His activism helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and other wilderness areas. But the felled timber is not worked up into firewood for the engines and into lumber for the company's use; it is left lying in vulgar confusion, and is fired from time to time by sparks from locomotives or by the workmen camping along the line. John Muir: The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books, by John Muir. The Civil War had just ended. "In the Sierra Forests", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 3 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated July 1875, published 3 August 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 79 They might run into the adjacent forests and burn the timber from hundreds of square miles; not a man in the State would care to spend an hour in fighting them, as long as his own fences and buildings were not threatened. The people will not always be deceived by selfish opposition, whether from lumber and mining corporations or from sheepmen and prospectors, however cunningly brought forward underneath fables and gold. The remnant protected will yield plenty of timber, a perennial harvest for every right use, without further diminution of its area, and will continue to cover the springs of the rivers that rise in the mountains and give irrigating waters to the dry valleys at their feet, prevent wasting floods and be a blessing to everybody forever. But when the steel axe of the white man rang out in the startled air their doom was sealed. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees—tens of centuries old—that have been destroyed. The American Forests (1897) - Kindle edition by Muir, John . Over 150 years ago, John Muir set out on a thousand mile journey across the US, from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico, on foot. Size Chart. But there is not a single specimen of the redwood in any national park. John Muir (1838 – 1914) was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. This is an excerpt from "The American Forests," an essay by John Muir published in The Atlantic in 1897. Drifting adventurers in California, after harvest and threshing are over, oftentimes meet to discuss their plans for the winter, and their talk is interesting. The Indians with stone axes could do them no more harm than could gnawing beavers and browsing moose. Land commissioners and Secretaries of the Interior have repeatedly called attention to this ruinous state of affairs, and asked Congress to enact the requisite legislation for reasonable reform. Loading... Unsubscribe from JennifDudley? Even lumbermen in these regions, long accustomed to steal, are now willing and anxious to buy lumber for their mills under cover of law: some possibly from a late second growth of honesty, but most, especially the small mill-owners, simply because it no longer pays to steal where all may not only steal, but also destroy, and in particular because it costs about as much to steal timber for one mill as for ten, and therefore the ordinary lumberman can no longer compete with the large corporations. the glory of the world! The S Yet the dawn of a new day in forestry is breaking. Then he chops into one after another of the pines, until he finds one that he feels sure will split freely, cuts this down, saws off a section four feet long, splits it, and from this first cut, perhaps seven feet in diameter, he gets shakes enough for a cabin and its furniture,—walls, roof, door, bedstead, table, and stool. The redwood is restricted to the Coast Range, and the big tree to the Sierra. Every place is made better by them. They cover an area of about 29,000,000 acres. My First Summer in the Sierra. All Rights Not only do the shepherds, at the driest time of the year, set fire to everything that will burn, but the sheep consume every green leaf, not sparing even the young conifers when they are in a starving condition from crowding, and they rake and dibble the loose soil of the mountain sides for the spring floods to wash away, and thus at last leave the ground barren. These residual forests are generally on mountain slopes, just where they are doing the most good, and where their removal would be followed by the greatest number of evils; the lands they cover are too rocky and high for agriculture, and can never be made as valuable for any other crop as for the present crop of trees. World does not move backward until something more profitable and as sure could selfishly... And splitting for the market, tying the shakes in bundles of fifty or hundred... 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