THE PINE INVESTIGATION. 279 



which grew convenient to the larger rivers and creeks were 

 selected, in order that they might be the more readily made 

 into rafts and thus floated to the water power sawmills, or to 

 market. For a long time the upright, water power sawmills 

 were the only means of home manufacture of lumber, except 

 the more primitive and laborous method of "whip" sawing by 

 hand. Later, portable steam sawmills were located farther 

 back on the smaller streams, where the logs were converted 

 into lumber and hauled with teams to the large streams, and 

 then floated to market. Still later, flatboats were used to trans- 

 port the lumber, and extensive sawmills were located at the 

 mouth of the large streams where floating logs were held in 

 booms until they could be converted into lumber. 



Thus, the best yellow pine was called out and marketed from 

 all of the more thickly settled and accessible regions, before 

 the other kinds of timber had any commercial value. 



This culling out process and leaving the tops and broken or 

 injured trees in which the insect enemies bred and multiplied, 

 together with the changed conditions brought about from clear- 

 ing large areas of land, and the consequent frequency of forest 

 fires, combined to weaken the vitality of the remaining pine 

 timber, resulting in destructive invasions of insects, and the 

 death of vast quantities of young and old timber. 



Thus the process of natural and artificial destruction of the 

 pine has been going on in all of the pine areas until it culmi- 

 nated within the last five years in one of the most extensive 

 devastations of timber by destructive insects that has ever been 

 witnessed, or at least recorded in this country, which not only 

 swept over the pine regions of this State, but that of Penn- 

 sylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, killing mil- 

 lions of pine trees of all kinds and ages above a diameter of a 

 few inches. Fortunately, this -last -serious trouble is over for 

 the present at least. 



When we come to look over the field of devastation we find, 

 like the effects of a series of great conflagrations, or destructive 

 tornadoes sweeping over the country, that while immense and 



