Commercially, the 1,400 square miles of Glacier Park, even with its 60 glaciers and 260 lakes, are worth exactly the price of its big trees, and not a penny more.  For mining, agriculture, horticulture and stock-raising, it is a cipher.  As a transcendant pleasure ground and recreation wilderness for ninety millions of people, it is worth ninety millions of dollars, and not a penny less.  It is a pleasure park of which the greatest of the nations of the earth,—­whichever that may be,—­might well be overbearingly proud; and its accessibility is almost unbelievable until seen.

This park is bounded on the south by the Great Northern Railway, on the east by the Blackfoot Indian Reservation, on the north by Alberta and British Columbia, and on the west by West Fork of the Flathead River.  Horizontally, it contains 1,400 square miles; but as the goat climbs, its area is at least double that.  Its valleys are filled and its lakes are encircled by grand forests of Douglas fir, hemlock, spruce, white pine, cedar and larch; and if ever they are destroyed by fire, it will be a national calamity, a century long.

So long as the American people keep out of the poorhouse, let there be no lumber-cutting vandalism in that park, destroying the beauty of every acre of forest that is touched by axe or saw.  The greatest beauty of those forests is the forest floor, which lumbering operations would utterly destroy.

Never mind if there is “ripe timber” there!  The American nation is not suffering for the dollars that those lovely forest giants would fetch by board measure.  What if a tree does fall now and then from old age!  We can stand the expense.  If Posterity a hundred years hence finds itself lumberless, and wishes to use those trees, then let Posterity pay the price, and take them.  We are not suffering for them; and our duty is to save them inviolate, and hand them down as a heritage that we proudly transmit unimpaired.

[Illustration:  UNITED STATES NATIONAL GAME PRESERVES and Five Pacific Bird Refuges]

The friends of wild life are particularly interested in Glacier Park as a national game reservoir, and refuge for wild life.  On the north, in Alberta, it is soon to be extended by Waterton Lakes Park.

When I visited Glacier Park, in 1909, with Frederick H. Kennard and Charles H. Conrad, I procured from three intelligent guides their best estimates of the amount of big game then in the Park.  The guides were Thomas H. Scott, Josiah Rogers and Walter S. Gibb.[L]

[Footnote L:  See Recreation Magazine, May, 1910, p. 213]

They compared notes, and finally agreed upon these figures: 

Elk 200
Moose 2,500
Mountain Sheep 700
Mountain Goats 10,500
Grizzly Bears 1,000 to 1,500
Black Bears 2,500 to 3,000