This scene depicts an early-day Forest Ranger in a remote area of central Oregon. In the early 1900s these Forest Rangers were essentially custodians of the forests, protecting them against fire, game poachers, timber and grazing trespassers and exploiters. In those years Forest Rangers and Forest Supervisors were used to trail life; many of them former cowboys, trappers, and woodsmen.
To provide use of the public forests, rangers issued permits for grazing of domestic livestock and made the first sales of mature timber and other forest products.
President Theodore Roosevelt was quoted, "Forestry is the preservation of forests by wise use…forestry means making the forests useful not only to the settler, the rancher, the miner, the men who live in the neighborhood, but indirectly to the men who may live hundreds of miles off down the course of some great river which has had its rise among the forest-bearing mountains."