USE OF FIRE
Above all, it pays the settler in wooded regions to be careful with fire. Properly directed and confined, fire is necessary in clearing land. But there is no profit in allowing uncontrolled fire to spread from the actual clearing to create a snarl of dead, decaying and falling trees and underbrush. It is usually harder to extend the clearing into such ground than into green timber. This added work later is many times that necessary to safeguard the burning in the first place.
In every case that fire ever escaped from clearing operations, the cause was either thoughtlessness or unwillingness to perform certain work. Because it is easier to burn a slashing than to pile and burn; or when a ground burn is desirable, because it is easier to take chances than to clear a fire line around the area and have a force of men present; because burning at a dry, dangerous time will be cleaner and thus save work after the fire; inexperience, coupled with unwillingness to take advice from the experienced—these and like reasons are responsible for the destruction of lives and property worth over and over again the sum that was saved by the attempted economy. And, although this does not save others, the person responsible also usually loses instead of gaining.
Without deprecating in the least the importance of agricultural development or of lightening the useful and not easy task of the settler, it is still terribly true that the agricultural industry and the settler suffer an annual loss through the destruction of improvements, crops and stock by fires from careless clearing that is far greater financially than the saving in clearing cost which was the cause. In other words, agricultural development is retarded instead of advanced by its present careless use of fire.