81 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



this lumberman, judged by his record, will use less than one half. The 

 other half will never be taken out of the woods at all. Three fourths 

 of that half may never even be cut, but may be set on fire and burned 

 as it stands. Much as we had in forest resources in the past, we never 

 could afford to have lumbering operations destroy as much as they 

 sawed. But that is what they did. What should be our attitude to-day 

 toward the threatening destruction of one half of our alarmingly small 

 remaining supply ? 



Last year we cut nearly forty billion (40,000,000,000) feet of lumber, 

 board measure. It may be interesting to know in what proportions the 

 different states furnished this supply. In relative order a partial list 

 is as follows : Washington, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Mississippi, 

 Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, North 

 Carolina, and so down. To-day Washington furnishes 11.5 per cent of 

 our lumber, and Louisiana 7.4 per cent. Let us look now at some of 

 the demands for trees that at first might seem unimportant. 



Our railroads are said to use one third of the industrial timber cut. 

 They require, on the basis of present demand, 100,000,000 ties per 

 year, and they are always wondering where they are going to get them. 

 The demand is for better ties, not poorer. Bad ties mean wholesale 

 murder, forfeiture of mail contracts, reduced dividends. A tie contains 

 about thirty-five feet of wood. All sorts of wood are now being used 

 for ties, from hemlock at twenty-eight cents to white oak at fifty-one 

 cents, an average of forty-seven cents per tie. Suppose we could cut 

 one hundred ties to the acre; we should require a million acres a year 

 for ties. Hardwood grows, under favorable conditions, a little more 

 than forty cubic feet per acre per year. Not a very fast crop, is it ? 

 Railroad men sincerely wish it might be faster. The Santa Fe road 

 has recently arranged to plant a few thousand acres with eucalyptus, 

 from which it will some time make ties. Each road now has its tie 

 lands. These lands no longer furnish a public supply of lumber. 



Alongside the ties run the telegraph poles, not so perishable, but 

 requiring continual renewal. Two years ago we cut 3,526,875 poles 

 over twenty feet in length. Three fifths of these were cedar, 28 per cent 

 chestnut. We cut hundreds of thousands of smaller poles, also, not to 

 mention vast quantities of what is called lodge-pole pine, for other uses. 

 We annually reap for telegraph and telephone poles somewhere between 

 three and four million acres of land. 



Our tanneries two years ago required 1,370,000 cords of bark. In 

 the same year we cut 11,858,260 shingles and 3,812,807 laths. This 

 represents one of the real savings in lumber manufacture the utiliza- 

 tion of material much of which otherwise would go to waste. Then we 



