THE USES OF WOOD 



851 



with wheels which would almost pass for automobile 

 wheels of today, except the tires. The chariot dates from 

 before the time of Sanballat, or looo years before the 

 Christian era. The light wheels on some of the chariots 



ON THE ROAD TO FRANCE 



This shipment of Overpack's Michigan logging wheels was bound for France to assist the American forces 

 in getting out war material from French forests. The wheels are ten feet in diameter and are well 

 ifnown to logging contractors not only in America but in distant countries. They are manufactured at 

 Manistee, Michigan. The spokes are of cork elm and are said to be the longest in the world for wagons. 



of the ancients, of which some knowledge exists at the 

 present time, were made of birch, sycamore, locust, fig, 

 and other woods which now would not be regarded as 

 wholly satisfactory for wheels. Some of them had little 

 or no metal, and were not very 

 different from the light wooden 

 Red River carts of Manitoba and 

 Saskatchewan, or like the heavi- 

 er, clumsier all-wood carts used 

 by the New Mexicans a hundred 

 years ago. It is not necessary to 

 go farther into the history of 

 vehicles made in ancient times. 

 The point is that there has been 

 a long series of developments in 

 the plans and the making of ve- 

 hicles, and we are simply using 

 what was in part used ages ago, 

 and are adding to make them bet- 

 ter. It is a notable fact that the 

 American Indians knew nothing 

 of wheel conveyances. It is not 

 known that they ever made or 

 used a wheel of any kind, unless 

 their discoidal stones be regard- 

 ed as such, and they were only 

 playthings. But they had a rude 

 sled consisting of two poles on 

 which they placed the article to 

 be moved, and thus dragged it 

 along the ground. 



American vehicles are now bet- 

 ter than they ever were in the 



past and better than vehicles are now in the countries 

 across the sea. That is in part due to skill in manufac- 

 turing and due in part to the excellent woods supplied by 

 our forests. No other country ever had anything to 

 compare with our hickory and 

 Osage orange in their peculiar 

 qualities ; but we have had other 

 woods and plenty of them, and 

 the wagon and carriage makers 

 never lacked material. Accord- 

 ing to Burnaby, there were 9,000 

 wagons in Pennsylvania in I759' 

 and according to Filson who 

 spoke from personal knowledge, 

 the wagons were worth fifty 

 dollars each, when sold at Phila- 

 delphia. The nine thousand 

 wagons represented an invest- 

 ment of $450,000 in wagons in 

 Pennsylvania alone at that early 

 date. The figures stand for what 

 was left after Pennsylvania in 

 the year 1755 had furnished 

 wagons worth $100,000 for the 

 ill-fated Fort Duquesne expedi- 

 tion under Braddock, from which 

 scarcely a wagon returned. The Carnegie Museum in 

 Pittsburgh has the tire from one of those wagons, found 

 in recent years near the battlefield where Braddock's 

 army was defeated by the Indians. The old tire sug- 



A TRACTOR DOING STRENUOUS WORK 



It begins to look as if tap line railroads may soon be dispensed with in logging operations, if tractors 



continue to expand their spheres of usefulness. The accompanying illustration represents an, Avery 



tractor (Peoria, Illinois), hauling logs on Powell Brother's operation near Elton, Iowa. Ox and horse 

 teams are back numbers there. 



