Part 14

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.

[Illustration: THE EFFECT OF EROSION ON A HILLSIDE FROM WHICH THE FOREST COVER HAS BEEN REMOVED]

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."

[Illustration: THE SAME HILLSIDE AFTER TWO YEARS OF CAREFUL AND SYSTEMATIC GRAZING]

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.

[Illustration: HERD OF SHEEP GRAZING UPON A NATIONAL FOREST. THE SHEEP GRAZE IN LARGE BANDS AND VERY CLOSE TOGETHER, AND THE CUTTING ACTION OF THE THOUSANDS OF HOOFS IS VERY INJURIOUS TO THE SOIL. FOR THIS REASON, SHEEP-GRAZING IS ONLY ALLOWED ON CERTAIN AREAS OF THE NATIONAL FORESTS.]

_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

1905 85,627,000 279,592 $101,282 1906 106,999,000 115,416 76,183 1907 164,154,000 212,850 31,589

That is, in 1905 the loss from fire was more than three times as great as in the year 1907, with an area of forests almost twice as great to protect and control.

_$1,000,000 Saved by the Forest Hunters_

Another important feature of Mr. Pinchot's work is the employment of experienced hunters for killing wild animals which destroy stock. In the year 1907, according to records kept of all predatory animals killed upon the various national forests, or on lands adjoining them, no fewer than 1600 wolves, 19,469 coyotes, 265 mountain lions, 368 bears, and 2285 wild cats and lynxes were killed by the various hunters and settlers. Of these, it is probably fair to credit the rangers and the hunters employed by the Forest Service with at least one-fourth.

Now, any well-posted stockman will tell you that, on an average, a full-grown wolf will destroy one thousand dollars' worth of stock every year of its life. Mountain lions prefer horses to any other food, but still they will put up with calves and sheep. They, too, are easily chargeable with a thousand dollars' worth of damage each year. The coyotes, bob-cats, and lynxes do less harm, and that mostly to sheep. Yet I think it is a very conservative estimate to say that each coyote or lynx annually destroys stock to the value of fully one hundred dollars.

Taking these figures as a basis for comparison, it is very easily seen that the value of the animals killed by the Forest Service men is more than $1,000,000. Hence, so far as return for their $836,920 in grazing fees is concerned, the stockmen get it back in full and with some to spare.

[Illustration: _Copyrighted by E. S. Curtis, Seattle_]

CHIEF KITSAP, FINANCIER

BY

JOSEPH BLETHEN

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

When young Johnny Kitsap, having made up his mind that his clerkship in the reservation agency did not offer the chance of advancement to which the son of a Puyallup chief and a graduate of Carlisle was entitled, applied for work to the President of the Elliott Bay National Bank, it was not an act of such presumption as some might suppose. No one, to be sure, when he saw the high cheek-bones, wiry black hair brushed pompadour, dull brown eyes, and copper complexion, could possibly have been deceived by Johnny's well-cut clothes, clean linen, and good English. Nor did Johnny affect these things as a disguise or as signifying that, in adopting the apparel and speech of the white man, he had renounced his nationality--had, to all intents and purposes, become a dead Indian. Quite to the contrary, what secured Johnny his position in the bank was precisely that, besides having a pleasant manner and civilized ways, he was so manifestly an exceptionally live Indian.

The Elliott Bay National's famous line of "red paper" had paid from the start. When, some years before, the proposition to loan old Peter Coultee, a full blood of the Puyallup reservation, was laid before the directors, they had laughed, but, like true Western men, they wanted to know the details. What they learned was that old Peter Coultee owned one hundred and sixty acres of fine reservation land, well stocked and highly cultivated; that his crop of hops was fast ripening; that he needed money to pay the hop-pickers of his own tribe; and that hop-house receipts in the White River Valley were as good as wheat receipts in the Palouse. This put the matter in other, at least, than a sneering light, and one of the laughing directors offered to visit the reservation and make a full report. The result was that old Peter Coultee got his loan, and that this turned out to be the first of many others, both to himself and to his tribesmen, and all of much mutual profit alike to white man and red.

When, accordingly, Johnny Kitsap did the Elliott National the honor of preferring its employment to that of the government, the president did not laugh, but, with all due formality, laid his application before the board, and suggested that a bank which loaned money to Indians might in time find it convenient to have a clerk who could interpret not only the language of the Siwash customers, but the more subtle emotions of the Indian heart. And so Johnny came by his job, and the bank had as little cause to regret it as the first loan to old Peter Coultee, which was the original cause of it.

To the young Indian, the bank became a magic house. The brass-barred windows before the tellers; the wire cages; the tiled floors; the great doors of the vault, with the _tick-tick-tick_ of the time locks; all seemed to him to be parts of a powerful chieftain's house. The vault itself, with its store of gold and currency, and its cabinet of mysterious treaties, which the _tyee_ made with the busy white men, filled him with awe. This was the white man's magic treasure-chest, wherein money bred money. No one bought or sold, so far as he could see, yet this treasure-chest paid salaries, distributed profits, and always continued full. With his imagination thus enlisted in firing his work with the zest of play, it is no wonder that he proved an apt pupil and in a rapidly flying trio of years had filled various positions and had earned high appreciation.

With his entrance upon the duties of collection clerk, Kitsap became the credit man on all "red paper." Every bit of Indian business received the approval of the Chief before the discount committee would act upon it. Thus the young Indian became surely, even if indirectly, a power on the reservation, where the tribal leaders regarded him as being at heart a white man and continued to address him quizzingly as _Italapas_ (The Coyote That Wanders). Kitsap maintained a modest room in Seattle, enjoyed the privileges of an athletic club, owned a one-twentieth interest in a yacht, and, out on the reservation, kept a cayuse in father Kitsap's corral and a suit of Indian finery in father Kitsap's house. Thus he zigzagged across the borderland of civilization and led a most picturesque, but strictly honorable, double life.

Kitsap had been four years in the bank when three hop-buyers from St. Louis attempted to raid the White River hop fields in advance of picking and to buy the entire crop of the valley at fourteen cents a pound. The raid had progressed far towards success when Kitsap accidentally heard of it.

The Indian hop-growers of the reservation had made their fall estimates, Kitsap had inspected their fields and approved their items, and some ten thousand dollars in "red paper" was entered on the books of the Elliott Bay National Bank, the loans to be secured by the warehouse receipts on hops. Kitsap had spent the first Sunday of the picking on the reservation, greeting friends who had come on their annual pilgrimage to the hop fields from other reservations; and early on Monday morning he was on the way to take a train for Seattle, when Peter Coultee's cayuse overtook him, bearing Peter Coultee's oldest son.

"Good morning, _Italapas_. Is your bank short of money?" called the young Indian, with enough dire suggestion in his tone to start a Wall Street panic.

Kitsap faced his questioner. "It has more gold than the son of Coultee can count," he retorted sharply.

"Then why is Lamson, who owns the largest fields of all the white men in the valley, saying that the bank will not loan him enough to pay the pickers?"

Lamson, who was wealthy, as ranchers go, was a heavy client of the Elliott Bay National, but, since he was a white man, his accounts were unknown to Kitsap. The bank clerk was thus taken at a disadvantage and could not give a direct answer. But, desiring to learn what he could, he bantered the younger Indian to talk on, and listened carefully, that his words might be carried to the cashier.

"Lamson is paying two picking tickets out of every three in cash; for the third ticket he gives an order on the stores in the village. When the pickers complain, he laughs and says that the bank has loaned the Indians so much that it cannot lend him the little he needs. Peter Coultee sends word to you: Let _Italapas_ run to the bank and count the gold." Then the younger Indian smiled suggestively, whirled his cayuse, and rode away.

Kitsap was troubled by young Coultee's words. Not that any thought of weakness in the Elliott Bay National entered his mind; but he felt at once that such a report, if allowed to circulate undenied, would be harmful to the magic treasure-chest. He was all nerves when he reported to the cashier.

As soon as the president arrived, the cashier went to him with the report. Together they reviewed Lamson's account, and decided that no danger was to be found there. Lamson's hops were being delivered to a warehouse, and the warehouse receipts were being delivered to the bank as security for the hop-gathering loan. All this was regular and customary. But Lamson's motive in making such talk disturbed the president. He sent for Kitsap to question him.

Never before had the young red man been called into a conference with the president. He felt both proud and alarmed at the incident. When told the facts, Kitsap was greatly relieved, but he could suggest no motive for Lamson's story. He volunteered to visit the valley in an endeavor to ascertain the facts. The suggestion pleased the president, who at once ordered it put into effect.

"I suppose," said the gray-headed president, "that you will enjoy this scouting expedition all the more because you are on the trail of a white man. But while I am going to trust to your own good sense and your knowledge of your people in running this lie right back to the man who fathered it, I want to caution you to play well inside the rules of the game.

"Now, you are out to hit the trail of that lie and chase it home. When you have corralled it, let me know what company it is keeping and I will tell you what to do next. Lamson has been a good client and this lie may run away from him. If so, we must not offend him and thus lose his account. But if it hikes home to his ranch house, then I want to know what he is doing, and the nearer he is related to this rumor, the quicker we shall cash his hop receipts and cancel his note.

"If you find it necessary to use the bank's authority, then come out strong as ambassador plenipotentiary and read the stiffest kind of a bluff to your man in the name of the Elliott Bay National Bank. Talk as little as possible about the bank; but when you do talk, make every man jealous of your connection with the institution. A conservative remark may bring a new customer to our books; a flippant word may go into business for itself and start a run that no bank could weather. Now get at it, and let us hear something from you by day after to-morrow."

Scout! The president himself had said it! The Indian's blood thrilled with his commission. His voice shook a little in its attempt to be very, very steady as he telephoned out to the reservation station for a saddle-horse. Then he ran for the five o'clock south-bound train.