Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1880.djvu/35

Rh After a lapse of nearly thirty years, more than one thousand claims have been filed with the surveyors-general, of which less than 150 have been reported to Congress, and of the number so reported Congress has finally acted upon only 71. The construction of railroads through Xew Mexico and Arizona, and the consequent influx of population in those Territories, renders it imperatively necessary that these claims should be finally settled with the least possible delay. I have, therefore, the honor to recommend that the attention of Congress be called especially to this subject, with a view to securing action upon the claims pending before it, and upon the pending bill providing for the settlement of the remaining claims.

In my last annual report I called attention to the fact that the waste and destruction of the redwood and the "big trees" of California have been and continue to be so great as to cause apprehension that in the course of years these magnificent species may entirely disappear unless some measure be taken to preserve at least a portion of them. I recommended at the same time that the President be authorized to withdraw from sale or other disposition an area at least equal to two townships in the coast range in the northern and an equal area in the southern part of the State of California upon which these interesting trees grow. That bill has not yet been acted upon, and it seems important that if any measure for the preservation of these species of trees is to be taken at all, it should be done as soon as possible. I therefore once more commend this subject to the attention of Congress.

In my first annual report I had the honor to present to you in 1877, and every successive year thereafter, I invited attention to the extensive depredations committed on the timber-lands of the United States, and the rapid and indiscriminate destruction of our forests, especially in the South and in the States and Territories of the West. Referring to the warning example furnished by other parts of the world, where the disappearance of the forests had been followed by the most deplorable consequences: the drying up of springs; the irregularity of the water-supply in navigable rivers; the frequency of destructive freshets and inundations; the transformation of once productive and flourishing agricultural districts into barren wastes, almost uninhabitable to man&#8212;I showed that the same results would inevitably befall certain parts of this country, if so short-sighted and reckless a practice be persisted in as is now prevailing. I set forth as a universally acknowledged fact that especially in our mountainous regions the stripping of the slopes of their timber would be an irreparable injury, inasmuch as the rainfall and the water from melting snows would wash down the soil, transform brooks and rivulets running regularly while the forests stand, into raging torrents 3 I