ail and road
building through the forests, that the stock may more easily and safely
reach the higher grazing areas, in fighting the fires, in building
telephone lines to the very remotest corners of the forests, in hiring
hunters to exterminate the wolves and other wild animals that prey upon
the stockman's herds, in digging deep wells and erecting windmills and
other pumping engines to furnish water where there is none on the
surface, a sum almost equal to the entire amount paid in fees by the
stockmen, and all for their sole benefit and use.

The total amount of fees paid by stockmen in the year 1907 amounted to
$836,920. If the lands were under private control, the fees would be
more than double what they now are. In New Mexico, for instance, the
usual price for pasturing cattle upon the large land grants is from two
dollars to three dollars a year, while on the government forests
immediately adjoining the grant, and almost the same country, the fee is
only seventy-five cents a year per head and twenty-five cents per head
for sheep. And these are the highest fees charged on any national forest
for all-the-year-round grazing permits. In Colorado, California, Nevada,
and Arizona, the charge for sheep or cattle grazing on the large areas
of railroad and State lands is on an average fully twice as great as the
same fees upon the national forest, and in the former the stockmen get
no other return from the land owners.

The last and loudest wail was that these "great areas of segregated
lands," as the protestants love to call the national forests, were a
barrier to the settler and homesteader; that the Forest Service was
making vast areas of forest solitudes in the heart of the Western
States.

To this the Forest Service replied by throwing open to agricultural
settlement every acre of land, lying within the limits of the national
forests, which was more suitable for agriculture than forest culture.
Six thousand new homes were selected in the different forests in the
year 1907, and with vastly less red tape and delay than under the
regular homestead laws now in force upon other public lands.

If the Forest Service had done no more than keep down the fire losses,
their work would not have been in vain. In 1901 the total area burned
over in the government forests equalled 2-3/4 acres in every thousand,
while in 1907 the burned area was only 9/10 of an acre in every
thousand. No record of the money value of the earlier f