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Show THE FOREST FIRES. Death and destruction followed in the wake of the forest fires which have burned over vast areas in the northwest. At times during the past month sections of the wooded mountains more than fifty miles in length have been a seething mass of flame. Man's best efforts to check the onrushing flames have been most futile. Hundreds of settlers and men in the employ of the forest service of the government have perished, towns and settlements have med the flames, and timber of incalculable value has been destroyed. Indeed, the situation last week grew to be such a menace to human life that efforts to check the flames were more or less abandoned in an enort to save human hie. it was a terrible situation ,and what was the cause? Perhaps some careless campers built a fire in the forests, cooked their meal and went away, leaving leav-ing the dying embers to be fanned into flames by a rising wind. Perhaps some smoker carelessly tossed a lighted match into a small bed of leaves. Perhaps a spark from a passing locomotive started a fire. Or it may be that different fires were started in different places. Carelessness surely is at the bottom of the whole sad affair. A fire in a forest is about as easily controlled as a fire in a powder house. About all human beings can do is to make a rush for safety. The flying embers may drop miles ahead of the principal fire and, starting smaller fires, hem in a territory from which escape is impossible. The dispatches said the fight made by the forest department in the Missoula district alone, which comprises Montana, northern Idaho and Wyoming, cost $7,000 a day, and that this expenditure would leave a deficit of $135,000 in the appropriation of the last Congress for fighting forest fires. That the efforts to check the flames were without appreciable appre-ciable effect is indicated by the fact that rain has long been looked upon as the only solution of the perplexing problem. Despite the most heroic efforts, ef-forts, the fires burned themselves out or were checked by a merciful shift of the wind currents. The experience in the northwest once more emphasizes em-phasizes the fact that the one way to fight forest fires, the one way to conserve the forests, is to prevent pre-vent fy-es from starting. How this is to be accomplished accom-plished it is impossible to say, but logging companies, com-panies, railroads, settlers and campers will have to join hands with the government forest department in enforcing the most stringent regulations. If, as has been suggested, the conservation of the natural resources of the nation is a movement to perpetuate the dominant political party in power, there must be some more efficient conservation than that shown in the northwest, or there will not be enough natural resources in the form of timber land to warrant the perpetuation of the department of forestry. |