All had occasionally to fight fires. Each
was given the inestimable privilege of doing what he could. Everything
he did had to be reported on enormous and complicated forms. If he made
a mistake in any of these, he heard from it, and perhaps his pay was
held up. This pay ran somewhere about sixty or seventy-five dollars a
month, and he was required to supply his own horses and to feed them.
Most rangers who were really interested in their profession spent some
of this in buying tools with which to work.[A] The Government supplied
next to nothing. In 1902 between the King's River and the Kaweah, an
area of somewhere near a million acres, the complete inventory of
fire-fighting tools consisted of two rakes made from fifty cents' worth
of twenty-penny nails.
But these negative discouragements were as nothing compared to the petty
rebuffs and rulings that emanated from the Land Office itself.
One spring Ross Fletcher, following specific orders, was sent out after
twenty thousand trespassing sheep. It was early in the season. His
instructions took him up into the frozen meadows, so he had to carry
barley for his horses.
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