40 USES OF COMMERCIAL WOODS OF THE UNITED STATES. 



of romance and human interest. The cypress lumberman has been 

 resourceful in his operations upon submerged lands ; the yellow pine 

 operators have cut the primeval timber harvest from a wide area ; the 

 cutters of white oak and yellow poplar have worked as long and have 

 gone scs far, but they have done it without stamping their individu- 

 ality upon the history they have made. The men who have logged 

 and milled the California redwood accomplished much on a small 

 area, and over a wider region the Douglas fir has been the means of 

 enormous development. But none of these compare with white pine 

 in the absorbing and peculiar interest that pervades its history. 



The first lumbermen on the New England coast had everything to 

 learn by experience. They brought no forest lore with them from 

 the mother country, for England was a land without a sawmill. 

 They began with rude tools and on a small scale. There were no 

 great lumber camps, but a multitude of small, individual enterprises. 

 No large operations were carried on in New England in early times, 

 though much business was done. White pine ship timbers were 

 brought down to the sea by ox teams or were floated on the streams. 



When the white pine operators reached New York and northern 

 Pennsylvania, they found it necessary to carry on their work in a 

 different way. They put the watercourses to more use, or used them 

 over a larger region. Practically the whole State of New York was 

 a continuous forest of white pine, and much of Pennsylvania was the 

 same. The best of the timber near the lower Hudson River was cut 

 very early by settlers, and that part of the stream was never much 

 used for rafts and log drives. The stream could not be used in that 

 way, for the current, because of the tides which ebb and flow twice a 

 day, is too weak to carry floating objects down, unless the wind hap- 

 pens to be in the right quarter at the right time. Log drives on 

 streams farther west became common. Floods were depended upon 

 to carry the rafts or the loose logs in the streams. They were trans- 

 ported in that way from forests to the mills, sometimes a: hundred 

 miles or more. That made operations on a large scale not only possi- 

 ble but necessary. Some of the rivers of western New York floAv 

 through lakes where there is practically no current. When the drive 

 of logs arrived at such a lake, they spread out upon the surface, and 

 the wind drove them back and forth, scattering them and stranding 

 many of them upon the shores. The lumberman's ingenuity was 

 called upon to overcome that difficulty, and it was done by bunching 

 the logs by passing a long cable around them and thus keeping them 

 from separating and scattering. The logs were held in a body by 

 that means, but the current was not sufficient to carry them down 

 the lake to the outlet. To overcome that difficulty, windlasses were 

 erected at certain points along the shore, and by means of ropes at- 

 tached to the logs they were warped down the lakes, often against 



