Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/404

376 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