d C. Pulaski, of the Coeur
d'Alene National Forest, stationed at Wallace, Idaho. Pulaski had charge
of forty Italians and Poles. He had been at work with them for many
hours, when the flames grew to be so threatening that it became a
question of whether he could save his men. The fire was travelling
faster than the men could make their way through the dense forest, and
the only hope was to find some place into which the fire could not come.
Accordingly Pulaski guided his party at a run through the blinding smoke
to an abandoned mine he knew of in the neighborhood. When they reached
it, he sent the men into the workings ahead of him, hung a wet blanket
across the mouth of the tunnel, and himself stood there on guard. The
fierce heat, the stifling air, and their deadly fear drove some of the
foreigners temporarily insane, and a number of them tried to break out.
With drawn revolver Pulaski held them back. One man did get by him and
was burned to death. Many fainted in the tunnel. The Ranger himself,
more exposed than any of his men, was terribly burned. He stood at his
post, however, for five hours, until the fire had passed, and brought
his party through without losing a single man except that one who got
out of the tunnel, although his own injuries were so severe that he was
in the hospital for two months as a result of them. The record of the
Forest Service in these terrible fires is one of which every Forester
may well be proud.

The Ranger must protect his District, not only against fire but against
the theft of timber and the incessant efforts of land grabbers to steal
Government lands. To prevent the theft of timber is usually not
difficult, but it is far harder to prevent fake homesteaders, fraudulent
mining men, and other dishonest claimants from seizing upon land to
which they have no right, and so preventing honest men from using these
claims to make a living.

In the past, this problem has presented the most serious difficulties,
and still occasionally does so. There is no louder shouter for "justice"
than a balked habitual land thief with political influence behind him.
To illustrate the kind of attack upon the Forest Service to which
fraudulent land claims have constantly given rise, I may cite the
statements made during one of the annual attempts in the Senate to break
down the Service. One of the Senators asserted that in his State the
Forest Service was overbearing and tyrannical, and that in a particula