REDWOOD LUMBERING. 23 



mills now in operation, the owners of which, as a rule, own 

 large reserves of timber lands, can easily overstock the lum- 

 ber market if run two-thirds of the year. Millmen state that 

 the capacity of the mills now in operation is sufficient to cut 

 double the quantity that now finds ready sale. With cheaper 

 transportation to the East, however, either by sail or rail, the 

 present corps of redwood mills would hardly meet the require- 

 ments of the trade. Under any circumstances, whether the 

 demand for redwood materially increases or not, the work of 

 consolidating small bodies of forests into tracts sufficiently 

 large to warrant operations will, in the nature of things, grad- 

 ually go on. It is only a question of price that will prevent 

 all accessible redvyood lands from being consolidated into 

 reasonably large tracts within perhaps another year. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF CLAIM OWNERS. 



The price for fair or extremely good redwood lands at 

 accessible points varies according to the disposition of the 

 owner. If he be of a nervous, irritable, and unsettled char- 

 acter, he is just as likely to sell his "claim" one hundred 

 and sixty acres for a comparative pittance, should he be ap- 

 proached at the proper time, as he would be to demand a 

 value for stumpage at another time equal to that realized for 

 the lumber from it after passing through the entire process of 

 its manufacture. This is the man who would, in Wall Street 

 or at the mining stock boards in San Francisco, "buy 'em 

 when they are high, and sell 'em when they are low." Take 

 this party when there were booms in locating redwood 



