Public sentiment should be aroused on the general question of forest preservation, and especially in the matter of securing legislation which will adequately protect the game and the forests of the various forest reservations already established. Special attention was called to this point in the earlier volume published by the Club, from which we quote:
If it was worth while to establish these reservations, it is worth while to protect them. A general law, providing for the adequate guarding of all such national possessions, should be enacted by Congress, and wherever it may be necessary such Federal laws should be supplemented by laws of the States in which the reservations lie. The timber and the game ought to be made the absolute property of the Government, and it should be constituted a punishable offense to appropriate such property within the limits of the reservation. The game and timber on a reservation should be regarded as Government property, just as are the mules and the cordwood at an army post. If it is a crime to take the latter, it should be a crime to plunder a forest reservation.
In these reservations is to be found to-day every species of large game known to the United States, and the proper protection of the reservations means the perpetuating in full supply of all the indigenous mammals. If this care is provided, no species of American large game need ever become absolutely extinct; and intelligent effort for game protection may well be directed toward securing through national legislation the policing of forest preserves by timber and game wardens.
A really remarkable phenomenon in American animal life, described in the paper on the Yellowstone Park Protection Act, is the attitude now assumed toward mankind by the bears, both grizzly and black, in the Yellowstone National Park. The preservation of the game in the Park has unexpectedly resulted in turning a great many of the bears into scavengers for the hotels within the Park limits. Their tameness and familiarity are astonishing; they act much more like hogs than beasts of prey. Naturalists now have a chance of studying their character from an entirely new standpoint, and under entirely new conditions. It would be well worth the while of any student of nature to devote an entire season in the Park simply to study of bear life; never before has such an opportunity been afforded.
The incident mentioned on [page 421] was witnessed by Mr. W. Hallett Phillipps and Col. John Hay. Since this incident occurred, one bear has made a practice of going into the kitchen of the Geyser Hotel, where he is fed on pies. If given a chance, the bears will eat the pigs that are kept in pens near the hotels; but they have not shown any tendency to molest the horses, or to interfere in any way with the human beings around the hotels.
These incidents, and the confidence which the elk, deer and other animals in the Park have come to feel in man, are interesting, for they show how readily wild creatures may be taught to look upon human beings as friends.
Theodore Roosevelt,
George Bird Grinnell.
New York, August 1, 1895.