toward the threatening destruction of one half of our alarmingly small 

 remaining supply ? 



Last year we cut nearly forty billion (40,000,000,000) feet of lumber, 

 board measure. It may be interesting to know in what proportions the 

 different states furnished this supply. In relative order a partial list 

 is as follows : Washington, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Mississippi, 

 Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, North 

 Carolina, and so down. Today Washington furnishes 11.5 per cent of 

 our lumber, and Louisiana 7.4 per cent. Let us look now at some of 

 the demands for trees that at first might seem unimportant. 



Our railroads are said to use one third of the industrial timber cut. 

 They require, on the basis of present demand, 100,000,000 ties per 

 year, and they are always wondering where they are going to get them. 

 The demand is for better ties, not poorer. Bad ties mean wholesale 

 murder, forfeiture of mail contracts, reduced dividends. A tie con- 

 tains about thirty-five feet of wood. All sorts of wood are now being 

 used for ties, from hemlock at twenty-eight cents to white oak at fifty- 

 one cents, an average of forty-seven cents per tie. Suppose we could 

 cut one hundred ties to the acre; we should require a million acres a 

 year for ties. Hardwood grows, under favorable conditions, a little 

 more than forty cubic feet per acre per year. Not a very fast crop, 

 is it ? Railroad men sincerely wish it might be faster. The Santa Fe 

 road has recently arranged to plant a few thousand acres with euca- 

 lyptus, from which it will some time make ties. Each road now has its 

 tie lands. These lands no longer furnish a public supply of lumber. 



Alongside the ties run the telegraph poles, not so perishable, but 

 requiring continual renewal. Two years ago we cut 3,526,875 poles 

 over twenty feet in length. Three fifths of these were cedar, 28 per 

 cent chestnut. We cut hundreds of thousands of smaller poles, also, 

 not to mention vast quantities of what is called lodge-pole pine, for 

 other uses. We annually reap for telegraph and telephone poles some- 

 where between three and four million acres of land. 



Our tanneries two years ago required 1,370,000 cords of bark. In 

 the same year we cut 11,858,260 shingles and 3,812,807 laths. This 

 represents one of the real savings in lumber manufacture the utiliza- 

 tion of material much of which otherwise would go to waste. Then we 

 had to timber our mines, and for that we used 165,000,000 cubic feet, 

 not board measure, much of which was the best of hardwood. 



If you stood on the top of a tower in the greatest hardwood forests 

 of the South, one sweep of the scythe of civilization would mow it 

 farther than you could see, for one month's use in vehicles, manu- 

 factured furniture, and farm implements. Prices for this kind of 

 wood have risen from 25 to 65 per cent since 1899. In seven years the 

 production of hardwood has fallen off 15 per cent ; and those were the 

 six years of its greatest demand. 



There is absolutely no hope for vehicle and machine makers except 

 a more careful use of the hardwood forests of the South and the South- 

 east ; nor indeed can that be called a solution now. In these forests 

 grow also many softer woods, once scorned. Continually we adjust, 

 compromise, become European and not American. Tight-barrel cooper- 

 age is a heavy drain on white oak. In 1906 we made 267 million tight- 



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