The Forest and Man 55 



While thus the immediate dependence of the 

 settler upon the forest has greatly declined, indi- 

 rectly the forest is perhaps of just as much impor- 

 tance to him as it ever was. Certain it is that at no 

 time in our history has the forest been of so much 

 importance to us as a nation. The immense in- 

 crease in the business of lumbering dates also from 

 the time of the advent of railroads. The lumber in- 

 dustry, in all the forest region where settlement 

 has gone forward during the present generation, 

 has been the main support of the settler. Making 

 a farm out of the primeval forest is slow work. On 

 the prairie you have but to break the sod, and can 

 get a crop for sale the very first season. In the 

 woods you cannot expect to raise field-crops for 

 sale till after a number of years. Therefore the 

 forest settler would have had no money wherewith 

 to buy the commodities brought within his reach 

 by the railway, and would have had to go on in the 

 old backwoods life, if it had not been for the. 

 wages earned in the lumber industry. 



As long as practically all the settled portions of 

 the United States were in the close neighborhood 

 of extensive forests, there was little trade in lum- 

 ber within the country. A few small sawmills pro- 

 vided all that was needed for home consumption in 

 each neighborhood. The country people lived to 

 a great extent in log houses of their own fashioning 

 and considered sawed lumber as a luxury beyond 

 their reach. Only along the seacoast, especially 

 in Maine, New York, and New Hampshire, was 



