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Show 548 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT valuable forest land for much less than its actual value and cheating the government out of large sums. Millions of acres of heavily timbered pine land in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and of Douglas-fir and redwood land in the Pacific Coast states had been taken under the settlement laws and yet not a "vestige of agriculture or cultivation" existed on them. On both the plundered lands and those acquired through fraudulent use of the settlement laws wasteful cutting prevailed. Only the choicest trees were taken; slightly defective logs and the tops and branches were left. As they rotted they harbored insects and diseases; fires ran through the dry slash, destroying the young trees and wildlife, transforming a living wilderness into a desert. Williamson hinted at the "disastrous climatic effect" which might follow from the removal of the forests, and suggested that members of Congress might well familiarize themselves with George P. Marsh's Man and Nature, published 13 years earlier.50 Marsh deplored the urban and industrial waste that polluted the streams, the loss of forest soils that followed cutting, the damage livestock did to young trees, the transfer of forest lands from public to private ownership, and the lack of respect for forest property whether owned by the state or individuals. He termed the indiscriminate clearing of forests catastrophic. He anticipated the later "denudiacs," to use a hostile expression applied by the Northwestern Lumberman to those persons predicting the early exhaustion of growing timber, by saying that, except for Oregon, no state had a supply of standing timber greater than its prospective needs. Marsh in 1864 expressed sentiments which sound mGLO Annual Report, 1877, pp. 24-25; David Lowenthal (ed.) , Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) , pp. ix-xvii, 42-43, 257 ff.; and Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh. Versatile Vermonter (New York, 1958) , pp. 267-70. very modern today and remind one of another crusader, Rachel Carson, author of The Silent Spring. Marsh wrote: The ravages of man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organic and her inorganic creations; and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces ... which he has unwisely dispersed .... The earth is fast become an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant .... It was such prescience that led Lewis Mumford to call Marsh "the fountainhead of the conservation movement." Williamson reiterated his recommendation that all valuable pine lands be withdrawn from entry under the settlement laws and be made available for purchase only at their appraised value. He urged that the Secretary of the Interior be permitted to sell at a fair value the timber on public lands near mining activities and in unsurveyed areas where it was needed by settlers. His third recommendation may have come from reading Marsh: Congress should be asked to provide for "the care and custody" of the timberlands unfit for farming and for the perpetuation of the growth of timber on these lands after the virgin timber had been cut by "such rules and regulations as may be required to that end." Here is the first official proposal for the retention and development of national forests/'1 Carl Schurz did not go quite as far as Williamson in his covering and summarizing report for the same year. He agreed that the timberlands should not be subject to entry under the settlement laws, that timberlands fit for agriculture "should be sold, if sold at all, only for cash and so graded in price as to make the purchaser pay for the value of the timber on the land." This, said Schurz, would make the settler provident in the disposal of the B1GLO Report, 1877, p. 25. |