes to cut. A careful survey and cruise of the timber is then made by experienced and competent men trained especially for that work. If they report favorably upon the cutting, a minimum price is set at which the timber will be sold, and the sale is duly advertised for thirty days, if it amounts to more than one hundred dollars in value. If it comes to less, the forest officer on the ground makes the sale without delay. When the bids are opened, the highest bidder gets the timber.

There is seldom much competition on the small lots, but the large tracts are frequently bid up to very much more than the minimum price set by the forest expert. In New Mexico, for instance, several large sales were made in 1907, where the keen competition ran the price up from three dollars, set by the Service, to five and six dollars a thousand. Surely this was not playing into the hands of the Lumber Trust.

"_Two Blades of Grass Where One Grew Before_"

Moreover, when the buyers come to cut, the ranger marks each tree, leaving out all those below a certain size for future growth, and also a certain number for seed purposes, that reproduction may follow. Again, the buyers are required to cut the stumps low, generally at a height equal to the diameter. Under old methods they cut them off high up, where it was easier for the ax and saw men to work, thus leaving in the stump a waste equal to more than ten per cent. of the measured value of the tree. "Two blades of grass" here surely!

Under the old methods, if the logs had to be "snaked" out, the loggers took the shortest cut, and if that cut led through a dense thicket of young trees, the logs were dragged through them, so that millions of young trees were destroyed each year by this recklessness alone. To-day the ranger sees to it that they go around such little groves, or, if it is absolutely unavoidable, a straight and narrow way is cut through them to which the loggers must keep, thus reducing the damage to the minimum. "Two blades of grass" here also.

In the old days of reckless lumbering only the best of the tree was used. A single log was taken, and the rest left to waste. Now the watchful "scaler" sees to it that the logs are cut with judgment, so as to utilize every foot of saw timber.

When the logging is finished on a tract, according to the government contract, the brush must be carefully piled by the lumberman far enough away from other trees or young stuff to cause no damage when it is burned by the rangers. Under the early methods the "slashings," as cut-over areas were called, were an almost impassable mass of dead tree-tops and logs, a most fruitful and dangerous source and auxiliary of forest fires.

_The Forest Service and the Stock-Raisers_

The only remaining class opposed to the policy of the Forest Service is that composed of the stock-raisers; and for their interests and welfare the Forest Service has worked harder than for all the other users of the forests combined.

That mistakes were made in handling the livestock interests; that in some cases individuals were unduly hampered with rules enforced by over-zealous forest officers, is not to be denied. It was a huge task. Almost in a day the Forest Service sprang full-fledged into the world, charged with the care and responsibilities of more than a hundred million acres; to-day it controls a third of the area of grazing country in the United States, whereon graze about eight million sheep and a million and a half cattle and horses.

Trained foresters there were to be had in plenty, but men who knew the stockman's trade, whose training fitted them to handle the vexatious questions of range divisions, over-grazing, and relative injury done by cattle, sheep, and goats, were hard to find, and when found were not willing to enter the Service for the niggardly pay allowed by the government. However, the Forest Service, with its ranger system, is to-day training up a class of young men, who, in a few years, will be at once expert lumbermen, scientific foresters, and excellent all-round frontiersmen and stockmen.

In this work there have been no precedents to follow, no rules to look to for guidance. Instead, rules must be made and tested through use; precedents must be established and certain fundamental principles worked out and made a basis for future government.

Further than this, every section has its own necessities. Rules that would apply to Oregon and Washington, with their sixty inches of rainfall a year, would not apply to Arizona, with its ten. One great mountain region, whose waters drained off into the ocean and could never be used for irrigating purposes, might safely be let open to all kinds of grazing; while another equally large section, just as well grassed, would have to be closed to sheep and goats, with their erosive little feet and habits of grazing in large bands, because all the drainage went into creeks, streams, and rivers that lower down on the desert were needed to irrigate vast areas of valuable farming lands.

_The Roosevelt Dam Case_

Take a single case: that of one national forest in Arizona. At the upper end of this forest--which is a long, narrow tract covering a great mountain chain--rise two or three streams; on the eastern slope, the Rio Verde and the Salt River, on the western, the Agua Fria. A hundred miles below these heads the government is building, at a cost of more than $4,000,000, the great Roosevelt Dam which will furnish water to irrigate 250,000 acres of the richest of soils around the city of Phoenix in the Salt River valley. One of the most serious problems in the construction of the great dams in the West is the question of silt, which is washed down in the streams and will eventually fill up and render useless these expensive dams and reservoirs.

Careful studies of silt prove beyond doubt that its primal cause is the removal of the forest cover, such as underbrush, weeds, and grasses, along the streams, which allows the rainfall to run off rapidly. The grazing over these areas by sheep and goats not only exhausts this forest cover, but from the cutting up of the soil and the loosening effect of the thousands of tiny hoofs, the erosive action of the rain becomes disastrous. The wash of the hills and mountain-sides carries with it into the streams tons and tons of silt to fill up the dams and beds of the streams, as well as working irreparable injury to the comparatively thin soil covering the mountains.

On this national forest the watershed on the eastern side all runs into streams which eventually reach the Roosevelt Dam; on the western slope the water runs unused to the Gulf of California. So the National Reclamation Service, charged with the building and maintenance of these huge reservoirs, said to the Forest Service: "The watershed of the Roosevelt Dam must be protected from over-grazing, so that the forest cover may be preserved, and the deposit of silt reduced to the very lowest possible percentage."

The Forest Service whose duty it was under the law to protect and preserve, not only the timber of the mountains, but the water supply as well, had no alternative but to say to the sheep and goat men using this area: "You cannot longer graze sheep or goats upon the eastern side of this forest, but may do so on the western slope." But since cattle do much less damage than sheep, in order that the grazing may not go entirely unused, the Service allows cattle to graze there in such numbers as will not injure the watershed.

Naturally the sheep owners set up a cry that could be heard from Dan to Beersheba. But an analysis of the situation shows that while some fifty individual sheep men, owning probably 100,000 sheep valued at about $300,000, were forced to rearrange their business to meet the new conditions, their loss was overwhelmingly offset by the benefit to the entire population of the Salt River valley, a population to-day of not fewer than 50,000 people, every soul of whom is absolutely dependent upon the agricultural lands of the valley for a living; these lands consisting of more than 100,000 acres, valued at an average of sixty dollars an acre, already under cultivation, with 150,000 acres more ready to be cultivated the instant the Roosevelt Dam is finished.

_Irrigation Revolutionized by National Forestry_

Surely such conditions fully justify the Forest Service in its course of pursuing the greatest good for the greatest number. In Colorado a small number of stock men, principally cattle owners, aided and abetted by a few political malcontents, have attempted to discredit the Forest Service, but no one has heard a word against the Service from the thousands of contented irrigationists, who, with countless acres to be watered by more than 12,000 miles of irrigation ditches, see their source of water supply amply protected, and realize that already the supply has increased and the flow is more regular than it has been in the past.

In the great Kern River district about Bakersfield in southern California, a careful measurement shows that since the restrictions on grazing in the mountains at the heads of the streams, together with the almost complete absence of forest fires, the flow of water in the great canal system has become fully twenty per cent. greater in volume than ever before. And so one could go on without end, if necessary, for all over the West are smaller or larger areas wholly dependent upon the rivers and streams for their water supply, and to them the Forest Service guarantees full protection for their lands and homes.

_The Free Grass Question_

The range stockmen of to-day are in much the same position as the reservation Indian. The tides of civilization, advancing from east and west, have met and threaten to overwhelm them. Like the Indian they must meet the new conditions with new methods. They must not, and need not, be overwhelmed, but can be assimilated in the new order of things. The day of free grass in the State of Texas came to an end twenty years ago. The old-timers shook their heads and prophesied all sorts of dire happenings to the State. To-day Texas has more cattle and sheep, and better ones, too, than ever before, and they are still growing in numbers.

A convention of stockmen was held at Denver in 1898, at which the burning question was the then new plan of forest reserves. The sheep men from Wyoming, Utah, and one or two other Western States, declared with a bitterness born of conviction that if the government made any forest reserves in their States it would mean the total annihilation of the sheep industry there. To-day these States are plastered with national forests, and each has three or four times as many sheep as it had ten years ago.

There has arisen, of course, from the men who have used these government lands without money and without price, a continuous cry that the grazing fees the Forest Service collects are "illegal, unjust and double taxation," The complaint, of course, will not bear analysis. The land belongs, not to the stockmen, but to the whole people. Why should the government give something to a stockman in Wyoming, that belongs equally to a stockman in Ohio, who is raising live stock on private land, in keen competition with Western free grass men?

The fees are scarcely illegal. If the government can sell one man one hundred acres of public land, it certainly can sell another man the grass and forage crop produced upon any portion of the public lands. One is no more a case of merchandizing than the other. As for the double taxation argument, that too is equally childish, because the grazing fee is not a tax but the price of a commodity.

As a matter of fact, the government spends annually, in trail and road building through the forests, that the stock may more easily and safely reach the higher grazing areas, in fighting the fires, in building telephone lines to the very remotest corners of the forests, in hiring hunters to exterminate the wolves and other wild animals that prey upon the stockman's herds, in digging deep wells and erecting windmills and other pumping engines to furnish water where there is none on the surface, a sum almost equal to the entire amount paid in fees by the stockmen, and all for their sole benefit and use.

The total amount of fees paid by stockmen in the year 1907 amounted to $836,920. If the lands were under private control, the fees would be more than double what they now are. In New Mexico, for instance, the usual price for pasturing cattle upon the large land grants is from two dollars to three dollars a year, while on the government forests immediately adjoining the grant, and almost the same country, the fee is only seventy-five cents a year per head and twenty-five cents per head for sheep. And these are the highest fees charged on any national forest for all-the-year-round grazing permits. In Colorado, California, Nevada, and Arizona, the charge for sheep or cattle grazing on the large areas of railroad and State lands is on an average fully twice as great as the same fees upon the national forest, and in the former the stockmen get no other return from the land owners.

The last and loudest wail was that these "great areas of segregated lands," as the protestants love to call the national forests, were a barrier to the settler and homesteader; that the Forest Service was making vast areas of forest solitudes in the heart of the Western States.

To this the Forest Service replied by throwing open to agricultural settlement every acre of land, lying within the limits of the national forests, which was more suitable for agriculture than forest culture. Six thousand new homes were selected in the different forests in the year 1907, and with vastly less red tape and delay than under the regular homestead laws now in force upon other public lands.

If the Forest Service had done no more than keep down the fire losses, their work would not have been in vain. In 1901 the total area burned over in the government forests equalled 2-3/4 acres in every thousand, while in 1907 the burned area was only 9/10 of an acre in every thousand. No record of the money value of the earlier fire losses was kept, but that the loss ran into the millions, no one who has seen the miles of burned over tracts can doubt.

The following table shows the fire losses in the national forests for the past three years:

Year Area of Acres Value of Forests Burned Over Timber Burned