1258 



Canadian Forestry JournaL August, 1917 



cultural soils; days when a commun- 

 ity blessed its stars when a million 

 feet of spruce and hemlock went roar- 

 ing to the skies in flame. We of 1917 

 are inheritors of that early miscon- 

 ception of the country's trees and 

 their relation to the age we live in. 

 With the French governors, only the 

 finest of the oaks were accorded any 

 value under the law, being reserved 

 for the royal navy. With the coming 

 of the English some of the pines of 

 greatest size and most accessible for 

 water carriage were further reserved 

 for naval and bridge-building uses. By 

 the time of the Napoleonic wars when 

 Baltic exports to Britain were tem- 

 porarily disarranged, Britain reached 

 out for Canadian wood supplies, and 

 in so doing laid the foundations of 

 our great lumbering industry. 



The National Thief 



In the developing days of 1825, for 

 example, one would not expect to find 

 any rigid regulation of individual en- 

 terprise. Canada was too loose-joirit- 

 ed, too eager for any form of exploit- 

 ation that would give a show of im- 

 mediate wealth. Accordingly, the de- 

 mand for timber from the United 

 Kingdom and the United States was 

 fed without stint and with a full- 

 blown optimism. Splendid forests of 

 white pine, our finest wood, fell, never 

 to be replaced. Thousands of square 

 miles degenerated to permanent 

 waste. Fire, then as now, the great 

 national thief, took 'ten trees to the 

 luml)erman's one. Only the mildest 

 suggestion for fire patrol or suppres- 

 sion of loss ever emanated from gov- 

 ernment or licensee. So enormously 

 did the present fact of a super-abund- 

 dant wood supply overtop the thought 

 of future depletion that "thrift" was 

 as unpract ced as it was unpreached 



The Forest Primeval 



In the Canada primeval, forests 

 covered probably more than 1,200 mil- 

 lion acres. Indeed, with the exception 

 of lakes and rivers, the great triangu- 

 lar wedge of the prairies, the expan- 

 ses of permanent barrens and the In- 

 dian settlements, the green mantle of 

 tree life zig-zagged from ocean to 

 ocean. Not until the lumbering indus- 



try became established did any sign 

 appear that this rich bounty of Provid- 

 ence was a thing worth investigating 

 and preserving. A few gingerly meas- 

 ures became law, mostly in the direc- 

 tion of personal arrest for starting con- 

 flagrations. Forest fires pillaged the 

 country practically without hindrance 

 and with not a little help. The Mira- 

 michi fire of 1825 cut a swath 80 

 miles long and 25 miles wide through 

 the heart of New Brunswick, w ped 

 out six towns, killed 120 people, 1,000 

 head of cattle, and an uninventoried 

 mass of standing timber. That was 

 spectacular because concentrated. But 

 it has been duplicated in material 

 losses time and time again since 1825, 

 and indeed as late as last year when 

 the Northern Ontario fires burned 

 ac oss 800,000 acres and killed 264 

 people, with a vast sacrifice of pro- 

 perty. In Northern Manitoba one 

 fire within the last 30 years ran for 

 over 450 miles. In Northern Saskat- 

 chewan is an area of about 8,000 

 scjuarc miles, two-thirds as big as Bel- 

 gium, fireswept almost to the point of 

 permanent extinction of timber and 

 soil. The burden wh ch Canada has 

 carried as a consequence of forest 

 fires will probably never be computed 

 because public sentiment in the past, 

 vitiated by that pioneer indifference 

 to tree values, kept no account and 

 charged the whole business to the 

 gamble of unpreventable events. 



Jack Canuck's Wood Factory 



But we Canadians have of late been 

 listening to reason. We are not pion- 

 eers or colonials any longer. The na- 

 tional machine is putting on extra 

 decks. From the first forest equip- 

 ment of a pair of mitts and a broad 

 axe, we have developed 5,000 wood- 

 using industries. We ship spruce not 

 only as lumber, but as rolls of finished 

 paper. Indeed we are doing that so 

 acceptably that, in 25 years, exports 

 have jumped from $91 to over 

 120,000,000 a year. And $15,000,000 

 worth of timber goes each twelve 

 months to John Bull. Then we make 

 800 million laths and three billion 

 shingles, and our whole lumber cut 

 annually exceeds three and quarter 

 billion feet. 



