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I had no idea what it was like till we stayed there. I knew from guide-books that there were thousands of acres of woodland still, though much had been "deforested"; but I didn't know it hid many beautiful villages, and even towns. It's a heavenly place for motoring, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be even better to walk, because you could eke out the joy of it longer.
Cutting trees when they have reached their maximum is a most necessary part, and it's a policy that helps to make the forest pay for itself. But the value to the forest lies in its conservation. You know about that?" "Yes, sir," said the boy; "it's keeping the watersheds from becoming deforested, either by cutting or by fire, and so preventing erosion from taking place."
Now the floods have carried destruction all over the land and the valley is a stony desert. Another photograph shows a mountain road covered with the stones and rocks that are brought down in the rainy season from the mountains which have already been deforested by human hands.
Our streams, in spite of the millions of dollars spent upon them, are less navigable now than they were fifty years ago, and the soil lost by erosion from the farms and the deforested mountain sides, is the chief reason. The great cattle and sheep ranges of the West, because of overgrazing, are capable, in an average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support and should still.
Parrots, kingfishers, swifts, and hummingbirds are almost helpless on the ground, their feet being adapted for climbing about the branches, perching on twigs, or clinging to the hollows of trees. Taken as a whole, birds would suffer more than any other class of creatures in a deforested world.
I had, therefore, to be content for the present with sketching and studying its main features at a distance. When we arrived at the Hoona hunting-camp, men, women, and children came swarming out to welcome us. In the neighborhood of this camp I carefully noted the lines of demarkation between the forested and deforested regions.
At the present time the destruction of our forests and serious injury to the water supply has been threatened through the organization of large lumber companies. Those interested in lumbering usually live far removed from the scenes of their operations, and consequently care little about the condition in which the deforested lands are left.
Two shifts work in factories for the twenty-four hours. They get about twenty to thirty cents a day and the little children get from nothing up to nine cents, or even eleven cents after they get older. Iron mines are idle, coal and oil undeveloped, and they cannot get railroads. They burn their wood everywhere and the country is withering away because it is deforested.
The road leads through majestic woods with ferns ten feet high beneath some of the thickets, and across a gravelly plain deforested by fire many years ago. Orange lilies are plentiful, and handsome shining mats of the kinnikinic, sprinkled with bright scarlet berries.
The Home of the Cats so called from the catamounts which infested the locality which had for over a century lazily basked before one of the hottest canyons in the Coast Range, had lately been stirred into some activity by the American, Don Diego Fletcher, who had bought it, put up a saw-mill, and deforested the canyon.
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