GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE TEREITORIES. 221 



will be able to supply tlieir own demands for fuel for ten years to come. 

 While it will pay, in case of necessity, to freight lumber and heavy 

 timber great distances by land, and to ship it by water half-way round 

 the globe, it becomes very burdensome and oppressive to all classes of 

 the community to be compelled to convey wood for domestic and man- 

 ufacturing x)urposes comparatively but small distances. To illustrate 

 this proposition we need only to mention the fact that while there is 

 within an area of twenty miles from either of the cities, Marysville, 

 Stockton, or Sacramento, a plenty of wood for a year or two's supply, 

 and it costs but $2 a cord to have it cut, yet the present price of wood 

 in each of these cities is about $10 a cord. Even at this high price 

 the owner of wood-land thirty miles from Sacramento, on the line of the 

 Central Pacific Eailroad, can make that wood net him only one dollar and 

 a half a cord delivered in the citj^ These facts show how extremely ex- 

 pensive and oppressive it would be to undertake to supply the cities of 

 the State with wood from the distant mountains. And yet what other 

 resource will be left a very few years hence? California should at no 

 distant day become one of the greatest manufacturing States of the 

 Union ; but where will we obtain the fuel with which to generate the 

 steam that propels the machinery? Again, a new element of calcula- 

 tion on this subject has just been introduced among us and will grow 

 rapidly in the future. We refer to the consumption of fuel by the rail- 

 roads. There are now in the State, completed and in operation, about 

 seven hundred miles of road. In a year from now it is safe to say there 

 will be over a thousand ; call it one thousand even. It requires one cord 

 and three-fourths of wood, with an ordinary train, to drive an engine 

 twenty-five miles. Now, assuming that an average of ten trains a day 

 will-then be running over this one thousand miles of road for three hun- 

 dred and twenty days in the year, and we have a distance of three mil- 

 lion two hundred thousand miles traveled in a year. As each twenty- 

 five miles of distance traveled will consume one cord and three-fourths 

 of wood, the consumption on one thousand miles of road will be 224,000 

 cords per year. In twenty years we will probably have four thousand 

 miles of road completed, averaging twenty instead often trains per day, 

 and consuming 1,792,000 cords of wood per annum. This, added to the 

 increased consumption for all the other purposes of life, will make rapid 

 inroads into the few sparsely wooded portions of our State, if there 

 should indeed be any trees left standing at that time. 



''The first effect of a scarcity of lumber and wood will be to enhance 

 the cost. We have already noticed the high price of wood delivered in 

 our cities. Lumber has not advanced very mucli in value lor the last 

 ten years except indirectly. The cost of cutting, manufacturing, and get- 

 ting to market has been decreasing, while the cost to the (^.onsnmer has 

 remained the same. It is the opinion of dealers that it will soon increase 

 in value very materially. It cannot be otherwise, as we have show^n that 

 the demand will increase rapidly and the supply decrease. Even now the 

 cost and scarcity of these articles is having an oppressive eftect on every 

 industry in the State. The expense of agricultural implements and tools 

 here, over their cost in the Eastern States, is already operating as a seri- 

 ous drawback upon the thrift and profit of our farmers, brought in close 

 competition, as they now are, with their neighbors of the western Atlan- 

 tic States. Tlie cost of lumber for building and fencing, in most of our 

 agricultural districts, obtained, as it is, at a distance of hundreds ot 

 miles away, is even now so great that our fariners are among tlie poor- 

 est housed people of any agricultural community in the Union where the 

 country has been settled au equal length of time. Their crops and stock 



