The first Europeans settlers did not step off boats into a vast, primeval forest untouched by human hands. Millions of Indians were living in these forests then, and more than half their food supply came from cultivated fields kept free of trees by repeated burning. There is no scientific evidence to support the largely romantic notion that eastern forests were somehow formed independent of human influences. The fact is they were shaped and reshaped by human and natural forces.

          Dr. Edward Buckner, Overton Professor of Forestry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Evergreen, October, 1997

Instead of finding an uninterrupted forest carrying 100,000 (board) feet or more per acre, reaching from the Cascades to the Pacific, the first settlers 75 years ago (1840) found the valleys great areas of ‘prairie' land covered with grass, brakes or brush which were burned to keep treeless by the Indians, and mountainsides upon which forest fires had destroyed the mature forests and which were then covered by a ‘second growth' of Douglas-fir saplings or poles.

          Thornton Munger, "The Productive Capacity of The Douglas-fir Lands of Western Oregon and Washington" University of California Journal of Agriculture, 1916, Evergreen, March-April, 1994

Fires have widely ravaged the region examined. There is not a single forested township either on the west side or on the east side of the Cascade range in which timber is not more or less fire marked without much doubt the present agricultural areas, once grass covered and carrying scattered stands of oak, were burned over quite as extensively as the timbered tracts.

          John Leiberg, "Twenty First Annual Report of the United States Geological Service," 1900, Evergreen, March-April, 1994

The assertion is often made that today's western forest health problems are the result of the aggressive fire suppression activities initiated by the Forest Service and other federal agencies in the 1930s, coupled with the extensive harvest of western pine forests after World War II. While there is some truth to these assertions, they tell only a partial story. A substantial reduction in ecosystem fire had already occurred over much of the West by the late 1880s or even before. It coincided with the disintegration of the cultures of native peoples in the area, virtually all of whom actively used fire as a major land management tool. [Other factors included] settlement of western valley areas and, especially, with increased livestock grazing which broke up fuel continuity.
          Douglas MacCleery, USFS, "The Way to a Healthy Future for National Forest Ecosystems in the West," Evergreen, Winter 2000