Part 3 (2/2)
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 a.s.sumes 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 s.p.a.ce 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 fict.i.tious 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 part.i.tions, 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 sc.r.a.ped 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.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: Pueblo boys at play in the streets of Zuni, New Mexico.
The dome-like tops on the houses are bake ovens]
What sort of men are these young fellows living halfway between heaven and earth on the lonely forested ridges whose nearest neighbors are the snow peaks? Each, as stated previously, patrols 100,000 acres. That is, over an area of 100,000 acres he is a road warden, game warden, timber cruiser, sales agent, United States marshal, forester, gardener, naturalist, trail builder, fire fighter, cattle boss, sheep protector, arrester of thugs, thieves and poachers, surveyor, mine inspector, field man on homestead jobs inside the limits, tree doctor, nurseryman. When you consider that each man's patrol stretched out in a straight line would reach from New York past Albany, or from St. Paul to Duluth, without any of the inaccuracy with which a specialist loves to charge the layman, you may say the ranger is a pretty busy man.
What sort of man is he? Very much the same type as the Canadian Northwest Mounted Policeman, with these differences: He is very much younger. I think there is a regulation somewhere in the Department that a new man older than forty-five will not be taken. This insures enthusiasm, weeding out the misfits, the formation of a body of men trained to the work; but I am not sure that it is not a mistake. There is a saying among the men of the North that ”it takes a wise old dog to catch a wary old wolf;” and ”there are more things in the woods than ever taught in l'pe'tee cat--ee--cheesm.” I am not sure that the weathered old dogs, whose catechism has been the woods and the world, with lots of hard knocks, are not better fitted to cope with some of the difficulties of the ranger's life than a double-barreled post-graduate from Yale or Biltmore. So much depends on fist, and the brain behind the fist. I am quite sure that many of the blackguard tricks a.s.sailing the Forest Service would slink back to unlighted lairs if the tricksters had to deal not with the boys of Eastern colleges, gentlemen always, but with some wise and weathered old dog of frontier life who wouldn't consult Departmental regulations before showing his fangs. He would consult them, you know; but it would be afterwards. Just now, while the rangers are consulting the red tape, the trickster gets away with the goods.
In the next place, your Forest ranger is not clothed with the authority to back up his fight which the N.W.M.P. man possesses. In theory, your ranger is a United States marshal, just as your Mounted Policeman is a constable and justice of the peace; but when it comes to practice, where the N.W.M.P. has a free hand on the instant, on the spot, to arrest, try, convict and imprison, the Forest ranger is ham-strung and hampered by official red tape. For instance, riding out with a ranger one day, we came on an irate mill man who opened out a fusillade in all the profanity his tongue could borrow. The ranger turned toward me aghast.
”Don't mind me! Let him swear himself out! I want to see for myself exactly what you men have to deal with!”
Now, if that mill man had used such language to a Mounted Policeman, he would have been arrested, sentenced to thirty days and a fine, all inside of twenty-four hours. What was it all about? An attempt to bulldoze a young government man into believing that the taking of logs without payment was permissible.
”What will you do to straighten it all out?” I asked.
”Lay a statement of the facts before the District Supervisor. The Supervisor will forward all to Denver. Denver will communicate with Was.h.i.+ngton. Then, soon as the thing has been investigated, word will come back from Was.h.i.+ngton.”
Investigated? If you know anything about government investigations, you will not stop the clock, as Joshua played tricks with the sun dial, to prevent speed.
”Then, it's a matter of six weeks before you can put decency and respect for law in that gentleman's heart?” I asked.
”Perhaps longer,” said the college man without a suspicion of irony, ”and he has given us trouble this way ever since he has come to the Forests.”
”And will continue to give you trouble till the law gives you a free hand to put such blackguards to bed till they learn to be good.”
”Yes, that's right. This isn't the first time men have tried to get away with logs that didn't belong to them. Once, when I came back to the first Forest where I served, there was a whole pile of logs stamped U.
S. that we had never scaled. By the time we could get word back from Was.h.i.+ngton, the guilty party had left the State and blame had been shunted round on a poor half-witted fellow who didn't know what he was doing; but we forced pay for those logs.”
It is a common saying in the Northwest that it takes eight years to make a good Mounted Policeman--eight years to jounce the duffer out and the man in; but in the Forest Service, men over forty-five are not taken.
For men who serve up to forty-five, the inducements of salary beginning at $65 a month and seldom exceeding $200 are not sufficient to retain tested veterans. The big lumber companies will pay a trained forester more for the same work on privately owned timber limits; so the rangers remain for the most part young. Would the same difficulties rise if wise old dogs were on guard? I hardly think so.
What manner of man is the ranger? As we sat round the little parlor of the cabin that night in the Vasquez Forest, an army man turned forester struck up on a piano that had been packed on horseback above cloud-line strains of Wagner and Beethoven. A graduate of Ann Arbor and post-graduate of Yale played with a cigarette as he gazed at his own fancies through the mica glow of the coal stove. A Denver boy, whose mother kept house in the cabin, was chief ranger. In the group was his sister, a teacher in the village school; and I fancy most of the ranger homes present pretty much the same types, though one does not ordinarily expect to hear strains of grand opera above cloud-line. Picture the men dressed in sage-green Norfolk suits; and you have as rare a scene as Scott ever painted of the men in Lincoln green in England's borderland forests.
Of course, there are traitors and spies and Judas Iscariots in the Service with lip loyalty to public weal and one hand out behind for thirty pieces of silver to betray self-government; but under the present regime, such men are not kept when found out, nor s.h.i.+elded when caught.
For twenty years, the world has been ringing with praise of the Northwest Mounted Police; but the red-coat men have served their day; and the extension of Provincial Government will practically disband the force in a few years. Right now, in the American West, is a similar picturesque body of frontier fighters and wardens, doing battle against ten times greater odds, with little or no authority to back them up, and under constant fire of slanderous mendacity set going by the thieves and grafters whose game of spoliation has been stopped. Let spread-eagleism look at the figures and ponder them, and never forget them, especially never forget them, when charges are being hurled against the Forest rangers! _In the single fire of 1909 more rangers lost their lives than Mounted Policemen have died in the Service since 1870, when the force was organized._
<script>