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Show THE TRAGEDIES IN THE FORESTS. Thoso who live in a region not heavily timbered'and who have never seen a forest fire beyond control can scarcely realize how fire fighters can be caught in the flames. It seems beyond belief that a fire can travel at a speed of twenty miles an hour even when fanned by the wind, yet we are told that tho flames yesterday swept over the Avery timber belt at 25 miles to 60 miles an hour. With well organized bodies of fire fighters, the danger of being entrapped in one of those roaring furnaces should be remote, yet hundreds of men in this work of saving the forests have been caught and burned to death. It may be that the men had penetrated the timber in the mountains without being fully informed as to the progress pro-gress of the fires they were fighting and in that way have failed to see the danger or take steps to guard against threatened isolation. There has been in the past no such concerted and well organized effort at combatting timber fire3 and yet the loss of life in the present disaster has been most appalling and almost unequalled. The men who have sacrificed their lives have met the worst of fates and, we presume, that many of those wno have been hemmed in and finally have escaped as by a miracle, never will fully recover from the mental shock of seeing great encircling tongues of fire. Several volunteers were caught in a canyon in the St. Joo country. They saw no outlet and were transfixed by the horrors of tho scene until one of the party had the presence of mind to lie down in a small creek and protect his body with blankets soaked with water. They heard twenty of their number scream and pray for deliverance, deliver-ance, and then they saw the ill-fated seared by the devouring flames and finally reduced to charred corpses. Men who survive a peep of that kind into the inferno either have minds that are inactive which save them from brain storms, or, being keenly sensitive to tho situation, sit-uation, must suffer a mental collapse that years cannot cure. The forest fires in Idaho and adjoining states are to bo classed among the great calamities of this country in both the loss of life and the destruction of property. |