HISTORY OF THE LUMBER INDUSTRY OF AMERICA.* 



"To the memory of men of brain and brawn who hewed out 

 of the forests of the New World room for CiviHzation, and to the 

 men of to-day who are making the American Lumber Industry an 

 agent of commercial progress at home and abroad, this work is 

 dedicated." 



It is now pretty well understood by all students of the sub- 

 ject that the success of a nation in almost any part of the world 

 depends upon the maintenance of a due proportion of forest, 

 for the forest not merely distributes water in the soil, but regu- 

 lates the precipitation which is necessary for the proper cleansing 

 of the atmosphere. More than this, modern industries depend, 

 to a far greater extent than has hitherto been generally under- 

 stood, upon a due supply of timber for the thousand and 

 one uses to which wood is put by civilized man. In a word, 

 the life of a nation is largely the life of its forests. Yet, strangely 

 enough, this fact has never been sufficiently recognized by the 

 historian, and the consequence is that those who seek to follow 

 the life history of many nations are reduced to collating the 

 gossip of the court or the official records of battles when, in fact, 

 the real sources of the actions which they record lie far back in the 

 treatment by the people of their forests and forest wealth. The 

 cutting off of the forest has turned many a place into a desert, 

 making it necessary for its inhabitants to move on and possess 

 the land of some less wasteful people, and so have come those 

 intrigues and wars the minutiae of which are so faithfully re- 

 corded by the writers of history. It seems strange that the 

 original facts have been so generally omitted by the historians 

 that it is almost impossible — even in the case of those nations 

 whose rise and subsequent downfall have clearly followed the 

 wilful waste and afterwards woeful want of their forests — to 

 trace back to their cause even effects so marked and, in the end, 

 so disastrous. Even in America, whose chief attraction from 

 its earliest settlement has been its forest resources, the historian 

 seems not only to have failed to collect material easily available, 

 but to have been almost wholly blind to the importance of such 

 facts as were easily within his reach. 



Fortunately for those who are to come after us and who will 

 seek to understand our actions, as we seek to trace out the causes 



♦The History of the Lumber Industry of America, by James 

 Elliott Defabaugh, Editor of the Aineriean LumlHTman. Vol. 1, Chi- 

 cago, the American Lumberman. 



