Through Our Unknown Southwest. Agnes C. Laut

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СКАЧАТЬ trail up. When men ask him why he does it, he says it's to lead people up; for the glory of God and that sort of thing. Of course, the people in the valley think him crazy."

      Of course, they do. What would we, who love the valley and its dust and its maniacal jabber of jealousies and dollars do, building trails to lead people up to see the Glory of God? We call those hill-crest dwellers the troglodytes. Is it not we, who are the earth dwellers, the dust eaters, the insects of the city ant heaps, the true troglodytes and subsoilers of the sordid iniquities? Perhaps, by this, you think there are some things to do if you go out to the National Forests.

      You have been told so often that the National Forests lock up timber from use that it comes as a surprise as you ride up the woodland trail to hear the song of the crosscut saw and the buzzing hum of a mill—perhaps a dozen mills—running full blast here in this National Forest. Heaps of sawdust emit the odors of imprisoned flowers. Piles of logs lie on all sides stamped at the end U. S.—timber sold on the stump to any lumberman and scaled as inspected by the ranger and paid by the buyer. To be sure, the lumberman cannot have the lumber for nothing; and it was for nothing that the Forests were seized and cut under the old régime.

      How was the spoliation effected? Two or three ways. The law of the public domain used to permit burn and windfall to be taken out free. Your lumberman, then, homesteaded 160 acres on a slope of forest affording good timber skids and chutes. So far, no wrong! Was not public domain open to homesteading? Good; but your homesteading lumberman now watched his chance for a high wind away from his claim. Then, purely accidentally, you understand, the fire sprang up and swept the entire slope of green forest away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope would be left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this manner.

      That was the principle of Congress when it withdrew from public domain these vast wooded areas and created the National Forests to include grazing and woodland not properly administered under public domain. The making of windfall to take it free was stopped. The ranger's job is to prevent fires. Also he permits the cutting of only ripe, full-grown trees, or dead tops, or growth stunted by crowding; and all timber sold off the forests must be marked for cutting and stamped by the ranger.

      But the old spirit assumes protean forms. The latest way of working the old trick is through the homestead law. You have been told that homesteaders cannot go in on the National Forests. Yet there, as you ride along the trail, is a cleared space of 160 acres where a Swedish woman and her boys are making hay; and inquiry elicits the fact that millions of acres are yearly homesteaded in the National Forests. Just as fast as they can be surveyed, all farming lands in the National Forests are opened to the homesteader. Where, then, is the trick? Your farmer man comes in for a homestead and he picks out 160 acres where the growth of big trees is so dense they will yield from $10,000 to $40,000 in timber per quarter section. Good! Hasn't the homesteader a right to this profit? He certainly has, if he gets the profit; but supposing he doesn't clear more than a few hundred feet round his cabin, and hasn't a cent of money to pay the heavy expense of clearing the rest, and sells out at the end of his homesteading for a few hundred dollars? Supposing such farmer men are brought in by excursion loads by a certain big lumber company, and all sell out at a few hundred dollars, claims worth millions, to that certain big lumber company—is this true homesteading of free land; or a grabbing of timber for a lumber trust?

      The same spirit explains the furious outcry that miners are driven off the National Forest land. Wherever there is genuine metal, prospectors can go in and stake their claims and take lumber for their preliminary operations; but they cannot stake thousands of fictitious claims, then yearly turn over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of timber free to a big smelting trust—a merry game worked in one of the Western States for several years till the rangers put a stop to it.

To build roads through an empire the size of Germany would require larger revenues than the Forests yet afford; so the experiment is being tried of permitting lumbermen to take the timber free from the space occupied by a road for the building of the road. When you consider that you can drive a span of horses through the width of a big conifer, or build a cottage of six rooms from a single tree, the reward for road building is not so paltry as it sounds.

      Presently, your pony turns up a by-path. You are at the ranger's cabin—picturesque to a degree, built of hewn logs or timbers, with slab sides scraped down to the cinnamon brown, nailed on the hewn wood. Many an Eastern country house built in elaborate and shoddy imitation of town mansion, or prairie home resembling nothing in the world so much as an ugly packing box, might imitate the architecture of the ranger's cabin to the infinite improvement of appearances, not to mention appropriateness.

      Appropriateness! That is the word. It is a forest world; and the ranger tunes the style of his house to the trees around him; log walls, log partitions, log veranda, unbarked log fences, rustic seats, fur rugs, natural stone for entrance steps. In several cases, where the cabin had been built of square hewn timber with tar paper lining, slabs scraped of the loose bark had been nailed diagonally on the outside; and a more suitable finish to a wood hermitage could hardly be devised—surely better than the weathered browns and dirty drabs and peeling whites that you see defacing the average frontier home. Naturally enough, city people building cottages as play places have been the first to imitate this woodsy architecture. You see the slab-sided, cinnamon-barked cottages among the city folk who come West to play, and in the lodges of hunting clubs far East as the Great Lakes. Personally I should like to see the contagion spread to the farthest East of city people who are fleeing the cares of town, "back to the land;" but when there are taken to the country all the cares of the city house, a regiment of servants or hostiles, and a mansion of grandeur demanding such care, it seems to me the city man is carrying the woes that he flees "back to the farm."

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