r
case it had driven out of his home a citizen known to the Senator, and
had left him and his family to wander houseless upon the hillside, and
that for no good reason whatsoever.

This statement, if it had been true, would at once have destroyed the
standing of the Service in the minds of many of its friends, and would
have led to immediate defeat in the fight then going on. Fortunately,
the records of the Service were so complete, and the knowledge of field
conditions on the part of the men in Washington was so thorough, that
the mere mention of the general locality of the supposed outrage by the
Senator made it easy to identify the individual case. The man in
question, instead of being an honest settler with a wife and family, was
the keeper of a disreputable saloon and dance hall, a well-known
law-breaker whom the local authorities had tried time and again to
dispossess and drive away. But by means of his fraudulent claim the man
had always defeated the local officers. When, however, the officers of
the Forest Service took the case in hand, the situation changed and
things moved quickly. The disreputable saloon was promptly removed from
the fraudulent land claim by means of which the keeper of it had held
on, and this thoroughly undesirable citizen either went out of business
or removed his abominable trade to some locality outside the National
Forest.

The actual facts were fully brought out in the debate next day, remained
uncontradicted, and saved the fight for the Forest Service. The whole
incident may be found at length in the Congressional Record.

The Forest Ranger is charged with overseeing and regulating the free use
of timber by settlers and others who live in or near the National
Forests. Last year (1912) the Forest Service gave away without charge
more than $196,000 worth of saw timber, house logs, fencing, fuel, and
other material to men and women who needed it for their own use. Usually
it is the Ranger's work to issue the permits for this free use, and to
designate the timber that may be cut. For this purpose, he must be well
acquainted with the kinds and the uses of the trees in his District, and
it is most important that he should know something of how their
reproduction can best be secured, in order that the free use may be
permitted without injury to the future welfare of the forest.

A Ranger oversees the use of his District for the grazing of cattle,
sheep, and other domestic animals. He mus