WASTE BY PIONEERS: TIMBER FOR NAVAL CONSTRUCTION. 9 



demanded by commerce, or standing in the way of cultivation, become 

 an object of inconsiderate waste, and not unfrequently to such degree 

 that the markets are overstocked, and ruin is brought upon the greedy 

 but thoughtless adventurers in a business liable to bring an over-supply. 

 This tendency has been exemplified over and again in our lumber and 

 timber trade, and illustrations are too numerous and too recent to need 

 mention. But, aside from the conceded propriety of proper clearings 

 for cultivation in forest regions, the opportunities for trespass are too 

 open and inviting to be resisted by the class of settlers who generally 

 make the first and furthermost advances in frontier settlement; and too 

 often the forest history of our most valuable woodlands would be a record 

 of the doings of timber-thieves. The growth best suited for lumber, or 

 timber, or shingles, or staves, has been taken where most convenient, 

 without regard to ownership, and the products of this stealthy industry 

 have been sold to unscrupulous dealers, who may have made small ad- 

 vances in supplies, well knowing from whence the returns would come. 

 Finally, to cover these proceedings, fires may be set to burn up all traces 

 of evidence, and when once started in the shavings of a shingle-camp, 

 or among the dry brush of a timber-cutting, these fires may cause infi- 

 nitely more damage than the depredations they were intended to conceal. 

 Such regions, when plundered, have sometimes grown up with an in- 

 ferior class of timber or have been occupied by a more substantial class 

 of settlers, by whom the first permanent improvements have been made. 

 These descriptions of forest- waste are by no means local or applicable 

 to particular regions, although they may vary according to circumstan- 

 ces and opportunity. The Saint Lawrence frontier of New York was 

 stripped of its best oak-timber by thieves from Canada before settlement 

 began. The pine-regions of Pennsylvania suffered greatly before notice 

 was taken or measures adopted for preventing it, and the mining regions 

 of the West present instances of waste far exceeding any that we meet 

 with elsewhere.^ 



TIMBER RESERVATIONS FOR NAVAL CONSTRUCTION. 



Reservations of timber fit for ship building were common in the 

 patents granted for land in the colonial period, and the exportation of 

 timber was from an early period an important item of industry and source 

 of profit to the colonists. 



The earliest measures taken by the Federal Government for the estab- 

 lishment of a Navy were under an act approved March 27, 1794, author- 

 izing the President to provide four ships of forty-four guns, and two 

 ships of thirty-six guns each, for the purpose of protecting American 

 commerce against the depredations of Algerine corsairs. A small ><avy 

 had existed under the government of the old confederation, but from 

 1785 until the first ships were launched under the act above noticed in 

 1797, there was none. 



iMr. R. W. Raymond, in his second Report on Mines and Mining (1870), in speaking 

 of the mining-interests of the Pacific States, says: "In this connection I det-ire to call 

 attention particularly to one of the worst abuses attendant upon the settlenjcnt of the 

 mining regions and other portions of the West. I allude to the wanton destruction of 

 timber. This reckless and disastrous practice was extensively prevalent in the heavy 

 fir and cedar forests of Oregon and Washington nearly twenty years<ogo. Timber was 

 so abundant that to many it seemed inexhaustible, and they took especial delight in 

 its destruction. Hundreds of square miles were burned over in a single season, and 

 vast quantities of the finest timber in the world, easily accessible for purposes of com- 

 merce, either totally consumed or rendered utterly valueless. The same waste is yearly 

 going on in all the Western States and Territories, and particularly in the mining 

 regions of the Rocky Mountains." {Eeport on Mines and Mining Statintics, 1870, p. 34:2.) 



