Every wild garden is trodden down, the shrubs are stripped of leaves as if devoured by locusts, and the woods are burned.

Running fires are set everywhere, with a view to clearing the ground of prostrate trunks, to facilitate the movements of the flocks and improve the pastures.

The entire forest belt is thus swept and devastated from one extremity of the range to the other, and, with the exception of the resinous _Pinus contorta_, Sequoia suffers most of all.

Indians burn off the underbrush in certain localities to facilitate deer-hunting, mountaineers and lumbermen carelessly allow their camp-fires to run; but the fires of the sheepmen, or _muttoneers_, form more than ninety per cent.

of all destructive fires that range the Sierra forests.
It appears, therefore, that notwithstanding our forest king might live on gloriously in Nature's keeping, it is rapidly vanishing before the fire and steel of man; and unless protective measures be speedily invented and applied, in a few decades, at the farthest, all that will be left of _Sequoia gigantea_ will be a few hacked and scarred monuments.
TWO-LEAVED, OR TAMARACK, PINE (_Pinus contorta_, var._Marrayana_) This species forms the bulk of the alpine forests, extending along the range, above the fir zone, up to a height of from 8000 to 9500 feet above the sea, growing in beautiful order upon moraines that are scarcely changed as yet by post-glacial weathering.