ter; the mining, sawmill, and railroad men the timber; until--simply
because no one made it his business to object to the spoliation that was
going on--what had been done wholly on the suffrance of the national
government had come to be regarded and most lustily defended as an
inherent privilege and right.

[Illustration: GIFFORD PINCHOT]

And so when, a decade ago, the tall, pleasant-voiced young man from the
far East, now known throughout the United States as Gifford Pinchot, the
national forester, appeared in the West, and suggested to the stockmen
that they were ruining the country by over-grazing, they laughed him to
scorn.

He told the mining and sawmill men that through reckless and extravagant
methods of lumbering they were bringing on a timber famine by great
strides; he characterized their whole policy as one of utter disregard
for the future of the country; and he demanded forcible and immediate
action on the part of the Federal authorities. These pioneers had seen
uncounted millions of buffalo melt away because no one took enough
interest in the matter to stop the wanton waste. They had seen great
billowy prairies, once knee-deep in the most splendid covering of grass
and vegetation, grazed down until they were hardly more than dust heaps;
and mountains that were clothed with magnificent forests swept
bare--first by the woodsman's ax and later by forest fires that burned
each year millions and millions of feet of the finest timber a country
ever possessed, while no one raised a hand even to quench the fire
because "it was only government land."

_The Fight against the "Pinchot Policies"_

These hard-headed, adventurous Western pioneers, indignant at the
thought of any curtailment of their freedom; resentful of interference
in what they were pleased to call their "inalienable right" to do as
they pleased with the country they had conquered; utterly regardless of
its future, and thinking but of the present and their own selfish
interests, arose in their wrath and protested vigorously against what
they called the "Pinchot policies" of the government.

That the writer, then a range cattle-raiser in Arizona, was one of the
first to feel the effects of the new forest policy gives him all the
more right to speak as he does of these things; that he joined with loud
tongue and bitter pen in the general denunciation of the "Pinchot
policies" makes it all the more a pleasure to him now to defend and
explain th