Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 9/From Youth to Age As an American, part 3
FROM YOUTH TO AGE AS AN AMERICAN—III.
CHAPTER XI.
By John Minto.
THE CLIMATIC CONDITIONS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC IN THEIR INFLUENCE ON FORESTS, STREAMS AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIONS.
The preceding papers have been written with the double purpose of showing conditions of life in Oregon as the writer has experienced them, and in order to indicate wherein they differed from the conditions of the Atlantic Coast, even as to the pioneer settlements, but especially as to flow of rivers and action of rain and wind on the soil; and the personal narrative has been used at the cost of diffuseness, in order to indicate the reasons for a difference of opinion as to the best form of a conservative forest policy as a national policy, from those who have so far controlled it. Believing in a general national conservative forest policy as firmly as the present able Chief Forester, and having practiced it in Oregon longer than he has lived, I feel constrained by my duties as a citizen to give the reasons for my position in the best form I may ; and what I shall have further to say will be in connection with differences between the Atlantic and the North Pacific Mountain States, as alluded to in the President's message to Congress in 1902, recommending the reforestration of the South Appalachian Mountains. While endorsing all that is humanly possible for the nation to legally do toward reclothing the South Appalachian Mountains with the best hardwood forests the climate and soils will carry, that are most suitable for the demands of future manufacturers, the object, I believe, will be best attained by instructing and encouraging private initiative and ownership. It will beyond From Youth to Age As An American. 375 question be a difficult undertaking to change the civic spirit of the inhabitants of the South Appalachian Mountains, and lead them to seek peace and honor in the culture, care and harvesting of forest resources, in any other way than by appeal to civic pride, where so many of them have either depended on occasional wage labor and the small game yet remaining in their bush-covered surroundings, or the cultiva- tion of their rough little fields of corn, as breadstuff or as the basis of illicit distillation. It cannot and should not be attempted at public cost, without the good will of the people who have their homes in that region. In advocating an American system of forestry, in distinc- tion from the German system which the present Chief Forester began with and has clung to as much as the American spirit of men and institutions will permit, I am aware that the present population of the Appalachian Mountains may, per- haps will be, the greatest obstacle in the way of success, unless the improvement of their condition is made a first object in the plan. In some of his best papers in advocacy of a national forest policy, President Roosevelt has stated his conviction that "No policy will succeed unless it has the en- dorsement of the people; in the judgment of the writer, that is most true in regard to the people who inhabit the South Appalachian Mountains. They are, or were, a ' ' mighty poor," but also a mighty proud" people; but, treated right, they are a mighty potent people; as the winning of Oregon proved; in which national drama they furnished by far the greatest contingent, by about three to one, when the Oregon boundary was agreed on. Their camp-fire war stories were all located in the Southern States— Florida, Louisiana, Ken- tucky and Tennessee. As reasons for reforesting the Ap- palachian M6untains, the President accompanied his message to Congress with a finely bound volume of maps, plates, and letter-press descriptions of the erosions made by copious rain- fall in different localities on this chain of mountains, as the result of destruction of forest cover by over-cutting for homes or by forest fires. In support of the President's recommenda376 John Minto. tion there has grown up quite a body of magazine literature in regard to the loss of natural resources by fire, floods, erosions, etc., ascribed generally to the destruction of the forest cover, ""liese sources of waste are summarized by the President as follows: "The Southern Appalachian region embraces the highest peaks and largest mountain masses east of the Rockies. It is the greatest physiographic feature of the eastern half of the continent and no such lofty mountains are covered with hard- wood forests in all North America, Upon these mountains descends the heaviest rainfall in the United States, except that of the North Pacific Coast; it is often of extreme violence, as much as eight inches having fallen in eleven hours, thirty-one inches in a month, and one hundred and five inches in a year. "The soil, once denuded of its forests and swept by tor- rential rains, rapidly loses first its humus, then its rich upper strata, and finally is washed in enormous volume into the streams, to bury such of the fertile lowland as is not eroded by the floods ; to obstruct the rivers and to fill the harbors of the coast. More good soil is now washed from these cleared mountain-side fields during a single heavy rain than during centuries under forest cover." This description of results by the President is unquestioned as to some of the mountains and farms of that region, and the manner of rainfall described is not uncommon as far north as Pennsylvania. On the Pacific Coast, however, the 105-inch record is limited to a low gap in the Coast Range in Tillamook County, Oregon, extending less than twenty miles from south to north. But the President's mention of the North Pacific as a region having as much rainfall annually as he mentions— 105 inches— carries an inference, to the uninformed, that the North Pacific Coast receives its rains in the same way and with like results. Such an assumption would be a very serious mistake. Judging by the number of writers seeking attention through the cheap magazines, it is time that some one who has lived on this coast and had some opportunities to have an intelli- gent view of nature's operations in the three separate ranges 4 From Youth to Age As An American. 377 of the Coast, Cascades, and Blue Mountains of Oregon should call attention to conditions peculiar to this region. From the experience of sixty-four years of labor-life, beginning with logging for a sawmill in the Coast Mountains, planting and cultivating trees, both fruit and forest, as a means of living, and clearing land for cultivation and cutting and burning young trees in defense of the rich natural pasturage which we as pioneers found on much of Western Oregon, I can say that I have no doubt that land-slides do occur on the west side of the Coast Range, as it receives the heaviest impact of both wind and rain from the Pacific Ocean, and in places the hill- sides are steep from weather-wear; but the only slide I re- member to have noted came down heavily clothed wdth tim- ber—about one and one-half miles east of Clifton, before the Groble & Astoria Railroad was thought of. With a large ex- perience in the Cascade Range since, I would ascribe that slide to the tide wash in the Columbia River. It was due in part to the under softening by the tide-water and in part to the leverage of its timber rocked by the wind. Within the Cascade Mountains, following up the north bank of the North Santiam to the summit tree of the Davenport survey of 1874, eighty-seven and one-half miles from Salem, all the signs of surface disturbance off the right of way of the Corvallis & Eastern Railroad line— and there are many— are slides which brought down the trees with them, either broken up or parti- ally covered with stone and soil. Almost uniformly there would be the evidence of slush and mud to indicate that the rocking of the trees by the wind had let in the rain, loading and loosening the mass. There are other kinds of surface movement in the Cascades, in places where there is little soil, but acres of broken rock of no value, which, however, tends toward soil-making by sliding down into the river. In the sixty miles of this valley of the North Santiam, with its south bank in sight most of the way, there is but one slide in sight from the north bank, and the mass is not more than five acres in area, but it represents a great aggregate of surface of steep mountain sides of broken up, hard, trap rock^ at so steep an 378 John Minto. angle that the weight of a man or even a sheep will start tons it with a jingling, metallic grind, toward the brawling stream, busy with grinding roeks into gravel and sand and soil. In the case of this slide, it appears that the torrent, by undermining some softer rock— lime, marl, or volcanic ash- produced the slide which must have put thousands of tons under the grinding force of the stream. What has broken up these vast masses of hard, jingling stone? Are they the result of thousands or millions of years and countless earthquakes or volcanic upheavals? There is the presence of volcanic craters, now lake beds — like Marion Lake, sixteen miles east of this slide — the gem of this valley, at least as a natural fish-pond; then there are Clear Lake and Fish Lake, thirty miles south, draining into the McKenzie. All three of the lakes were formed by a mighty power throwing millions of tons of rock, scoria and ashes northeast from the cavities left, and the bottom of Clear Lake is formed by a grove of iir timber which must have slid gently to the place where they now are stand- ing upright, with their tops thirty to forty feet below the surface of the water. Ten miles east from this slide is a bed of ashes as fine as bolted flour, above the timber-line of Mount Jefferson, on the southwest slope. Every summer the snow- melt above the ash-belt makes new channels over them, and turns the crystal streams of the main river at first dun color and then whiter as it flows w^est to the great Willamette Val- ley. Mounts Jefferson, Hood and Raineer each mother white rivers. In the hot days of August the White and Pamelia branches of the North Santiam vary their flow from eight to sixteen inches daily. Mount Hood and the "Sisters" are the nursing mothers of streams in August and September, each sending down the life-giving fluid to bless human, vegetable, tree or animal life. The same general character of soil and soil formation reaches from the Willamette Valley eastward to and including the Rocky Mountains. From a point within forty miles southeast of the land or rock slide which started me on this descriptive tour, north to Puget Sound and south to New Mexico, soil on the highlands is colored reddish with From Youth to Age As An American. 379 oxide of maguetic iron, sliOAving gold-bearing quartz on thou- sands of hill-tops; the water clear and apparently pure, yet carrying in solution a mineral which loads pine-twigs so that the}^ sink in the immense crystal springs that rise within five to eight miles east of the summit of the Cascades — full-grown mill-streams, clear as crystal and as cold as ice In addition to the peculiarity of leaves, twigs and branches sinking in the waters of these large springs, so numerous at the east base of the Cascades, and. which form the Matoles, which enters the Deschutes at the Agency, forty-five miles north, is the clearness and coldness of the water and its un- satisfactory character as drink— you wish to drink again at such short intervals. I have met more than one educated man who held that it is due to over-filtration —seeping so far through basaltic rock that the life principle is filtered out of it. The question arises : may it not be filtering through the stratum of volcanic ash which Professor Condon so finely de- scribes in his geological history, "The Two Islands," the evidences of which remain throughout the mountain, valleys and stream-beds of the plains? From where I stand in fancy at this writing, sixteen miles northwest reaches the hot-and-cold springs of the Santiam; twenty-six miles south reaches Crater Springs, on the head of the Matoles branch of the Deschutes. This crater is a fine, hollow cone, thirty feet high, at the bottom of which a current of ice-cold water is gurgling its way toward the Des- chutes, the Columbia, and the Pacific Ocean. I was the old man of the party, and not sure the boys were not joking about the good water and ice they had found at the bottom of the gigantic bowl. One gave me his cup and an ax to reach in and chip off the ice. I could get a good drink by lying down, but the ice was further in, and over the water. I secured both, but saw also, when I rose to my feet, that I was sur- rounded by formation very similar to that around Soda and Steamboat Springs on Bear River, Utah, 700 miles eastward, and in woodland scenery not unlike that in sight from Pacific Springs, where we camped in sight of snow on the Wind River 380 John Minto. Mountains in August, 1844. The same color and texture of soil, seemingly without humus, but which nevertheless will bear two months without rain better than the corn-lands of Iowa will two weeks. OREGON WINDS SOIL-MOVERS. The mention of the Wind River Mountains reminds me that we in Oregon are as different in the winds that blow as in the rains and snow that maintain the flow of our rivers, for we are free from their cyclones and downpours of eight inches of rain in eleven hours, as in the Appalachian Mountains, which I will notice after stating that warm or hot springs and vol- canic ashbeds are, together with mineral springs, common occurrences all over the Columbia Valley from the west slopes of the Cascade Range to the Rocky Mountains. The return trade-wind from the South Pacific is now called the ' ' Chinook. ' ' It is the wind of blessing in more ways than those connected with or concerned with the Appalachian chain can well conceive of. The early and the latter rains" it brings from the South Pacific Ocean; it is the prevailing winter wind over Oregon and Washington, and is the natural enemy of frost and snow in all the country west of the Cas- cade Range, so that snow to load the trees and whiten the ground on the plains is exceptional weather west of these mountains. The longest time that sleigh-riding could be indulged in, within the last sixty-four years, was in the winter of 1861-2, after the waters of the Willamette had receded from the highest flood known to the conquering race. We had seven weeks of sleighing at Salem; the livery stable men, in order to give the stock healthy exercise, hitched up all for which they had harness, and with a string of sleighs gave free rides to young and old. My wife and children were at Salem, my farm stock and feed four miles south. I already knew the sound of the moisture-laden wind coming over the cold strata next the earth, and I remember well with what pleasure I sought my bed when I distinctly heard the heavenly sound. It is to every Pacific Coast stockman a sound of deFrom Youth to Age As An American. 381 light; Aeolian harps are nothing in comparison to a feeling stock o^^^ler. My description may be indefinite, but it is known up to and over the passes of the Rocky Mountains, 800 miles. I understand, reaching the head of the cold, rich, Sas- katchewan Valley. This wind, robbed of most of its rain by the Coast and Cascades, takes the snow off the country like a charm. But this is not all: the "Oregon," the "Columbia," the River of the West," second in size only to the Mississippi, is sand and gravel-making until it passes The Dalles, 200 miles from the ocean. From Cape Horn Rock, about 125 miles from the Columbia bar, the Chinook is an up-stream wind; some- times so strong that it compels the largest river steamers to tie up. The writer has seen it take the water from the river in sheets, and throw it up as spray, fog, and cloud. From <^ape Horn to Wind Mountain must be twenty-five or thirty miles of the grandest river and mountain scenery in the world. When not charged with rain, this Chinook charges itself with dry dust, sand, silt, and volcanic ash, and from weatherings of the broken basaltic rocks that largely line the grand gorge which this grand river makes through the Cascades; and de- posits it in recesses like the Hood River and White Salmon val- leys, but often at bends of its canyon, taking it up as an imperceptible dust, and laying it on the Klickitat, Wasco, and Sherman County Plains. In some places this action is so strong as to form sand dunes, as at Celilo, the mouth of the Deschutes, or extensive plains, as at Umatilla ; but this will be found true : that slopes declining from the forces of the Chi- nook wind are the best grain lands. The wind movement is generally opposite to the stream. The effect of this wind has been going on in the water courses as they have been formed in the uncounted years since the last volcanic era, widening the valleys as the wear of the 382 John Minto. stream deepened them,* and yet goes on, but with the effect of counteracting the tendency of the water to carry soil in the stream-beds, which, in regard to those extending to the Colum- bia, is slight, except in the case of cloud-bursts, which are happily of limited area and infrequent. The movement of soil-making by the wind may be fairly estimated at nine months of every year, in action, and the play of freshets by snow-melt lasts only about one month. In order to show the more general effect of these soil- forming winds in shallowing the lakes of Southeastern Ore- gon, I insert the following extracts from Professor Condon's book, "The Two Islands," which I think should be used in the high schools of Oregon : "In 1876, Governor Whiteaker, while camping in Eastern Oregon in the neighborhood of Silver Lake, noticed some fossil bones on the surface of the prairie and shortly after brought some fragments to the writer for examination. The Governor was soon convinced that he had discovered an im- portant fossil bed, and the next summer by kindly furnishing a team and sending his son as guide, he gave the writer the pleasure of visiting this Silver Lake country. * * * The last part of the journey took us through a monotonous dead level covered with sage-brush, until finally we reached the home of a ranchman on the shore of one of those strange alkali lakes whose flats are at this season covered with a thick inflorescence of alkali. Here we left our wagon and the next morning started on horseback for the fossil beds. After traveling about eight miles we saw, from the eminence of a sand dune, an apparently circular depression four or five miles across, in the lowest portion of which was a small pond or lake, surrounded by grass and tule rushes. Perhaps two ♦The following extract from a letter from a business man's observation (T. C. Elliot's, of Walla Walla, Washington,) will explain the effect: "* * * I am afraid that my own observations in the matter of allu- vial deposits is not intelligent enough to be of value in the stating. In this particular section (Walla Walla) there is certainly considerable soil moved every year by the wind, but at first glance it is the lighter upon the heavier soils. The silt that is carried out upon the bottom land adjoining the rivers is kept there by being sown to alfalfa, etc. But there are blow- holes in our fields from which the ashy soils cover adjoining acres, often to their detriment; and there is a stretch of country in this country that is affected by the winds blowing up through the Columbia River gorge at Wallula and is blowing off as it is put under plow. This last spring the wheat was simply uncovered and blown away, both before and after germination. As to the better fertility of the 'slopes inclining from the sun,' that is very certainly true." From Youth to Age As An American. 383 miles to the leeward this depression was bordered by a line of sand dunes, unquestionably formed from sands blown from the bed of the lake that once occupied the whole of this depres- sion. It is the blowing- out of this sediment which exposes the fossils buried in the depths of the old lake. * * * Judging from the uniformity of its surroundings one is found unavoidably thinking of an extensive lake sediment, of which this fossil lake is only a very small portion. The orig- inal Pliocene lake probably included Silver Lake and Klamath Marsh with its surroundings, and perhaps Summer Lake and an extension eastward over the present Harney and Malheur lake regions. These w^aters were low^ered to their present level by evaporation in excess of inflow. The mineral left behind accumulated until it covered the face of the pond like snow. * "Besides this extensive Pliocene lake already mentioned, there are, fronting on Snake River, a series of terraces, frag- ments of a continuous lake-bed from which the writer has received fresh-water fossils. Among these a small pastern bone of a horse was found, establishing the claim of the beds as Pliocene. "The fossils of these Silver Lake beds were found often lying on the surface, bare of any covering. The sands and dust that had covered them were blown to the leeward where they lay in extended dunes, and this uncovering and drifting process w^as still visibly going on. Among these fossils we found many arrowheads of obsidian, such as were used by recent Indians." This is the only allusion to native life Professor Condon makes while reading the geological history of Oregon from most original records and its use commended to our fellow citizens east of the Rockies. They may go far wrong if they assume that because 105 inches of rain may have fallen within one year in the Tillamook gap of the Coast Range, that it has any effect on the river system of Oregon ; only one small river being affected ; and there is yet no reason to fear the effect of our rains anywhere. As an old citizen of Oregon, from the office of the State Board of Horticulture, I gave my reasons ten years ago for opposing the initiation of the forest reserve system for the reasons assigned by the evidence drawn from the National Academy of Science, because it recom- mended imperial methods on unsustained assumptions and 384 John Minto. assertions which I knew to be untrue, so far as they related to Oregon. There are now being laid before the reading public in the various cheap magazines, papers on this subject of conserva- tion of natural resources ; one of the best of these is the Teohnical World, in which a Mr. Roy Crandall claims that the Missouri River washes away yearly, in its course through the State, 8,000 acres of farm lands worth $100 per acre, or $800,000, supported, he says, by the estimates of Prof. W. J. McGee, of the Inland Waterway Commission, from whom he quotes. The writer is glad to be able to quote from advance sheets of a very able paper on forests and reservoirs with particular reference to navigable rivers, in the proceedings of the Ameri- can Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. XXXIV, No. 7, by H. M. Chittenden, Lieutenant-Colonel, Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, to be presented November 4, 1909. I quote only the summary of the points made by this able and trained sci- entific vn:'iter, and would be glad to see his entire paper as part of the next report from the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture of the United States. He reasons calmly against the assumption that forests have a beneficial influence in preserving stream flow. He notes that the experiments of Gustav Wex, chief engineer in the improvements on the river Danube, adopted in 1897 by the committee of the American Academy Gj Science, but proved inconclusive, as did those made in France by M. F. Bailee, reaching an opposite conclusion, as noted by Mr. Chit- tenden in the paper here alluded to. The writer took issue with the committee mentioned, in 1897, and is therefore glad to endorse Mr. Chittenden's summary, which follows: (1) The bed of humus and debris that develops under forest cover retains precipitation during the summer season, or a moderately dry season at any time of the year more effectively than do the soil and crops of deforested areai similarly situated. It acts as a reservoir moderating the run- off from showers and mitigating the severity of freshets, and promotes uniformity of flow at such periods. The above From Youth to Age As An American. 385 action fails altogether in periods of prolonged and heavy precipitation, which alone produce great general floods. (2) At such times the forest bed becomes thoroughly sat- urated, and water falling upon it flows off as readily as from the bare soil. Moreover, the forest storage, not being under control, flows out in swollen streams, and may and often does bring the accumulated waters of a series of storms in one part of a watershed upon those of another, which may occur several days later ; so that, not only does the forest at such times exert no restraining effect upon floods, but by virture of its uncon- trolled reservoir action, may actually intensify them, " (3) In periods of extreme summer heat forests operate to diminish the run off, because they absorb almost completely and give off in evaporation, ordinary showers which in the open country produce a considerable increase in the streams; while small springs and rivulets may dry up more than form- erly, this is not true of the larger rivers. (4) The effect of forests upon the run-off resulting from snow melting is to concentrate it into a brief period and thereby increase the severity of freshets. This results {a) from the prevention of the formation of drifts, and (&) from the prevention of snow melting by sun action in spring and the retention of the snow blanket until the arrival of hot weather. "(5) Soil erosion does not result from forest cutting in itself, but in cultivation, using that term in its broadest sense. The question of preventing such erosion of soil-wash is alto- gether one of dispensing with cultivation or properly con- trolling. The natural growth which always follows the de- struction of a forest is fully as effective in preventing erosion, and even retaining run-off, as the natural forest. (6) As a general proposition, climate, and particularly precipitation, have not been appreciably modified by the progress of settlement and the consequent clearing of land, and there is no sufficient reason, theoretically, why such a result should ensue. (7) The percentage of run-off to rainfall has been slightly increased by deforestation and cultivation."*
- The reason Colonel Chittenden's last proposition is true Is that a live
forest carries a vastly heavier crop of vegetable life and roots much deeper than ordinary field crops. The leafage of the trees hold a proportion of the rainfall, but in the late summer when the land is thirsty a ripening cherry or prune crop is often injured by the bursting of the fruit — a result 386 John Minto. The careful and able writer of the valuable paper of which the foregoing seven propositions are a part, says truly, If they are correct they enforce two very important conclusions ; one relating to the regulation of our rivers and the other to forestry. ' ' The last proposition Colonel Chittenden states is connected with the first statement I made in connection with the run- off from the Willamette as close as manifest effect to cause ; when I said in my view that the general level of life-sustaining moisture has lowered in many places two feet— in some places ten— by the process of ditching to drain roadbeds, common and rail, and for field crops, so that it is no longer the home of damp land birds, like the curlew, crane, gray plover and snipe, or the ducks, geese and swans, that it used to be sixty years ago. But I have given the observations of my labor-life on both plains and mountains in the June Historical Magazine of this year (1908) and did, indeed, in a more general way, in 1898 in opposition to the German system of forestry, the legality of which I doubted when it was first initiated and felt that it was not in accord with the genius of our form of government. Seemingly to reconcile those like the writei, who believes that timber production is the very highest class of productive industry, we are beginning to see in the magazines that give the value of forestry as preservative of water flow, pictures of community life in Germany where communities have in- of the sudden intake by the feeding roots. On the other hand, some varieties of prunes shed their fruit when suffering from drouth. I have also noted the soft maple — a fine street shade tree in Western Oregon — take on autumn colors and shed its leaves fifteen to twenty days in advance of its neighbors of the same species, solely on account of a difference in the depth of soil under them. I have seen, within this month of October. French walnuts shed their leaves while their nuts were immature, clinging to the tree with hull unopen, the result of being on shallow soil with rock imder and compact blue grass sod over their roots ; while other trees of the same sort, within fifty feet of them, but on deep unsodded soil, were dropping the nuts of normal size clean from the hull, and holding their leaves, which slowly changed color. Where irrigation can be secured, on the property of an orchardist, its use is the surest means of producing perfect fruit. Thus water becomes more important as a resource, increasing the production of crops, of heat and of power. From Youth to Age As An American. 387 vestments in bodies of forest land which are managed for them by officers called " Oberf oresters " furnished by the Government presumably. A corner of the Black Forest is shown, where live a remnant of an Alamani tribe, which the Roman General, Caius Marius turned back from Rome over two thousand years ago. They live at and around Sulzburg, Baden, and use such teams in their forest as their forefathers used when marching toward Rome. They still keep oxen for teams, as then, but are settled where the doctor, teacher and minister are the aristocracy— take their glass of beer on a Saturday night— enjoy a jollificati<»n when the grapes are gathered, and are fortunate if they have a portion in the production of 10,000 acres of forest. This, according to the writer, contains thirteen communal forests, and one or two private forests, the owners of which have the right to manage their forests as they like. That is the form that I hope and trust practical forestry will take in the United States, the ownership to be an appurtenance to the land, the minimum proportion the land is to carry to be made a matter of record and its maiatenance as obligatory as taxes, but free in all other respects.