eat Continental
Divide, there is a region that has been splendidly furnished by the hand
of Nature. It is a bewildering maze of thundering peaks, plunging
valleys, evergreen forests, glistening glaciers, mirror lakes and
roaring mountain streams. Its leading citizens are white mountain goats,
mountain sheep, moose, mule deer and white-tailed deer, and among those
present are black and grizzly bears galore.

Commercially, the 1,400 square miles of Glacier Park, even with its 60
glaciers and 260 lakes, are worth exactly the price of its big trees,
and not a penny more. For mining, agriculture, horticulture and
stock-raising, it is a cipher. As a transcendant pleasure ground and
recreation wilderness for ninety millions of people, it is worth ninety
millions of dollars, and not a penny less. It is a pleasure park of
which the greatest of the nations of the earth,--whichever that may
be,--might well be overbearingly proud; and its accessibility is almost
unbelievable until seen.

This park is bounded on the south by the Great Northern Railway, on the
east by the Blackfoot Indian Reservation, on the north by Alberta and
British Columbia, and on the west by West Fork of the Flathead River.
Horizontally, it contains 1,400 square miles; but as the goat climbs,
its area is at least double that. Its valleys are filled and its lakes
are encircled by grand forests of Douglas fir, hemlock, spruce, white
pine, cedar and larch; and if ever they are destroyed by fire, it will
be a national calamity, a century long.

_So long as the American people keep out of the poorhouse, let there be
no lumber-cutting vandalism in that park, destroying the beauty of every
acre of forest that is touched by axe or saw. The greatest beauty of
those forests is the forest floor, which lumbering operations would
utterly destroy_.

Never mind if there is "ripe timber" there! The American nation is not
suffering for the dollars that those lovely forest giants would fetch by
board measure. What if a tree does fall now and then from old age! We
can stand the expense. If Posterity a hundred years hence finds itself
lumberless, and wishes to use those trees, then let Posterity pay the
price, and take them. We are not suffering for them; and our duty is to
save them inviolate, and hand them down as a heritage that we proudly
transmit unimpaired.

[Illustration: UNITED STATES NATIONAL GAME PRESERVES
and Five Pacific Bird Refuges]

The friends of wild life