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AMERICAN FORESTRY 



tances and on a small scale, and they do so still ; but 

 when circumstances have been favorable or necessity 

 urgent, lumber has been hauled in large amounts and 

 for long distances by teams. Some of the California 

 sugar pine mills formerly sent their lumber by wagons 

 as much as fifty miles; and a single team of twelve 

 horses sometimes drew from 10,000 to 15,000 feet at a 

 load. In the northern snowy regions, such as New Eng- 

 land and the Lake States, hauling lumber on sleds may 

 be done on a large scale. 



Rivers have carried a great deal of lumber in rafts, 

 but not much in loose form by floating. If left free to 

 drift down stream, boards are liable to be damaged by 

 breaking or by the deposit of mud upon them. During 

 generations, the rafting of lumber was an important 



former producing districts; and, second, the extension 

 of railroads and the capture by them of the business 

 formerly going to the boats. In 1906 the whole inland 

 water traffic in lumber in the United States was less 

 than two-thirds that of the Great Lakes alone in 1889. 

 This indicates a tendency to transfer the carriage of 

 lumber from boats to railroads. The decline in water 

 transportation of lumber is still going on, and manu- 

 facturing districts depend for supplies more and more 

 upon railroads. About fourteen per cent of all the 

 revenue of the railroads of the United States comes in 

 normal times from hauling lumber. The revenue 

 of the railroads from carrying forest products in 1910 

 was $269,577,425. 



The country's railroads have generally proved equal 



LINES OF BEAUTY IN A LUMBER YARD 



A clean, well kept, well planned, well ordered lumber yard tells a story of good management. Decay has no chance to get a foothold there. 

 There is nothing slipshod about the one shown in the cut, and the bookkeeper can ignore the item of waste in balancing profit and loss. 



business on many of the rivers of New England, 

 New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and west- 

 ward through the Lake States ; and there was some 

 movement of lumber by boats on those streams. 

 But the principal carriage of lumber by water in the 

 United States has been on the Great Lakes. There are 

 more figures to show lake traffic than are available for 

 the rivers, at least, during early years. In 1889 the 

 lake ports, on the American side, shipped 3,428,628,500 

 feet of lumber, but seventeen jears later the total had 

 fallen to nearly one half of that, and it continues still 

 to fall. The decline in lake carriage of lumber has been 

 due to two causes, first, the exhaustion of some of the 



to the task of distributing lumber when and where 

 needed. Temporary and local difficulties, including 

 floods, snow, embargoes, and the fortunes and misfor- 

 tunes of war, have sometimes delayed arrivals, but as 

 a rule the railroads have done their part in carrying 

 lumber from the mills that make it to the men who use 

 it. During the year 1910 the railroads of this country 

 carried 62,000,000,000 feet of forest products, princi- 

 pally lumber; and that, too, in spite of the fact that the 

 total lumber production that year for the whole country 

 was only 40,000,000,000 feet. On their face, the figures 

 seem contradictory in that they show twenty-odd bil- 

 lion feet more hauled than the total output. The expla- 



