 It is the dawn of the 17th century, along the then unknown profile of America, outstretched from New England's Stony Coast to Virginia's shore, one vessel after another, filled with seaworn passengers destined by fate and the grace of God to be America's first settlers, feast with hungry eyes upon the mysterious shore that awaits them. And it lasted anchors, as if intuitive of what is to come, fittingly anchors by making fast to the trees. And that rope, that rope that binds their vessel to the new land, to trees that will cradle their progress for the next 300 years, that rope is like an umbilical cord, nourishing the birth of a new nation on earth. As to shore, these men from an anciently occupied continent, whose trees had long been felled and acres cleared for farming, stood in awe before a woodland undisturbed since the last glaciers retreat. They marveled at the abundance of every plant imaginable and some that weren't. Towering pine, whose girth was thicker than a man is long, maples so mighty a ship's keel could be shaped from a single one, but magnificent as the forest was. It was also dark, brooding, the trees so thick, the branches so intertwined, the sun was kept and outside it, the unrelenting gloom frightened even brave men into talking in histories. This raw forest stretched endlessly without a relieving open space to the horizon, then again beyond that and more still. Only the bird who could rise above it could judge its immensity, but just as the forest's shading branches were the enemy of farming, so was the bounty of the forest the settlers friend. For the forests were more than just a source of wood for fuel and homes, its animals were their prime source of food even long after the land was cleared. Almost everywhere wild plants in due season offered up a welcome feast and with the help of only an axe and a few modest tools, the trees provided many of the material things a pioneer family needed, simultaneously meant blackness defied and land cleared for crops, coaxing in the sun to warm the kernels of the life-giving plant the Indians had gifted them. In New England, the new settlers were not permitted to cut down the tallest and finest white pines, so prized were these as ship masts for the Royal Navy. They were axe-branded by King's men with a broad arrow and forbidden to the colonists. Along with the T-Tacks, this fired many New Englanders to revolution. With the spirit of liberty triumphant, now for its own ships, America turned freely to its woodlands and found locked in such placid waters as New England's Salmon Falls River, power enough to utilize the forest in earnest. For it was here that the nation's first water-driven sawmill helped birth the lumber industry, so vital to supporting the growth of our country for generations to come. Eager at last to fashion their own destiny, hands fashioned vessels to sail Yankees across the Seven Seas seeking the fortune that swam as a whale. Mementos of that age called scrimshaw were everlastingly etched on whale's teeth by lonely sailors at sea, whiling away the long, long time away with thoughts of home. Later, born by swift American clipper ships pursuing trade, the American flag was shown the world over. The wooden ships following their wood-carved figureheads, literally the forest at sea into the earth's most distant corners and ancient lands. They brought back strange riches to wonder their country. Along with the much-priced tea, their cargo included the first elephant ever seen in America. And so the nation prospered, its cities multiplying wherever new immigrants put down their roots to match those of the trees that sheltered them. Some acquired great wealth and lived in fine homes, but in cabins far to the south where newcomers strayed when they found the land along the eastern shore taken. To the hills of West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, where only Indians lived before, later came men intent upon shaping not a new Europe, but a new world, and found geography in turn that shaped them. In the Appalachians, the way our people were is still, in many ways, the way our people are today. Here are found some of the last Americans with a way of life still firmly cradled by the forest, the changes that now threaten this life sadden many, including Varney Watson's grandpa, of whom he sings. I guess when everybody's young, they always have someone they can look up to, at least when I was a kid and no idea, my grandpa was my hero, and he used to tag along while he was working, and the stories that he told about the good old days he made him sounds big. Well, I've been in the woods all my life, yes, I've been in the woods all my life. We went to town about once a year, about as old as we got to town, and that's generally the pay taxes. Back when I was about ten years old, it started building a big log house, one room for eleven of us and family, and we got it built, and we occurred two acres in land. We didn't think anything about the timbers as much more than just thinking that the Lord, he put it all here for us. Everything was available then, about everything to get a hold of it, just about how to take it out of the woods. To make you go to sleep at night, they use a lady slipper, which is better than any of these sleeping buildings, you've got your good store, and they have to defend on the wood for their heat and their building. In other words, these mountain people made their living off the woods. They had to work when I was growing up, people don't have to work now, they can make it to that work. Did you have washing machines? Yes, I had that for a washing machine, washed them with her hands. Did you have tubs to wash them in? I had a big trough, washed them in a big trough to the battling stick and a wash part and boil them. How did you get your call? Dug it. Dug it out of a big tree. I've dug lots of them. Everybody lived that kind of life, that was the reason it wasn't hard. How about the future? I predict that if times don't get better and people quit living for the devil like they do and not caring for human beings, I predict the end of time is coming. When you leave nature, you leave out your life. The ancestors of these mountain people who are today the last true bridge to our forest-oriented past that early in the 1800s followed Lewis and Clark even farther west. Built canals carried Americans to the Great Lakes region across the Alleghenies along the Wabash. Writing newly built turnbikes and national road, they followed the forest into Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi in an ever westward trust called one of the greatest migrations in history. Pioneers clad in homespun, living in log cabins, struggled to clear a place for home and farm by girdling the trees, leaving magnificent giants standing about as one British traveler put it with their throats cut, but it was the nation's great rivers whose very waters were nourished by the preserving green carpet of the forests that were the best route to the promised land, with the Mississippi serving as America's liquid main street, grassland. Here, for the first time since setting foot in the new world, a man could actually see the horizon and the grand sweep of the sky. For almost a generation, he paused at the edge of this land sea, along the domain of the buffalo and the Indian, fearful to venture upon it, because he knew not how he'd survive where the forest did not grow to support him. Not until the homesteader was given the steel plow that could cut the thick crust of its virgin soil did he take courage and move out upon the plain. Building first for himself houses of sod instead of logs, and many hardships later still accumulate all the riches with which this Nebraska farmer proudly had himself pictured. In contrast, the vision of the nation's future, such as artist Thomas Cole painted it, was fantastic, for there seemed no limit to the great American dream, only it was always just over the horizon, always having to be reached in some rough, realistic way. The mightiest surge toward that dream was in wooden land ships, born in the forests of Lake Erie and the east. Their ruts are still there, carved in Nebraska's soil as if an eternal witness to their passing. Some left their earthly bodies as if to blaze the trail, one grave imperishably marked by the bent rim of a wagon wheel that traveled only this far. After many a wearing mile and wearying day, the sun at last clearly showed them the landmark they had seen beckoning days before, Chimney Rock. They paused, thanking God for seeing them safely here. But once rested, they hastened on to challenge the mountains as they wheeled toward the setting sun. Forest, actually the sawing of timber right here at Sutter's Mill in California, that brought the treasure to life. For here, in these very waters, was first discovered the flickering image that was to change a hundred thousand destinations. Gold, gold but for the panning. To get it, 50,000 gold-crazed Americans raced over land, thousands clippers shipped around Cape Horn, and thousands more trudged across the tropic shortcut, the isthmus of Panama. Australians, Irishmen, Scotchmen, Chinese, swarms racing to find El Dorado, but destined to found a state instead. Neco remains. After the gold hunters had come and gone, after the long, slow wagon trains lurching west, it came. In Pacific moving west, the Central Pacific moving east, advanced each day on trestles, bridges, beds that were once the prime trees of each region. 6,250,000 wooden ties in all, without which the trains could not travel an inch. And when, in April of 69, the separate rail lines were joined at Utah's promontory point, the great day of coming had truly arrived. East and west were at last forever one. To the new undreamed of forests of western America, the freshly laid tracks of the transcontinental railroad were like a road to conquest. A double-edged blade raised against the most majestic trees on earth. Giant sequoia, Douglas fir, Redwood, the scotch-born naturalist John Muir, who loved them as his children, wrote, all through the wonderful centuries since Christ's time, and long before that, God cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanche, and the thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. It was called the greatest orgy of destructive lumbering in the history of the world. By 1909, American sawmills produced 44 billion feet of lumber, up to then an all-time heap. Ending for centuries were felled like kindling, leaving only stumps to mark their place. Soon the lumberman, despite his contribution to the early development of the nation, despite the towns and villages he helped make possible, became, in the eyes of his critics, public enemy. For everywhere he went, he left behind a horrible wake. Growing conservation movement, which began in the late 1800s, would soon become a major force under a strong and able leader. His name was Gifford Pinchel. And he was a crusader. As the frontier closed and a troubled, profligate America began hesitantly to establish forest reserves, Pinchel returned from studying forestry in Europe, where they were not so wealthy in trees, to put into practice the lessons he had learned abroad. And later, in 1905, under Teddy Roosevelt, he became the nation's first chief forester, with an eager young staff and with a minimum of equipment. He worked and taught and fought, preaching conservation, the wise use of our forest resources to all who would listen. It was a national movement, dedicated not to the one-time use of our forests with its consequent mantle of destruction, but to renewal, renewal through reforestation, reforestation to assure that life will succeed death. Today, more and more of our forests are being managed, planned by men and women in government and industry who study the science of trees in laboratory and field, study seed breeding, disease control, fertilization. With each seedling put down into the receiving earth, matched by millions more, we now grow more trees than we harvest. Not only in the traditional ways, but sometimes to preserve the surrounding trees and area and eliminate road building, logging is airborne. The conservation movement has progressed far beyond concern simply for our timber resources. We have come today to see to the preservation of the country's grasslands, guarding them against erosion and abuse to better support our sheep and cattle industries, to value our water resources as essential to our well-being, viewing the forest as the protective mantle of the nation, and to plan the use of our forest resources for play as well as for profit, and to provide a fitting home for our wildlife. But beyond that, what else have we the people discovered? We have discovered that our spiritual needs are, as they always were, that we hunger for the eternal peace of the wilderness, as God made it. And so we have set aside millions of acres bereft of the imprint of civilization, where trees grow as they will, where streams run clear, where animals thrive, where man moves only on horseback or his own two feet, not to remain, but only as a visitor. We have learned much. We must learn more. Our forests are as important today as they were in colonial times, for indeed they are the very roots of our nation, sustaining each of us. Their future is one with America's future. And in the words of John Muir, we all travel the milky way together, trees and men.