The United States Forest Service is responsible both for the general progress of forestry, so far as the United States Government is concerned, and for the protection and use of the National Forests. These National Forests now cover an area of one hundred and eighty-seven million acres, or as much land as is included in all the New England States, with New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. The head of the Service, whose official title is "Forester," is charged with the great task of protecting this vast area against fire, theft, and other depredations, and of making all its resources, the wood, water, and grass, the minerals, and the soil, available and useful to the people of the United States under regulations which will secure development and prevent destruction or waste.

The United States Forest Service consists, first, of a protective force of Forest Guards and Forest Rangers, who spend practically the whole of their time in the forest; second, of an executive staff of Forest Supervisors and their assistants, who have immediate charge of the handling of the National Forests; and third, of an administrative staff divided between headquarters in Washington and the six local administrative offices in the West, where the National Forests mainly lie.

The work of a Forest Ranger is, first of all, to protect the District committed to his charge against fire. That comes before all else. For that purpose, the Ranger patrols his District during the seasons when fires are dangerous, or watches for signs of fire from certain high points, called fire-lookouts, or both. He keeps the trails and fire lines clear and the telephone in working order, and sees to it that the fire fighting tools, such as spades, axes, and rakes, are in good condition and ready for service. If he is wise, he establishes such relations with the people who live in his neighborhood that they become his volunteer assistants in watching for forest fires, in taking precautions against them, and in notifying him of them when they do take place.

Fighting a forest fire in some respects is like fighting a fire in a city. In both, the first and most necessary thing is to get men and apparatus to the site of the fire at the first practicable moment. For this purpose, fire-engines and men are always ready in the city, while in the forest the telephones, trails, and bridges must be kept in condition, and the forest officers must be ready to move instantly day or night.

It is far better to prevent a forest fire from starting than to have to put it out after it has started; but in spite of all the care that can be exercised with the means at hand, many fires start. Each year the Forest Service men extinguish not less than three thousand fires, nearly all of them while they are still small. At times, however, when the woods are very dry and the wind blows hard, in spite of all that can be done, a fire will grow large enough to be dangerous not only to the forest but to human life. Thus in the summer of 1910, the driest ever known in certain parts of the West, high winds drove the forest fires clear beyond the control of the fire fighters, many of whom were compelled to fight for their own lives.

The worst of these fires were in Montana and Idaho, where the whole power of the Forest Service was used against them. The Forest Rangers, under the orders of their Supervisors, immediately organized or took charge of small companies of fire fighters, and began the work of getting them under control. But so fierce was the wind and so terrible the heat of the fires and the speed with which they moved, that in many places it became a question of saving the lives of the fire fighters rather than of putting out the fires. As a matter of fact, nearly a hundred of the men temporarily employed to help the Government fire fighters lost their lives, and many more would have died but for the courage, resource, and knowledge of the woods of the Forest Rangers.

Take, for example, the case of Ranger Edward 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 particular case it had driven out of his home a citizen known to the Senator, and had left him and his family to wander houseless upon the hillside, and that for no good reason whatsoever.

This statement, if it had been true, would at once have destroyed the standing of the Service in the minds of many of its friends, and would have led to immediate defeat in the fight then going on. Fortunately, the records of the Service were so complete, and the knowledge of field conditions on the part of the men in Washington was so thorough, that the mere mention of the general locality of the supposed outrage by the Senator made it easy to identify the individual case. The man in question, instead of being an honest settler with a wife and family, was the keeper of a disreputable saloon and dance hall, a well-known law-breaker whom the local authorities had tried time and again to dispossess and drive away. But by means of his fraudulent claim the man had always defeated the local officers. When, however, the officers of the Forest Service took the case in hand, the situation changed and things moved quickly. The disreputable saloon was promptly removed from the fraudulent land claim by means of which the keeper of it had held on, and this thoroughly undesirable citizen either went out of business or removed his abominable trade to some locality outside the National Forest.

The actual facts were fully brought out in the debate next day, remained uncontradicted, and saved the fight for the Forest Service. The whole incident may be found at length in the Congressional Record.

The Forest Ranger is charged with overseeing and regulating the free use of timber by settlers and others who live in or near the National Forests. Last year (1912) the Forest Service gave away without charge more than $196,000 worth of saw timber, house logs, fencing, fuel, and other material to men and women who needed it for their own use. Usually it is the Ranger's work to issue the permits for this free use, and to designate the timber that may be cut. For this purpose, he must be well acquainted with the kinds and the uses of the trees in his District, and it is most important that he should know something of how their reproduction can best be secured, in order that the free use may be permitted without injury to the future welfare of the forest.

A Ranger oversees the use of his District for the grazing of cattle, sheep, and other domestic animals. He must acquaint himself with the brands and marks of the various owners, and should be well posted in the essentials of the business of raising cattle, sheep, and horses. The allotment of grazing areas is one of the most difficult problems to adjust, because the demand is almost always for much more range than is available and the division of what range there is among the local owners of stock often presents serious difficulties, in which the Ranger's local knowledge and advice is constantly sought by his superior officer.

There is a wise law, passed at the request of the Forest Service, under which land in the National Forests which is shown to be agricultural may be entered under the homestead law, and used for the making of homes. This law is peculiarly hard to carry out because the ceaseless efforts of land grabbers to misuse it demand great vigilance on the part of the Forest Officers. In many cases it is the Ranger who makes the report upon which the decision as to the agricultural or non-agricultural character of the land is based, although in other cases the examinations to determine whether the land is really agricultural in character are made by Examiners especially trained for this duty. Serious controversies into which politics enter are often caused by the efforts of speculators and others, under pretext of this law, to get possession of lands chiefly valuable for their timber.

The building and maintenance of trails, telephone lines, roads, bridges, and fences in his District is under the charge of the Ranger, and in many cases Rangers and Forest Guards are appointed by the State as Wardens to see to it that the game and fish laws are properly enforced.

Next to the protection of his District from fire, the most important duty of the Ranger has to do with the sale of timber and the marking of the individual trees which are to be cut. The reproduction of the forest depends directly on what trees are kept for seed, or on how the existing young growth is protected and preserved in felling and swamping the trees which have been marked for cutting, and in skidding the logs. The disposal of the slash must be looked after, for it has much to do with forest reproduction, and with promoting safety from fire. Then, the scaling of the logs determines the amount of the payment the Government receives for its timber, and there are often regulations governing the transportation of the scaled logs whose enforcement is of great consequence to the future forest.

Nearly all of these duties the Ranger may perform in certain cases without supervision, if his judgment and training are sufficient, but the marking especially is often done under the eye or in accordance with the directions of the technical Forester, whose duty it is to see that the future of the forest is protected by enforcing the conditions of sale.These are but a part of the duties of the Ranger, for he is concerned with all the uses which his District may serve. The streams, for example, may be important for city water supply, irrigation, or for waterpower, and their use for these purposes must be under his eye. Hotels and saw-mills on sites leased from the Government may dot his District here and there. The land within National Forests may be put to a thousand other uses, from a bee ranch on the Cleveland Forest in southern California to a whaling station on the Tongass Forest in Alaska, all of which means work for him.

The result of all this is that the Ranger comes in contact with city dwellers, irrigators, cattlemen, sheepmen, and horsemen, ranchers, storekeepers, hotel men, hunters, miners, and lumbermen, and above all with the settlers who live in or near his District. With all these it is his duty to keep on good terms, for well he knows that one man at certain times can set more fires than a regiment can extinguish, and that the best protection for his District comes from the friendly interest of the men who live in it or near it.

A Forest Guard is in effect an assistant to the Ranger, and may be called upon to carry out most of the duties which fall upon a Ranger.

The foregoing short statement will make it clear that preliminary experience as a Ranger may be of the utmost value to the man who proposes later on to perform in the Government Service the duties of a trained Forester. It is becoming more and more common, and fortunately so, for graduates of forest schools to begin their work in the United States Forest Service as Rangers or Forest Guards. The man who has done well a Ranger's work, like the graduate of an engineering school who, after graduation, has entered a machine shop as a hand, has acquired a body of practical information and experience which will be invaluable to him in the later practice of his profession, and which is far beyond the reach of any man who has not been trained in the actual execution of this work on the ground and in actual daily contact with the multifarious uses and users of the forest.