The United States Government maintains a little army of twelve hundred men whose duty it is to look after the vast national forests, whose area is about five times that of Great Britain. Here, monarchs of all they survey, these rangers of the wild lead solitary and strenuous lives, sometimes not meeting a fellow human being for months on end.
The United States Government maintains a curious little force of policemen who do not patrol posts in the cities or towns, but may well be called the guardians of the wilderness, for it is their business to look after vast forests where few human beings live. It may seem odd that it is necessary to have Nature's police to go here and there in the forests and amid the mountains, but it is very necessary in order to protect one of the great resources of America. Some of these rangers of the wild have "beats" so extensive that one man may be the sole protector of a miniature empire, comprising two hundred thousand acres of primeval forest.
Mere figures cannot give the stay-at-home reader any adequate idea of the vastness of some of the great "reserves" in which the patrolmen live month after month. If the whole of London is measured it will be found to contain over seventy-five thousand acres, yet no fewer than eighty cities the size of London could easily be placed in a single one of the American "national parks." Washington Park, situated in the State of that name, and the greatest of them all, contains no less than ten thousand square miles of territory.
A FOREST RANGERS' PACK-TRAIN ON THE TRAIL.
From a Photograph.
RANGERS MEASURING TIMBER IN A SWAMP.