reaches the main skidroad, a long, carefully engineered path or trough made of logs laid endwise and winding off down the mountain-side for over a mile. Sometimes this trough is made slippery with grease, and sometimes a liberal watering is sufficient. Five or six logs are now fastened together, end to end, with dog-chains. The cable from the lower donkey-engine is attached to the leader, the signal is given, and the train of logs slips forward faster and faster down the hill, bounding, jerking, swinging around the curves of the skidway, and finally, with rush and roar, their under sides hot with friction, they plunge past the lower engine and out on the tracks of the mountain railroad. A man has followed them all the way, sometimes

the engine, is dragged wildly down the hill. We rode on the engine, watching the logs. twisting and bounding after us, around curves where it seemed they must certainly jump the track, down grades where we expected the logs to rush upon us and crush us, locomotive and all. Yet we always maintained our distance, the ponderous logs, many of which were as wide as the track itself, miraculously keeping to the narrow space between the rails. Sometimes, indeed, the logs do jump the track, -we saw in places the signs of such ruin, -and sometimes they carry the locomotive with them; but for the thousands of logs that are thus brought down the mountainside there are remarkably few accidents.

At the end of the mountain railroad we

came to the level landing-place where the logs were rolled across a narrow platform and out upon ordinary flat-cars, another donkey-engine assisting in the work of loading, so that many logs, piled pyramidwise, could be placed on each car. When a dozen cars or more were loaded, a standard locomotive came and pulled them to the mills, thirty miles away in Tacoma, downhill all the way.

NOWHERE else in the world is there such a forest as this. A few steps in any direction from the roads of the loggers bring one at once to the primeval wood.

Turn to the north. A thousand and five hundred miles you may wander, if you will, and never escape the inclosing silences of this wood. Across the British possessions, through endless reaches of mountains, snow-capped, inaccessible, and onward to Alaska, nothing but trees and trees-cedar, fir, hemlock, pine, spruce. Turn to the south. For a thousand miles of Sierra, through the heart of California, where grows the sequoia, the monarch among trees, to the very deserts of the Mexican border, and you will find this forest still covering all the hills, thick, silent, and all but undisturbed. A continent long is this wood, facing the Pacific, here two hundred miles wide, from the water's-edge across the heights of the Cascades and the Sierra, there narrowing to a thin, straggling, yet persistent growth along the mountain-tops.

This tree before you, rising two hundred and fifty feet in air, straight and strong, thick-coated with brown bark, its mighty base setting firmly in the earth, its roots gripping deep, was growing before Columbus saw America. Five hundred years has it been standing here, raising its head to the sky. What storms has it bent before; under what ages of sunshine has it gained strength; what lightning strokes have threatened it, what sweeping fires! And still it stands with the sublime majesty of age and strength, fearful of nothing-and the sound of axes knocking in the valley below!

But long before the seed of this hoary giant was sown in the wind, forests were old on these hills. For fifty thousand years and more have these mountains been forestclad, one forest rising five hundred years from youth to maturity, sinking away in

LXVI.-13

ripe old age, and giving room to another generation of trees. Deep in the earth to-day lie some of these ancient forests, changed by the slow chemistry of the ages into coal, and now at last beginning to give out for men the sunshine which they stored up centuries before the beginning of history.

During all these ages nature has favored the growth of forests on the Pacific mountains, providing the peculiar conditions which make them far different, much greater in size, more luxuriant, than any other in the world. Of all the creations of the living world none is so great in size, so majestic in presence, as the mighty trees of the Sierra and the Cascades. For here the air is always fertile with moisture; clouds blown in from the Pacific Ocean rest among the mountain summits, even crowning the tops of the trees themselves, and here discharge their rain. The soil is deep and spongy with centuries of decomposing vegetable matter, furnishing an unequaled nurturing-place for vegetation, and there are no extremes of heat in summer or depths of cold in winter. Every condition has been favorable to unexampled exuberance of growth not only of the larger trees, but of all manner of undergrowth, vine, shrub, and brake. A huge tree falls, decays, and is yellowed with thick moss; immediately scores of young firs and cedars spring up along the top of it-the first chance of a bare spot in the wood. Old burned stumps, gathering soil in their hollow interiors, are nurseries for colonies of young trees, some strong individual finally shouldering out the others, growing larger, and, as the mother stump drops away, sending its roots downward into the earth through the disintegrating textures, until it, in time, becomes a great tree. Even where the lumberman has laid the country waste with ax and fire, the new growth, creeping in silently from all directions, clothes the naked land with green within a year or two—a tangle of verdure almost impassable. Some of the old cuttings of Wisconsin and Maine have become all but barren wastes, the new growth coming in slowly or not at all; but here reforestation, unless prevented by continued fires or cultivation, goes forward immediately. There is no hindering the work of the fertile earth and the moist winds, and if these hills, when cut over, could be pro

tected, they would again produce a great forest, though none of us might wait to see the harvest.

We hear much of the magnitude of Western lumbering operations. Truly they are great and wonderful, and yet so vast are the forests that men have barely notched the edges. An eye that could see the continent length would hardly perceive the puny cuttings of the few loggers among the great trees, though he might see the blackened evidences of the forest fire.

Yet the logger is there at last, the sign of the consuming human builder. Five hundred years has the forest been preparing for his advent; he comes now, heedlessly, to reap his crop, unmindful of the wonders of the place. Long ago he sent down most of the forests of Maine to build Boston and New York; he has consumed the timber of Pennsylvania; he has nearly swept away the noble Lake Superior forests; he is fast subduing the ranges of the Southern pine; and now surely, slowly, inexorably, wastefully, he is gnawing his way into the greatest of all forests. Years it will take him, but he will finally subdue it -he and that other more destructive agency, his own ungoverned servant, the forest fire. Already, comparatively small as his beginnings are, he has built up scores of towns in the forest region; hundreds of miles of his railroad penetrate its solemn depths; he has absorbed the services of scores of ocean vessels; and his product is now being used in every part of the world: his masts on ships built in Maine; his shingles on houses in the ancient lumber stronghold of Michigan; his timbers in the mines of Australia and South Africa. His business to-day makes up a large share of the total commerce of the ports of Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, to say nothing of a score of other towns along the Pacific from Alaska to California.

BUT the waste of it all! Nothing impresses the visitor more strongly than the almost reckless despoliation of the forest. Here they have left to rot or burn a stump twelve feet high, seven feet across; here is the entire top of the tree, a hundred feet or more in length, in places over a foot through, with great branches forty feet long. It would yield a large amount of good lumber, lath, shingles, and scores of cords of wood. If only that forest could be gleaned

for the East Side of New York! Presently, when the loggers have finished their cutting, they will burn over the land, destroying everything that is left, even killing all the young and growing trees, some of them fifty years old or more, and large enough for good lumber, but left to waste in this forest where there is so much other and better timber. You travel over miles and miles of such blackened, desolate waste, in some cases the earth having been sown with grass-seed so that no new forest growth will appear. Much more than half of the actual bulk of the timber (sixty or seventy-five per cent.) is ruthlessly wasted, burned, lost, in the process of lumbering.

Yet the lumbermen say helplessly:

"What can we do? We don't like the waste; we are the greatest losers. But it does not pay us to cut any closer or save any more. We must watch our ledgers. We can find sufficient market for only the best and choicest lumber, so we save only the best logs. Freight rates to the East are so high that we cannot manufacture common-grade stuff and sell it to compete with Michigan and Georgia, and the population here on the coast is not sufficient yet to absorb a tenth part of it. As the country settles up and the demand grows, we shall cut closer and save more, as they are now doing in the Eastern lumber woods. As for the fires, we must burn over our old cuttings, else they furnish material for forest fires which would sweep into and destroy the green timber."

So the waste goes ruthlessly onward. The loggers are only one element in the wholesale destruction. Every year great fires break out, sweeping through the mountains, licking the very earth bare of its timber, and leaving it hopelessly desolate and forlorn, sometimes wiping towns out of existence, destroying railroad property, and taking toll of human life. For weeks during the summer of 1902, while we were among the forests, all Oregon and Washington lay under a pall of smoke: towns, sawmills, farms, logging-camps burned; settlers were driven from their homes; millions of acres of forest were burned, the timber being utterly destroyed, representing the loss of millions of dollars. The result of a single fire in Washington is thus described in a newspaper despatch:

were

TACOMA, WASHINGTON, September 16, 1902. Thirty-eight bodies were found to-day in the Lewis River valley, indicating that the devastation there by forest fires was worse than

supposed. The search is still in progress. The burned district was settled by five hundred prosperous farmers, who lost all they had. Sixty persons camping out at Trout Lake, near the base of Mount St. Helens, saved themselves by taking to the water on improvised rafts of poles and logs. One hundred and forty sections of the finest timber in Cowlitz County were destroyed. The total losses in western Washington cannot be less than two million dollars, without counting the cessation of the logging industry of southwestern Washington.

Henry Gannett, government lumber expert, is authority for the statement that while about twenty per cent. of the merchantable timber of Washington has been cut by lumbermen, over twenty-two and a half per cent. has been destroyed by fire. And there seems no way to stay this criminal wastefulness and loss, the very robbery of coming generations; there is no concerted action, no thought for the future. While the fire burns, the people talk, as at the burning of a neighbor's barn; the newspapers agitate: but with the first rain the fires are forgotten until another year.

Everything connected with the lumbering industry of the Northwest is built on larger lines than in the East. The timber is greater, the distances more extended, the country far more mountainous and difficult, the waste more appalling. Consequently the Northwest has had to develop new methods of lumbering, using a maximum of machinery and steam, a minimum of man-muscle and horse-power. Naturally, the practices in different localities vary slightly according to local conditions. Sometimes oxen are employed to haul the logs out of the woods; sometimes, where a mountain stream is convenient, they are shot down steep hillsides in water-chutes, landing at the bottom in a pond or river. In one locality, Bridal Veil, Oregon, where the forest is in the depths of an inaccessible cañon, the logs are lifted up hundreds of feet by wires suspended from the top of the cañon, sawed on the hills, and the lumber sent down in water-chutes. But, in the main, the methods are everywhere the same, and very different indeed from the operations in the Maine and Wisconsin woods-more daring, and on much larger scale.

a

In these older lumber States the trees are not so large by far, nor do they grow usually in such difficult mountain places. There is more room for the work of men

and oxen, for pevee and pike and ax. The Eastern logger commonly cuts his timber only in the winter, lands the logs on the ice of some stream or lake, and in the spring utilizes the freshet waters for driving them out and down to the sawmill, often many miles below. The lumberman chops in winter, goes " on the drive" in the spring, and lies idle, spending his money, in the summer. But these new loggeries of the Pacific coast never rest, cutting, hauling, sawing all the year round, except for a week at the Fourth of July, the greatest time of the year for every lumberman, and another week or more at Christmas. Nowhere else in the world has timber-cutting reached such a science as it has here in the West. The Russian government has had two separate commissions, for weeks at a time, inspecting these operations with reference to duplicating the machinery and methods in the forests of the Caucasus and Siberia.

The loggers in these camps live much as they do in Wisconsin, as they have for years in Maine-the same rude shacks set in the deep woods; the same long, low dining-room, with the same advertisement girls on the walls; the same fat cook in oil-cloth apron bringing in the same huge pans of beans, potatoes, soda-bread, pork, and prunes. Yet there are many and important differences. Working all the year round in one place, some of the men bring their wives and families to the camps; others build separate shacks, where they can secure privacy and a few comforts that they cannot find in the big, smoky bunk-houses. The camps are often more like little villages than temporary lodgings, and they are correspondingly more comfortable, attracting a better class of men. In the Eastern camps the management supplies the bed-clothing and the food. Here every man owns and cares for his own bedding, and has pride in keeping it clean; and he pays for his board from his wages at so much a day. Wages in the West are also higher. In one camp that I visited ordinary workingmen received from two dollars and a half to three dollars and twenty-five cents a day, with a deducted charge of sixtyfive cents for board. A fine, healthy,