PAPER MAKING POSSIBILITIES 



711 



phone lines have been strung along the main branches of 

 the streams to keep all points of the drive in touch. Tug 

 boats have rendered unnecessary much of the old-time 

 labor on headworks for getting logs across lakes. 



The type of men, too, has changed. The original 

 woodsmen were native Yankees, at first farmers who 

 worked for a while in the woods in winter and for a 

 while on the drive in spring, but they gradually gave way 

 to the professional lumberjack who followed the woods 

 regularly. He is as characteristic a type of our pioneer 

 days as the cowboy — and as picturesque. Holmes Day 

 in his " King Spruce " and some of his poems has given 

 us graphic pictures of him in his native north woods, 

 while Stewart Edward White has immortalized his imme- 

 diate successor, the Michigan lumberjack, in his " Blazed 

 Trail " and " The Riverman." The first foreigners in 

 the region were French Canadians and natives of New 

 Brunswick and Prince Edward Island — the latter de- 

 risively known as " PI'S." All were accomplished woods- 

 men and accepted as such. Up to 10 years ago there 

 were few Europeans, but now the Swede and the Po- 

 lander, better known in the woods as the " Squarehead " 

 and the " Polack," have secured a firm foothold, 

 but the river drivers are still largely Americans and 

 Canadian French. 



Early in the fall, sometimes in midsummer, the log- 

 ging crews seek the woods, generally far beyond the 

 railroads and in an otherwise uninhabited country. Cut- 



ting starts immediately unless a camp has to be built and 

 roads constructed. The aim is to get the winter's cut 

 finished by Christmas or the first of January, as generally 

 the snow becomes too deep to do much after that. The 

 logs are decked up in yards or skidways along the main 

 roads as fast as they are cut, and when cutting ceases 

 the roads are plowed out and iced so that the sleds will 

 run easily. The logs are then loaded on the sleds and 

 hauled to the landings at the edges of the streams or 

 lakes and dumped to await the melting of the ice and the 

 opening of the drive. The hauling of¥, as it is called, is 

 the most exciting and strenuous part of the woods work. 

 Oftentimes it is a race with the weather man, for to 

 linger is to let the snow melt and leave the logs in the 

 woods till the following winter. At such times all hands 

 work twelve, sixteen, perhaps twenty hours a day, to 

 get the logs landed " before she breaks up," and when 

 the impossible has been accomplished and the last log is 

 on the landing, the whole crew breaks camp amid melting 

 snow and slush which mark the coming of spring. After 

 a brief season in town, it is back to the woods when the 

 drive starts. What tales have been told of the drives 

 on the Penobscot, the Androscoggin, the Kennebec, the 

 Connecticut and many other streams ! There is scarcely a 

 more romantic branch of all industry than log driving. 

 Its greatest days have passed, but it will be many years 

 before the last log goes down the West Branch and the 

 stories of those which have will alwavs be told. 



PAPER MAKING POSSIBILITIES 



OWING to the growing scarcity in Wisconsin of 

 wood suitable for making paper pulp, the Forest 

 Products Laboratory has just completed a study 

 into the methods of barking, chipping, screening, and 

 baling of chips. Laboratory tests show that certain 

 western woods are admirably adapted for manufacture 

 into pulp, and negotiations are now under way between 

 paper companies in Wisconsin and western railroads with 

 a view to securing freight rates on trainload shipments of 

 chips to Wisconsin. It is estimated that some of these 

 western woods can be cut into chips, which, when dried 

 and baled, can be delivered to the mills in Wisconsin at a 

 very small advance over the cost of chips made from 

 local timbers. Since there is a market for more than 

 300,000 cords of wood annually in Wisconsin, an attempt 

 to utilize western species appears worthy of consideration 

 in order to hold the supply of wood for our American 

 paper mills on American soil. 



USING THE BARK OF TREES 



THE Forest Products Laboratory experts, in their 

 eff'orts to reduce the amount of waste in the lumber 

 industry, have long declared that they have been 

 able to utilize everything but the bark, just as the pork 

 packer is said to market everything but the squeal of 

 the hog. 



Now they have even found a way to use the bark. 

 By a new process, waste bark can be used to partially 

 replace expensive rag stock in the manufacture of felt 

 roofing, and is already being used commercially by mills 

 cooperating with the laboratory experts. The bark thus 

 used is that remaining after the extraction of the tannin 

 for leather work, and the same waste bark has been used 

 successfully for the making of a commercial wallpaper. 

 Experiments now in progress indicate that the hemlock 

 bark may be used for sheathing paper, carpet lining, 

 bottle wrappers and deadening felt. 



IN cooperation with the Post Office Department, the 

 Pennsylvania Department of Forestry has prepared 

 a big forest fire placard which will be placed in every 

 post-office in Pennsylvania located in or near a for- 

 ested area. An order has also been issued by the Post- 

 master General advising Pennsylvania post-masters 

 that all rural mail carriers must report any forest fires 

 they see to the nearest fire warden. 



ALMOST eight million trees will be available for 

 /\ next spring's reforesting operations from the stock 

 i. V now in the Pennsylvania State Forest nurseries. 

 This is an increase in production over last year of 

 about thirty per cent, and is the largest number of 

 seedlings ever grown in the nurseries. Last year private 

 individuals planted 1,500,000 trees furnished by the 

 Department. 



