In 1935, Emma Lou Dakin, a Lassen Junior College student won that year’s contest. The Dakin name may be familiar to some, as her old home is now the Dakin Unit of the Honey Lake Wildlife Refuge.I am only publishing a small excerpt, but this will help to explain why so much of the Diamond Mountain range is privately owned. Once upon a time farmers were allowed to file for a 160 acre federal timberland patent. This provided the farmer wood for cooking/heating, fence posts etc. With that in mind, Emma Lou uses that as an example.
“Each one of us farmers own a little piece of timber land where we get our wood, fence posts and logs. There’s an old saying that ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ My father is one of those old fashioned ranchers, but somehow for some unknown reason he did sell some logs to the Lassen Lumber & Box Company in 1929. From 300,000 feet of lumber we cleared $1,050, while in the same year from ninety head of cattle we got $3,000, but half of the $3,000 was put back into the cattle for feed, while nothing but our annual tax of $4.16 came out of our timber money. Besides making $1,050 we had enough slash left to furnish us wood for two years. From this experience I began to notice the economic value of the forests were to us people in Lassen County.”