"You are right, yet you will be surprised to see the inroads that have been made at different points. Lumbering there, you must remember, is advancing on a large scale, and a stick that would be thought of fair size in Maine, is discarded in Oregon as too small. I know one lumberman who won't cut a tree on his section that isn't at least twenty inches in diameter." "They'd better save some trees," said Owen. "If they don't, they'll suffer one of these days, just as Maine is beginning to suffer." "The government has already taken hold of the matter, and, in the three States I have named, Uncle Sam has set aside over thirty-two thousand square miles of forest lands which nobody can touch. These parks, as they are called, are filled with pines, fir, hemlock, redwood, and other trees." "Are there many small lumbermen out there?" asked Dale. "There used to be, years ago. A man would come out here, take up a homestead claim, and perhaps buy up some additional claims near by, and then start in to cut trees on his own account, getting them to market as best he could, and taking whatever the wholesale lumber companies cared to pay him. But all that is changed now. Business is done on a big scale, and the companies have millions of dollars invested. One company alone gets out half a million feet of logs every day." "Such an amount would be worth a small fortune in Maine!" put in Owen. "What a plant that must be!" "It certainly is a fine plant, and has many miles of railroad tracks, half a dozen locomotives, and ten times as many flat cars and trucks, four movable sawmills, six or eight movable donkey engines, a six-foot flume a mile long, from the top of one hill to the side of another, and a large quantity of machinery of all kinds." "And how many men are employed at such a place as that?" "I don't know exactly, but I should say close on to four hundred. They employ one man who does nothing but purchase provisions for the crowd, and have eight or ten cooks and also a first-class doctor." "If they have a railroad, I don't suppose they have much use for horses," said Owen. "The railroad runs through only a small part of the property, and to get the logs to the road they use both the donkey engines and horses. They build a skid road first, the same as you do in Maine, and then hook the logs fast to each other, making a train of them. Sometimes they use as high as twenty horses to move the log train. When they use a donkey engine, they chain the engine fast to some trees, and then hook the logs fast to a wire rope, that winds up on a big drum, moved by the engine. When the logs get to the drum, the donkey engine and drum are moved ahead, and then the logs are drawn up as before, and this is kept up until the logs are drawn to the spot where they are wanted." "I suppose it is nothing but lumber in some towns," said Dale, after a pause.