of the following 10 years had dropped suddenly out of the list of eight 

 important lumber producing states of the union. The Southern pine 

 industry had developed, and the Northwest coast industry was get- 

 ting on its feet in those later years. 



12 MILLION ACRES. 



In Michigan,_ in the palmy days of lumbering and denudation of 

 land, there were lumbered off or burned 12 million acres of pinery. 

 The figure is given by Filibert Roth, head of the University of Michigan 

 Forestry faculty. And at 15,000 feet of lumber to the acre this meant 

 180 billion feet all pine; while 8 million acres of hardwood at 10 thou- 

 sand board feet to the acre yielded 80 billion more. The total lumber 

 logged OR BURNED in North Michigan the professor estimates at 260 

 billion feet, and as an estimator in this field of inquiry Prof. Roth, one 

 quickly learns, has the reputation of being pre-eminent. 



Loss by fire interests us just now. Fire has run neck and neck with 

 the lumber operators in the wholesale job of' devastating acres by the 

 millions. Now the yowl of the circular saw is hushed in these lands, 

 down to -the merest murmur, the camps are "folded and gone," but the 

 fires are not gone. .They continue in the business of denudation and 

 desert production. 



ONE-THIRD BURNED. 



While lumbering was active, and lumber towns flourishing, and rail- 

 roads reaching tentacles farther and farther into the land to take in 

 supplies and bring in the products of the camps and mills, fire was 

 eating up, according to Prof. Roth's estimate, something less than 23 

 per cent of the timber which nature had set on the land. The lumber- 

 men themselves commonly estimate the fire loss of those days to have 

 been fully one-third. 



The Michigan lumber cut today is not to be sniffed at, considering 

 demands and prices it is now about a billion feet a year, over 

 $75,000,000 worth, taking the forest growth off 100,000 acres every 

 twelve month, adding that much area every year to the millions of acres 

 of stump lands now existing. These are Prof. Roth's figures again. 

 What is left is very valuable indeed, and what could be put back 

 would be much more valuable, both of which facts need to be borne 

 in mind as bearing on the fire question. But what the fires did besides 

 burning up about $1,200,000,000 worth of trees, reckoned on values of 

 the time of the old days of lumbering, is really most important of all, 

 and for this reason: What the fires did then in addition to burning 

 timber they are doing to this day. 



What they did, and continue to do, is to make absolute, complete 

 and all but irretrievable the havoc wrought by the timber cutters. 

 First take the superficial aspects of this moving picture of advancing 

 desolation. 



Towns dwindled when the timber stands receded before the saw 

 and ax, and nothing industrial of equal consequence came in to take 

 the place of lumbering. All native Michiganders, even in the largest 

 cities, where live people who never saw a pine tree, know about that, 

 realizing well the general effect. What is not so well realized is how 

 completely the fires that crept over the devastated lands, through the 

 "slashings" and through what timber tracts the first operations had 

 left, completed the devastation begun by the lumbermen. Much less 

 is it realized that besides burning the forest growth, virgin and second 

 growth, the fires burned the soil itself. 



19 



