32 AMERICAN FOREST TREES 



The seeds resemble lentils, and are provided with wings which carry 

 them several hundred feet, if wind is favorable. This affords excellent 

 opportunities for reproduction; but there is an offset in the sweetness of 

 the seeds which are prized for food by birds, beasts and creeping things 

 from the Piute Indian down to the Douglas squirrel and the jumping 

 mouse. 



Sugar pine occupies a high place as a timber tree. It has been in 

 use for half a century. The cut in 1900 was 52,000,000 feet, in 1904 it 

 was 120,000,000; in 1907, 115,000,000, and the next year about 100,000,- 

 000. Ninety-three per cent of the cut is in California, the rest in Oregon. 

 Its stand in California has been estimated at 25,000,000,000 feet. 



The wood of sugar pine is a little lighter than eastern white pine, 

 is a little weaker, and has less stiffness. It is soft, the rings of growth 

 are wide, the bands of summerwood thin and resinous; the resin passages 

 are numerous and very large, the medullary rays numerous and obscure. 

 The heart is light brown, the sapwood nearly white. 



Sugar pine and redwood were the two early roofing woods in 

 California, and both are still much used for that purpose. Sugar pine 

 was made into sawed shingles and split shakes. The shingle is a mill 

 product; but the shake was rived with mallet and frow, and in the years 

 when it was the great roofing material in central and eastern California, 

 the shake makers camped by twos in the forest, lived principally on 

 bacon and red beans, and split out from 200,000 to 400,000 shakes as a 

 summer's work. The winter snows drove the workers from the moun- 

 tains, with from eight to twelve hundred dollars in their pockets for the 

 season's work. 



The increase in stumpage price has practically killed the shake 

 maker's business. In the palmy days when most everything went, he 

 procured his timber for little or nothing. He sometimes failed to find 

 the surveyor's lines, particularly if there happened to be a fine sugar pine 

 just across on a government quarter section. His method of operation 

 was wastful. He used only the best of the tree. If the grain happened 

 to twist the fraction of an inch, he abandoned the fallen trunk, and cut 

 another. The shakes were split very thin, for sugar pine is among the 

 most cleavable woods of this country. Four or five good trees provided 

 the shake maker's camp with material for a year's work. 



Some of the earliest sawmills in California cut sugar pine for sheds, 

 shacks, sluiceboxes, flumes among the mines; and almost immediately 

 a demand came from the agricultural and stock districts for lumber. 

 From that day until the present time the sugar pine mills have been 

 busy. As the demand has grown, the facilities for meeting it have 

 increased. The prevailing size of the timber forbade the use of small 



