472 United States. 



furnished more lumber than any other State ; now it 

 supplies only insignificant amounts, a little over two 

 per cent, of the total lumber cut. 



In 1868, the golden age of lumbering had arrived in 

 Michigan; in 1871, rafts filled the Wisconsin; in 1875, 

 Eau Claire had 30, Marathon 30, and Fond du Lac 20 

 sawmills, now all gone; and mills at La Crosse, which 

 were cutting millions of feet annually, are now closed. 

 By 1882, the Saginaw Valley had reached the climax of 

 its production, and the lumber industry of the great 

 Northwest, with a cut of 8 billion feet of White Pine 

 alone, was in full blast. The White Pine production 

 reached its maximum in 1890, with 8.5 billion feet, 

 then to decrease gradually but steadily to less than 

 half that cut in 1908. Southern development be- 

 gan to assume large proportions much later; at the 

 present time, the lumber product of the Southern 

 States has grown to amounts nearly double that of all 

 the Northern States combined. 



But not only the unparalleled and ever increasing 

 wood consumption, which now has reached 260 cubic 

 feet per capita, five times that of Germany and ten 

 times that of France, threatened the exhaustion of the 

 natural supplies. Reckless conflagrations almost in 

 variably followed the lumberman and destroyed gen- 

 erally the remaining stand, and surely the young 

 growth. So common did these conflagrations become, 

 that they were considered unavoidable, and though 

 laws intended to protect forest property against fires 

 were found on the statute books of every State, no 

 attempt to enforce them was made. 



No wonder that those observing this rapid decima- 



