56 North American Forests and Forestry 



there a lumber industry intended for consumption 

 away from home. When timber fit for construction 

 purposes had become exhausted in many places, 

 such lumbering on a large scale became a necessity, 

 and from that time on the relations between man 

 and the forest underwent a revolution. Hitherto 

 the forest was the dominant element ; man had to 

 adapt himself to its nature if he wanted to sustain 

 life within it, and the strange backwoods type 

 of civilization was the result. Now man became 

 stronger than the wilderness. He began to carry 

 all the appliances of his industrial and commercial 

 life into the very depths of the forest. Partly 

 through his deliberate intent, partly by means of 

 unintended consequences of his acts, he disturbed 

 the life processes which had for many ages deter- 

 mined the character of American woods, and cre- 

 ated new conditions to which the forest, or so much 

 of it as was not directly destroyed by the invaders, 

 had to adapt itself or perish. 



The men who wrought this change were the sons 

 of the backwoodsmen. Not a few of them had 

 themselves spent their youth under backwoods con- 

 ditions. It was not surprising that they did not 

 at once realize the changed relations in which they 

 stood to the forest. The backwoodsman, to be 

 sure, derived his sustenance from the woods, but 

 he did so by destroying them. To his eyes, the 

 fall of a tree was the rise of civilization. The ugly, 

 repulsive look of his clearing, with the fire-blackened 

 stumps, or worse, the tree trunks still standing 



