The only remaining class opposed to the policy of the Forest Service is that composed of the stock-raisers; and for their interests and welfare the Forest Service has worked harder than for all the other users of the forests combined.
That mistakes were made in handling the livestock interests; that in some cases individuals were unduly hampered with rules enforced by over-zealous forest officers, is not to be denied. It was a huge task. Almost in a day the Forest Service sprang full-fledged into the world, charged with the care and responsibilities of more than a hundred million acres; to-day it controls a third of the area of grazing country in the United States, whereon graze about eight million sheep and a million and a half cattle and horses.
Trained foresters there were to be had in plenty, but men who knew the stockman's trade, whose training fitted them to handle the vexatious questions of range divisions, over-grazing, and relative injury done by cattle, sheep, and goats, were hard to find, and when found were not willing to enter the Service for the niggardly pay allowed by the government. However, the Forest Service, with its ranger system, is to-day training up a class of young men, who, in a few years, will be at once expert lumbermen, scientific foresters, and excellent all-round frontiersmen and stockmen.
In this work there have been no precedents to follow, no rules to look to for guidance. Instead, rules must be made and tested through use; precedents must be established and certain fundamental principles worked out and made a basis for future government.
THE EFFECT OF EROSION ON A HILLSIDE FROM WHICH THE FOREST COVER HAS BEEN REMOVED
Further than this, every section has its own necessities. Rules that would apply to Oregon and Washington, with their sixty inches of rainfall a year, would not apply to Arizona, with its ten. One great mountain region, whose waters drained off into the ocean and could never be used for irrigating purposes, might safely be let open to all kinds of grazing; while another equally large section, just as well grassed, would have to be closed to sheep and goats, with their erosive little feet and habits of grazing in large bands, because all the drainage went into creeks, streams, and rivers that lower down on the desert were needed to irrigate vast areas of valuable farming lands.
The Roosevelt Dam Case
Take a single case: that of one national forest in Arizona. At the upper end of this forest—which is a long, narrow tract covering a great mountain chain—rise two or three streams; on the eastern slope, the Rio Verde and the Salt River, on the western, the Agua Fria. A hundred miles below these heads the government is building, at a cost of more than $4,000,000, the great Roosevelt Dam which will furnish water to irrigate 250,000 acres of the richest of soils around the city of Phoenix in the Salt River valley. One of the most serious problems in the construction of the great dams in the West is the question of silt, which is washed down in the streams and will eventually fill up and render useless these expensive dams and reservoirs.