OTHER KEH0URCE8 OF MICHIGAN 73 



The first farmers sought to avoid forests by locating 

 on the prairies that clotted the southern counties; 

 but there was need of lumber for home consumption 

 and for exportation to the deforested areas of the 

 East and to the treeless country west of the Great 

 Lakes. Michigan prairies, too, were relatively of 

 limited extent and the timbered country was required 

 for agriculture. Saw-mills arose where water- 

 power was most readily available, and soon lumber 

 and logs were making their way down the Huron, 

 the Flint, the Saginaw, the Grand and other streams 

 — by boats, by rafts, in cribs ; and then by railroad, 

 to and on the Great Lakes and beyond them, — a 

 process which has gone on for a century and which 

 has not yet reached its conclusion. "What the mills 

 could not use, the fire consumed. "Niggering off," 

 as the phrase went, raised no misgivings where home- 

 making demanded infinite labor with saw and ax 

 and where the best effort of man seemed scarcely 

 to scratch the limitless forest resources of the State. 

 The forest slowly retired before the resolute as- 

 saults of the woodsman. Much timber was removed 

 from the southern counties prior to the Civil War. 

 The period following the war saw the great pinery 

 in the northern half of the southern peninsula grad- 

 ually disappear, until now the State is gathering in 

 the few slight remnants of its former magnificence 

 as a memento of what will never be again ; and finally 

 the northern peninsula, primarily prized for its min- 

 eral wealth, produced its crop of millionaires through 

 the exploitation of its forest wealth. Eailroads, like 



