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Show ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC FOREST LANDS 571 privilege of exchanging lands was worth $50 million to the railroads.17 Under the Forest Management Act the Geological Survey was assigned responsibility for the surveying of the forest reserves.18 Henry Gannett, geographer in charge of the surveys, the preparation of the land classification and topographical maps and the delineations of the reserves, rendered a service that Gifford Pinchot approved of and made use of later. The intensiveness of the investigations and the detail of the studies with their numerous illustrations and maps reveal the remarkable thoroughness, the scientific precision, and the imagination of the skilled participants. Here in two quarto volumes is contained a tremendous amount of detail concerning the status of the forest reserves as of 1897-1902, such as the varieties of timber trees and estimates of the number of board feet of the more important species, the condition of the forest till, the damages done by fires, disease and insects, the extent of cutting of dead wood which may have been legal and of green wood which ordinarily was not, the location and capacity of sawmills, the attitude of the local people toward the reserves and the larger timber cutting operations on them, the amount and location of homesteading, the number of livestock and the degree of damage, if any, they had done to the grasses and the young trees in burned over areas. Gannett had a considerable part in suggesting areas to be withdrawn for reserves, in which he seemed to have worked closely with Pinchot.19 17 R. F. Pettigrew, Imperial Washington. The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920 (Chicago, 1922), pp. 16-17. 18 33 Stat. 34. 19 U.S. Geological Survey, Nineteenth Annual Report, 1897-1898, Vol. 5; Twentieth Annual Report, 1898-1899, Vol. 5; and Twenty-First Annual Report, 1899-1900, Vol. 5; and Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, 1903-1904, Vol. 1, p. 287; Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground, pp. 92, 123. The observations of Gannett and his staff concerning the amount of timber cut on the Gifford Pinchot, like Fernow, thought of the forest reserves as a resource not to be locked up for the future but to be used subject to regulation that would require the cutting of mature trees, would provide for reforestation where natural regeneration would not take place speedily, and would give protection against fire, diseases, and depredations by unlicensed lumbermen. He was an extraordinarily able publicist who through his associations with influential Congressmen, and cultivation of the press quickly won support for the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, a division which had not attracted much attention or financial support under Fernow. One gambit that won the solid support of influential lumbermen to the agency was the offer in 1898 to provide them with technical advice concerning the reserves are particularly useful to the historian. For example on the Plum Creek Reserve in Colorado it is said that lumbermen had worked over the entire reserve cutting out the best of the timber. In some places a second and even third culling had been made. When the reserve was established there were six portable sawmills together turning out between 60,000 and 70,000 feet of lumber daily. Most of the lumber was shipped to markets far outside the reservation, being hauled to distant railroad stations and there transshipped. At South Platte from 25,000 to 50,000 feet were loaded for Denver and other commercial centers. Sawmill operators generally were said to leave the logging to others. They located their mills on patented, homestead, or state lands, hauled their lumber away as soon as cut to prevent its discovery and attachment by timber agents. It was a common practice to stake out a mining claim on a heavily timbered tract, cut and sell the timber without getting title, and then move to another choice spot. Over and over again the men preparing the reports said that the lumbering was extraordinarily wasteful for only the best part of the logs were taken and large amounts of good lumber was left to rot, leaving in the wake of the cutting operations an immense waste, a "tangled mass of unused and half used" timber. Local residents maintained they saw nothing wrong in the commercial cutting of timber though they might deplore the wasteful practices and the fires that sometimes followed. For protection, sawmill operators were charged with setting fires to deaden trees which they could then cut legally. |