8 North American Forests and Forestry 



Each of the three main subdivisions of the 

 North American forest has peculiarities distinguish- 

 ing them from the others. Let us first look at the 

 great Atlantic region. This immense territory 

 was, when white men first came to our shores, 

 almost uninterruptedly covered with forest. For 

 thousands of square miles, in many portions of it, 

 there was not enough open space to establish a 

 forty-acre farm on. There was an occasional strip 

 of sedge-covered marsh along the streams ; an 

 open bog had here and there taken the place of a 

 former lake. The few small clearings made by 

 the Indians were hardly worth counting. Thus 

 the interminable woods extended from the salt 

 meadows of the tide-water line to the Appalachian 

 Mountain chain, swept up its ridges and peaks, 

 leaving bare but a few of the highest tops, filled 

 the broad longitudinal valleys, and descended into 

 the great rolling plain of the Mississippi country. 

 But here its character changed by degrees. More 

 and more frequently the vast continuity of it was 

 interrupted by prairies, grass-covered and flower- 

 studded, many of them of vast extent. Towards 

 the north, to be sure, in what are now the northern 

 portions of Michigan and Wisconsin, Northeastern 

 Minnesota, and especially the immense territory 

 between the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay, there 

 are no prairies. The dense unbroken forest, the 

 " heavy timber " as it is called by the people of 

 the locality, is there bounded quite abruptly by the 

 treeless expanses of the Great Plains, where the 



