Evolution of Management on Chippewa 



dense shade will kill the young seed- 

 lings. White pine is a favorite food of 

 the snowshoe hare, which builds up to 

 tremendous populations at cyclic inter- 

 vals. The hare is regarded as the final 

 adverse factor in precluding the nat- 

 ural regeneration of white pine over 

 most of this particular project area. 



Under the terms of the timber-sale 

 contract, slash had to be piled and 

 burned. That was a new and rather 

 onerous requirement to the purchasers, 

 who had been accustomed to leaving 

 slash as it fell. Much established re- 

 production, therefore, was lost by the 

 careless burning of slash. The burned 

 places usually came back to weeds, 

 grass, or aspen, although if jack pine 

 trees remained in the stand, the heat of 

 the fires caused the serotinous cones to 

 open and disperse seed; consequently, 

 jack pine became established to a con- 

 siderable extent along with red pine. 



The seed-tree method of obtaining 

 regeneration cannot be said to be fully 

 successful. But that method plus a 

 reasonable success in fire protection 

 and the fact that seedlings were al- 

 ready established when the logging was 

 done brought in a substantial acre- 

 age of second-growth red pine, consid- 

 erable jack pine, and some white pine. 



UPON COMPLETION of the logging 

 and milling, the sawmill at Cass Lake, 

 which had bought most of the mer- 

 chantable timber, blew its whistle for 

 the last time another big mill had 

 exhausted its accessible timber supply, 

 just as hundreds of other mills had 

 done; it had cut-out-and-quit. 



That, however, was quite a differ- 

 ent quitting. Not so much devastation 

 was left behind. Slash had been dis- 

 posed of to reduce the hazard of slash 

 fires. Much of the area was covered 

 with young seedlings. Other parts had 

 reforested naturally to jack pine and 

 aspen. There were older age classes of 

 jack pine, aspen, and other hard- 

 woods, even if nobody wanted to buy 

 them. 



After all the merchantable pine had 

 been cut in 1923, the forest was largely 



313 



on a custodial basis. Protection against 

 fire was the main item, although the 

 men in charge tried to develop new 

 markets for the little-used aspen and 

 the overmature jack pine. They estab- 

 lished a forest-tree nursery that had an 

 annual production of about a million 

 2-year seedlings, but planting was not 

 eminently successful. A box mill came 

 in to utilize jack pine lumber for box 

 and crating production, but it did not 

 last long. It was succeeded by a more 

 adequately financed company, which 

 produced box lumber for shipment to 

 their main box plant at Cloquet, Minn. 

 It put in a small box unit to fur- 

 nish supplemental employment to a 

 stranded people. A few other sales 

 were made, and a couple of small port- 

 able mills were brought in to work in 

 the hardwoods. 



In cooperation with the University 

 of Minnesota, the Lake States Forest 

 Experiment Station was established in 

 1926 to investigate forestry problems in 

 the Lake States. Raphael Zon, the di- 

 rector, recognized the opportunity and 

 the necessity of solving the problems 

 connected with the reestablishment of 

 a new forest. He established plots for 

 the study of release and thinning and, 

 in the older stands, plots for the study 

 of growth and reproduction. 



SUCH WAS THE SITUATION in 1930 

 in the new national forest that now is 

 called, through Presidential proclama- 

 tion, the Chippewa National Forest. 



It had been discovered that aspen, 

 which has no odor to taint food prod- 

 ucts, was suitable for box lumber. The 

 aspen that followed the fire of two 

 summers had reached maturity, and a 

 sale of some 40 million board feet, 

 about two-thirds aspen, to be cut over 

 a period of 12 years, was advertised. It 

 was bid in at a dollar a thousand board 

 feet; other species and products like- 

 wise were priced low. The purchaser 

 contracted to deliver at least 3 million 

 feet of aspen to the box mill at Cass 

 Lake each winter. 



Logging operations started in the fall 

 with a crew large enough to deck the 



