heir
positions. Every man was urged to resign. Many did so. Others hung on
because the job was too soft to lose. Some, like Ross Fletcher,
California John, Tom Carroll, Charley Morton and a few others, moved on
their accustomed way.

One of the inspiring things in the later history of the great West is
the faith and insight, the devotion and self-sacrifice of some of the
rough mountain men in some few of the badly managed reserves to truths
that were but slowly being recognized by even the better educated of the
East. These men, year after year, without leadership, without
encouragement, without the support and generally against the covered or
open hostility of their neighbours, under most disheartening official
conditions kept the torch alight. They had no wide theory of forestry to
sustain their interest; they could certainly have little hope of
promotion and advancement to a real career; their experience with a
bureaucratic government could not arouse in their breasts any
expectation of a broad, a liberal, or even an enlightened policy of
conservation or use. They were set in opposition to their neighbours
without receiving the support of the power that so placed them.
Nevertheless, according to their knowledge they worked faithfully. Five
times out of ten they had little either of supervision or instruction.
Turned out in the mountains, like a bunch of stock, each was free to do
as much or as little of whatever he pleased. Each improved his district
according to his ideas or his interests. One cared most for building
trails; another for chasing sheep trespassers; a third for construction
of bridges, cabins and fences. All had occasionally to fight fires. Each
was given the inestimable privilege of doing what he could. Everything
he did had to be reported on enormous and complicated forms. If he made
a mistake in any of these, he heard from it, and perhaps his pay was
held up. This pay ran somewhere about sixty or seventy-five dollars a
month, and he was required to supply his own horses and to feed them.
Most rangers who were really interested in their profession spent some
of this in buying tools with which to work.[A] The Government supplied
next to nothing. In 1902 between the King's River and the Kaweah, an
area of somewhere near a million acres, the complete inventory of
fire-fighting tools consisted of two rakes made from fifty cents' worth
of twenty-penny nails.

But these negative discouragements were as n