almost
united in their opposition to the policies of the Government Forest
Service. Then the mining men found to their surprise that instead of
being ruined and forced out of business they were being helped. If a
miner had a valuable claim on some national forest lying idle, the
forest ranger of that district saw that not one stick of timber upon it
was cut by unauthorized persons. In the past, when a miner returned to
his claim after a year's absence, he generally found it stripped of the
timber which some day he would need for its development. Under the new
service, he discovered also that, when there was no timber on his own
claim, he could buy at a reasonable figure all the timber he desired for
the development of his mine. In many cases, in southern Arizona, for
instance, where the wood haulers were in the habit of taking from the
miners' claims fuel which they would be likely to need for their engines
sooner or later, the rangers stopped the practice and gave the wood
haulers other areas from which to cut, where no such injury to the
miners would result.

_Land Piracy Checked_

Of course, where mining companies, organized solely to obtain vast areas
of timber land, under cover of the mining laws, especially the Timber
and Stone Act, and the Placer Mining laws, found their work exposed by
the activity and watchfulness of the forest officers, they naturally
raised a cry against the Service that woke the echoes.

The Placer laws allow a company to obtain title to twenty acres of land
simply by showing five hundred dollars' worth of mining work done upon
it. No signs of mineral need be shown, no further attempt to develop it
is required. Prove that five hundred dollars' worth of work has been
done, and the patent is issued. The takers are not limited to a single
tract, but can have just as many tracts as they have sums of five
hundred dollars to invest. Under this Placer law whole townships,
covered with the finest timber on the Pacific coast, were taken up
solely to obtain title to the land for the timber upon it.

Wherever the final patents had not been issued on these lands, the
Forest Service stepped in and put a stop to it, thus saving thousands of
acres of timber land for the people. Small wonder that these licensed
pirates look upon a forest ranger as the embodiment of all that is bad,
and the forest policy as an encroachment upon sacred vested rights!

_The Case of the Wood Haulers_

And the poor w