THE PASSING OF AN INDUSTRY 



333 



vision of new possibilities and with the 

 courage and force to convert their visions 

 into reality. For the first time in history 

 they could see a market somewhat com- 

 mensurate with the products that they 

 had to sell, and they hastened to meet it. 

 No small portable mills and little hay 

 wire outfits for them. The trade of the 

 treeless prairies could not be satisfied 

 with any such obsolete methods. With 

 bands, and gangs, with double bands 

 and '"twins" and shining resaws, with 

 steam niggers and "shotgun" feeds, they 

 [JUt together mills of a million feet ca- 

 pacity, mills which sawed the logs from 

 a well timbered "forty" in a single day. 

 The feeding of such a mill as that, cost- 

 ing a quarter of a million dollars, could 

 not be left to chance. They acquired 

 vast tracts of land, that a long time sup- 

 ply of raw material might be assured. 

 The flooding rivers of spring, for cen- 

 turies the sole transporters of those heavy 

 logs, were too slow and too uncertain 



1:PPF.R~.\ \ .: \ I LAST AM) THRILI.IXG WITH A REALIZATION OF HER 

 POWER, THE SOUTH INSTITUTEU LUMBERING METHODS NEVER DREAMED 

 OF BEFORE AND RAILROADS WERE BUILT AND MACHINERY INSTALLED 

 WHICH WORKED MARVELS IN CLEARING HER GREAT CYPRESS AND PINE 

 AREAS. 



LOWER .\ PORT OF THE SOUTH A LUMBER DOCK AT SAVANNAH, GEOR- 

 GIA, FROM WHICH YELLOW PINE TIMBER IS SHIPPED FOR BOTH COAST- 

 WISE AND FOREIGN TRADE. 



for them. They built whole railroad 

 systems to keep their mills supplied, in- 

 vented great steam "jammers" to load 

 their cars, and sent great steam log haul- 

 ers into the woods 'to replace the strain- 

 ing horses on the long iced roads. They 

 harnessed lakes, rivers and railroads to 

 haul their products to the waiting world. 



It was there that millionaires were 

 made. But these long headed barons of 

 the Lake States were not the only ones to 

 hear the call of the prairies. Those folks 

 of the treeless prairie lands were in need 

 of homes. They were desperate. If 

 the white pine which their forefathers 

 had used would not come fast enough, 

 then they would take some other wood, 

 anything to get out of those sod hovels 

 in which they had been forced to live. 

 They cared not whence it came or how, 

 but give them wood. 



The East, no longer able to supply 

 themselves, had long been dabbling oflf 

 and on in southern pine while they logged 

 their own spruce and balsam for their 

 rapidly growing paper trade, but those 

 widespread pine forests of the South 

 Atlantic States were in the main un- 

 touched and more or less despised. But 

 now the insistent call of the prairies 

 reached the sleeping ears of this mighty 



