est away from his claim. Your homesteading lumberman
then set up a sawmill. A fire fanned up a green slope by a high wind did
less harm than fire in a slow wind in dry weather. The slope would be
left a sweep of desolate burn and windfall, dead trees and spars. Your
lumberman then went in and took his windfall and his burn free.
Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of acres of the public
domain, were rifled free from the public in this way. If challenged, I
could give the names of men who became millionaires by lumbering in this
manner.

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 assumes 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 space 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 l