Identifier: ournationalparks1909muir (find matches)
Title: Our national parks
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Muir, John, 1838-1914 author
Subjects: National parks and reserves
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company
Contributing Library: Harold B. Lee Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University

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em just right, and draw a bead onem, I fetch em every time. Another said hewas going to catch up a lot of mustangs assoon as the rains set in, hitch them to a gang-plough, and go to farming on the San Joaquinplains for wheat. But most preferred the shakebusiness, until something more profitable and assure could be found, with equal comfort andindependence. With a cheap mustang or mule to carry a pairof blankets, a sack of flour, a few pounds ofcoffee, and an axe, a frow, and a cross-cut saw,the shake-maker ascends the mountains to thepine belt where it is most accessible, usuallyby some mine or mill road. Then he strikes offinto the virgin woods, where the sugar pine, kingof all the hundred species of pines in the worldin size and beauty, towers on the open sunnyslopes of the Sierra in the fullness of its glory.Selecting a favorable spot for a cabin near ameadow with a stream, he unpacks his animaland stakes it out on the meadow. Then hechops into one after another of the pines, until
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SUGAR PINE THE AMERICAN FORESTS 355 he finds one that he feels sure will split freely, cutsthis down, saws off a section four feet long, splitsit, and from this first cut, perhaps seven feet indiameter, he gets shakes enough for a cabin andits furniture, — walls, roof, door, bedstead, table,and stool. Besides his labor, only a few poundsof nails are required. Sapling poles form theframe of the airy building, usually about six feetby eight in size, on which the shakes are nailed,with the edges overlapping. A few bolts from thesame section that the shakes were made from aresplit into square sticks and built up to form achimney, the inside and interspaces being plas-tered and filled in with mud. Thus, with abun-dance of fuel, shelter and comfort by his ownfireside are secured. Then he goes to work saw-ing and splitting for the market, tying the shakesin bundles of fifty or a hundred. They are fourfeet long, four inches wide, and about one fourthof an inch thick. The first few thousands

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