Mr. Pinchot rapidly gathered about him a force of expert assistants. The forest schools in the East were just turning out their first crop of young men, trained and educated as scientific foresters, and he brought them into the work. A year or two in the forests, mapping, scaling, estimating, and studying the western timber conditions, made them practical as well as scientific. The old sawmill men, themselves educated in the college of "Hard Knocks," first laughed at these college-bred foresters, but soon learned to respect and trust them. They began to adopt their plans and follow their suggestions, and to-day one of the most serious embarrassments the forester has to meet is the continual hiring away from him of his best men by the Western lumber and sawmill men, who offer salaries far beyond what the government pays. To handle the stockmen's interests--by far the most difficult and perplexing of all the problems connected with the administration of the national forests--Pinchot went to the Southwest and persuaded one of the most intelligent and level-headed young stockmen in the country to become head of the grazing department. A. F. Potter had been for years a cow-boy and range cattleman, then for several years a sheep owner, and not only knew every branch of the stock business through practical experience, but had the administrative ability to handle successfully the intricate and perplexing questions of ranges, priority of rights, effects of grazing, and methods of handling stock that must be passed upon. With this corps of assistants, and with Mr. Overton W. Price, a man second only to himself in ability, as his chief lieutenant, Mr. Pinchot began in earnest in the year 1898 the work of saving the remaining forested areas of the United States. A few years ago the mining men, lumbermen, and the stockmen were almost united in their opposition to the policies of the Government Forest Service. Then the mining men found to their surprise that instead of being ruined and forced out of business they were being helped. If a miner had a valuable claim on some national forest lying idle, the forest ranger of that district saw that not one stick of timber upon it was cut by unauthorized persons. In the past, when a miner returned to his claim after a year's absence, he generally found it stripped of the timber which some day he would need for its development. Under the new service, he discovered also that, when there was no timber on his own claim, he could buy at a reasonable figure all the timber he desired for the development of his mine. In many cases, in southern Arizona, for instance, where the wood haulers were in the habit of taking from the miners' claims fuel which they would be likely to need for their engines sooner or later, the rangers stopped the practice and gave the wood haulers other areas from which to cut, where no such injury to the miners would result. _Land Piracy Checked_