em in so far as he can.

Although there had been a small start toward forest preservation, it was
not until Mr. Pinchot was placed at the head of the movement in 1898
(six years after the first reserve was made), and organized and
reconstructed the force of officials, that we really had any national
forest policies worth mentioning.

His enemies first attacked his motives. He was a "notoriety seeker," a
"political adventurer" looking for personal advancement. To their
surprise they found that he showed not the slightest disposition to
exploit himself; that, having millions at his command, he could expect
to gain nothing financially by his course; and that he was absolutely
devoid of any political ambitions.

They then took another point of attack. "He is an Eastern swell who
knows nothing of forests, or the West and its needs. By what right does
he tell us how to use the public lands?"

And again they found him invulnerable, for, after graduating from Yale
in 1889, he had made a systematic and thorough study of forestry. He
traveled in Europe, through Russia, on the great steppes of Siberia, in
the Philippines, and in every part of the United States where there were
forests he investigated conditions and studied the water problem, the
grazing of cattle and sheep, and the effect of lumbering and forest
fires. There is hardly a corner of our whole Western country from the
Missouri to the Pacific where forests are found that he has not visited
and inspected. Days, weeks, and months spent on horseback and on foot in
the roughest, most inaccessible portions of the Rocky Mountain region
from the Canadian to the Mexican line have made him familiar with every
problem of forest preservation. He has studied the attendant and equally
important question of watershed protection and utilization of the
mountains for conserving the sources of all our great Western streams,
by which millions of acres are to be irrigated and millions of homes
built up in the West. He was from the first no "tenderfoot" adventurer,
no visionary enthusiast, but a practical, hard-headed man far more
earnestly and disinterestedly concerned in the Westerners' future than
they themselves had ever been.

Born in Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1865, of old New England ancestry, Mr.
Pinchot is just in the prime of life. A man of tremendous energy and
resourcefulness, tactful, quick to see a point, frank to admit his
errors, open and friendly in his intercourse wit