Though Engineer officers of the regular establishment were, of course, given command of these specialist regiments, the other officers as well as the soldiers themselves were recruited from men trained in the particular sort of work which each regiment was expected to perform. How to obtain officers of sufficient experience in these various lines of industry, and in sufficient numbers, promised at first to be a serious problem, but it was quickly solved by the Personnel Division of the Engineers, which had had on file, ever since the war-clouds first appeared on America’s horizon, tens of thousands of letters from men trained in every branch of the engineering profession, offering their services to the government in case of war. Hence, when it was decided to raise a forestry regiment, it was a simple matter to turn to the files and find the names of thousands of men—mill-owners, forest-rangers, lumbermen—with their experience and qualifications carefully listed, who were intimately familiar with every phase of the industry, from tree to finished board. The best qualified of these applicants were offered commissions by telegraph and instructed to go out into the lumber country and recruit their companies and battalions from men who had worked under them or whom they knew. Soon the walls of every employment-office, bunk-house, and cook-shack from the pine woods of Maine to the spruce forests of Washington blossomed with posters calling for axemen, sawyers, log-drivers, timber-cruisers, mill-operators, cookees, teamsters, for immediate service overseas. The response was prompt and startling. From their camps on the Kennebec and the Androscoggin, from the Adirondacks, from the pine-clad shores of Superior and Huron, from the Michigan Peninsula and the North Woods of Minnesota, from the forested slopes of the Wind River, the Bitter Roots, and the Cascades, from the big timber of the Far Nor’west the lumbermen came pouring in, in mackinaws and parkas, in moccasins and shoepacks, in knitted toques and caps of fur, their scanty belongings wrapped in the blanket-rolls slung across their backs and often with their axes on their shoulders. Sinewy-limbed, saddle-colored, horny-handed, tough as the timber of the forests whence they came, these were the real pioneers, the conquerors of the wilderness, the last of the frontiersmen, and Europe will, in all likelihood, never see their picturesque like again.