A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 



613 



grazing resources of great commercial importance, and the develop- 

 ment of these resources will naturally be limited to local requirements; 

 yet, in formulating a national or regional forest program of general 

 application, the major commercial forest and grazing resources of the 

 Indians, comprising as they do a considerable portion of the total 

 regional potentialities, should be reckoned with and assigned to their 

 proper place in the general scheme of things. 



TIMBER 



Indian forest lands support various kinds of timber, including the 

 Appalachian hardwoods of North Carolina; the pine, hemlock, and 

 hardwoods of the Lake States; the pine-fir-larch of Montana and the 

 Inland Empire ; the fir-spruce-cedar of the North Pacific ; the redwood- 

 fir of California; and the pine types of Arizona. 



Of the 16 Western States containing approximately 68 K million 

 acres of Indian land (or about 96 percent of the total) (table 1) six 

 States, the Dakotas, Nevada, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, do 

 not contain Indian-owned forests in sufficient quantities to be of 

 commercial importance. The bulk of merchantable timber in Indian 

 ownership is in the States of Washington, Arizona, Oregon, and 

 Montana, and consists of stands of timber typical of these States. 



Accurate statistics of the extent and character of these resources 

 are not available. The Forestry Branch of the Indian Service esti- 

 mates, however, that there remained on June 30, 1931, approximately 

 30 billion feet of merchantable Indian-owned timber with a value of 

 approximately $100,000,000, and about 10 billion feet of unmerchant- 

 able timber. Although a large part of the merchantable timber stands 

 on lands which have been allotted to individual Indians, large bodies 

 of timber remain in tribal ownership on some reservations. 



ANNUAL CUT AND POTENTIAL PRODUCTION OF TIMBER 



Over 7K billion feet of timber with a value of about $33,000,000 

 has been removed from Indian lands under the jurisdiction of the 

 Forestry Branch of the Indian Service since 1910, as given by years 

 in table 3. This total does not include approximately 2 billion feet 

 of timber which was sold from lands of the ceded Chippewas in Min- 

 nesota under the supervision of the General Land Office, and sales of 

 land and timber belonging to the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes in 

 Oklahoma for about $9,000,000. 



TABLE 3. Timber cut from Indian lands 1 



i Under jurisdiction of Forestry Branch. 



