[Page 34]
LOGGED-OFF LANDS.

The problem of making a home and providing a competency for old
age upon the lands in western Washington is somewhat different
and more difficult than doing the same upon the prairie lands of
the east. As they come to the hands of the would-be tiller of the
soil, they present a forbidding and disagreeable aspect. The loggers
have left them with considerable standing timber, with the tops of
the giants of the forests lying where they fell, scattered over
the land and covering it with an almost impenetrable mass of great
limbs and brush and dead logs. If seen in the summer, there is
added the view of a mass of green vegetation, rank and to a large
extent covering up the mass of dead stuff left by the loggers with
the huge stumps sticking up through it all, mute monuments of the
lost wealth of the forest. In some instances this is somewhat relieved
by the fact that, either by accident or design, the fire has been
there and swept through it all, leaving nothing but blackened and
smouldering emblems of its prior greatness. In this case, however,
only the lighter part of the refuse has been destroyed. The great
stumps of fir and cedar are there still, blackened and perhaps
with their dead hearts burned out. Great and small decaying logs
are there, some too wet to burn, some with the bark alone burned
off, and some with the dead centers burned out, scattered about
or piled in crisscross masses as they had fallen during the ages
of the forest's growth. In either case it looks different from
the smooth surface of the sagebrush plains about to be converted