Page:Looters of the Public Domain.djvu/464

 and it has been one of the keenest pleasures of my existence to analyze the various features entering into the forestry question. It is certainly an interesting study, and probably appeals to the lover of nature with a greater degree of harmony than an other topic of discussion.

"That the forests should not he permitted to fall into the hands of private individuals, is a doctrine that even the aborigines were prompt to recognize, and in their tribal relations it was one of their fundamental principles, down to within a few decades ago. to exercise virtually the same kind of supervision over the forests, in their crude way, that the Government is now seeking to establish in a more enlightened form.

"I have personal knowledge that the Indians of California. Oregon, Washington and the British Possessions were accustomed to extend the most careful guardianship over the forests, and until the white man came with his ideas of commercial greed, and destroyed the savage instincts of protection. there had never been a great forest fire of any serious consequence in all this vast wilderness, by any act of human hands, and there is no doubt that conflagrations of this character wreak more damage to standing timber than all the other causes combined. "In the Fallfi it had been the custom of the redmen since their earliest authentic history, to burn out the dry grass and light undergrowth in order to provide fresh range for the following season, and as a measure of expediency in clearing unnecessary obstructions to a full view of wild game, or perhaps also as a stroke of precaution against ambush by enemies. In consequence, the underbrush never attained any important headway, and whatever fires occurred under these circumstances went through the forests like a flash, without damaging the larger trees to any appreciable extent.

"Frequently, in passing through heavy bodies of timber even now, the casual observer is struck by the appearance of some giant of the forest with charred trunk, and attributes the fact to the pranks of lightning, but in reality it is merely an isolated instance where the pitch and abnormal quantity of bark has contributed an extra attraction to the flames, although the main body of the tree might have suffered an insignificant amount of damage by the operation, so swiftly had been the course of the flames.

"The practice of setting out these fires at that period of the year, and causing the atmosphere to assume a murky hue under the stimulus of heavy volumes of smoke from all directions, has clothed the season with the poetic designation of 'Indian Summer,' and this name has adhered to it through all time, although, as a matter of fact, civilization is responsible for the density of the undergrowth in our time, and civilization must answer for the sin of forestry destruction by the great fires of the present age.

"It is usually quite difficult to trace the real blame for starting them. Huge rocks have been known by forest rangers to become dislodged from mountain sides, and plunging down deep ravines as they pursue their maddening course, bounding from crag to crag, have thrown flinty sparks that ignited the accumulation of decaying leaves and decomposed vegetation; or perhaps the neglected embers from the campfire of some careless hunter has furnished its share of devastation, but the result is the same, and we must delve deeper than the surface for the real cause, and when we do, it will be found to exist in the general tendency to permit the undergrowth to attain too much headway.

"It has come to my own knowledge, through Sam Heiple, a well-known frontiersman of this state, that a destructive forest fire originated by a globule of pitch from a fir tree concentrating the sun's rays in a manner productive of the effects of a burning glass, and the intense heat thus generated, communicating with the dry leaves and miscellaneous dead foliage, caused a conflagration that wrought immense damage before expending its fury.

"All this demonstrates the extreme necessity of taking the control of the forests away from private ownership, and placing it in the hands of some central power where aboriginal ideas may prevail in a modernized form. Page 458