Cavanagh, Forest Ranger

Ross Cavanagh, a forest ranger of English birth, patrols a Colorado mountain district where federal conservation rules are new and unwelcome. Stockmen who ran sheep and cattle over the high range for years treat his authority as an insult, and the sheepman Sam Gregg sets himself against the service outright. Into this comes Lee Virginia Wetherford, back in Roaring Fork after ten years of schooling in the East, who finds her mother’s boarding house shabby and its reputation worse. Her disillusion and Cavanagh’s steadiness draw the two together. Garland, writing in 1910 from long acquaintance with the West, sets the remembered frontier against the one arriving, and gives forestry the dignity of public service rather than treating it as a backdrop for adventure.