58 



dandelion and we grew some in the Lakes States, and 

 produced a small amount of rubber practically equal 

 in quality to that from the rubber tree, 



Another small-scale project involved a plant called 

 cryptostegia. We tried this out in one of the Carib 

 bean countries with no significant results. 



We were strongly pressured by a Nevada congress 

 man to harvest and process rabbit brush, a shrub some 

 what like sagebrush which grows wild in many parts of 

 the West, but it would have been too costly to cut and 

 assemble the plants and process them, so this project 

 never got underway, 



Goldenrod also contains rubber and we did a small 

 project on this in the South, but only on a laboratory 

 scale, 



Alaska Spruce Production Project 



The army thought it necessary to supplement 

 available metals for airplane construction with the 

 old reliable spruce, especially for trainer planes, 

 so the Forest Service was asked to produce airplane- 

 grade spruce logs from the Tongass National Forest 

 in southeast Alaska where there are vast stands of 



