DALTON RANCH
Baker County - Private - Cooperator
January 1930: "The Whitman has one cooperator who acts as a lookoutman, crew organizer and firefighter.
It is very seldom that a busy rancher, especially one operating on a large scale, will take the time or have the interest in fire control displayed by Mr. J. Wylie Dalton of North Powder, Oregon.
In a fenced enclosure back of the ranch house there is mounted a #2 Osborne firefinder covering the east slopes of the Elkhorn range, a blind area to any of our regular lookouts. Each fire season there are a number of first reports on fires from this point.
As a crew organizer, Mr. Dalton is second to none and can always be depended upon to rustle and send any man required or go in person with them. On seeing the Daley road fire last August, Mr. Dalton stopped work, took the threshing crew, rustled more men in North Powder and then handled as foreman the rear and parts of the flanks of this fire while the District Ranger and staff officers took care of the front of the fire. No small job as be built and held over two miles of line with very little loss in a bug-killed moss-covered area of dead and down lodgepole, white fir and thick reproduction.
Why does he do it? Mr. Dalton says the forest cover preserves stream flow and holds moisture, also he likes to hunt and fish and see the home of wild life preserved. He is as interested in fire fighting as a science, and the technique of the game, as any of us in fire control work. It has been noted at the fire guard training camps that our cooperators generally take a greater interest in the work than many of our short-term men. A.G. Angell" (Six Twenty-Six)
It is very seldom that a busy rancher, especially one operating on a large scale, will take the time or have the interest in fire control displayed by Mr. J. Wylie Dalton of North Powder, Oregon.
In a fenced enclosure back of the ranch house there is mounted a #2 Osborne firefinder covering the east slopes of the Elkhorn range, a blind area to any of our regular lookouts. Each fire season there are a number of first reports on fires from this point.
As a crew organizer, Mr. Dalton is second to none and can always be depended upon to rustle and send any man required or go in person with them. On seeing the Daley road fire last August, Mr. Dalton stopped work, took the threshing crew, rustled more men in North Powder and then handled as foreman the rear and parts of the flanks of this fire while the District Ranger and staff officers took care of the front of the fire. No small job as be built and held over two miles of line with very little loss in a bug-killed moss-covered area of dead and down lodgepole, white fir and thick reproduction.
Why does he do it? Mr. Dalton says the forest cover preserves stream flow and holds moisture, also he likes to hunt and fish and see the home of wild life preserved. He is as interested in fire fighting as a science, and the technique of the game, as any of us in fire control work. It has been noted at the fire guard training camps that our cooperators generally take a greater interest in the work than many of our short-term men. A.G. Angell" (Six Twenty-Six)