40 FORESTS OF WISCONSIN. 



plants and macliinery, 11 millions to logging equipments, log- 

 ging railways, etc., including also logs on hand at the time, and 

 over 31 millions to timberland, tributary and belonging to the 

 saw-mills. These same establishments paid during that year 

 nearly $700,000 taxes, a sum equal to the total state taxes of 

 Wisconsin; they paid over $3,000,000 for running expenses 

 aside from wages; about 15 million dollars for wages and log- 

 ging contracts and over $700,000 for the keep of animals alone. 

 The lumbering industry gave employment in a regular way 

 to over 55,000 men (not women and children), besides purchas- 

 ing several million dollars worth of logs. • Of those persons em- 

 ployed in these operations a large per cent, are settlers who 

 through this industry alone are enabled to support themselves 

 until their slowly growing clearings furnish sufficient harvest. 

 It is the taxes on timber land (not waste land, however,) and its 

 industries which furnish the "road money" and it is this same 

 fund which builds, equips, and largely maintains in the thinly 

 settled backwoods of Wisconsin, schools equal if not better than 

 those of the country districts of any other state. It is this same 

 industry which for years has made farming in the backwoods 

 more profitable, and the farmers more prosperous than those of 

 some other states with milder climates and equally fertile soil. 

 Nor is it the pine alone which has done and is doing so much 

 for this country. For owing to an unnecessary and injurious 

 competition in the exploitation of the pineries there has result- 

 ed a concentration of milling and logging operations which in 

 many cases deprived the particular counties in which the pine 

 supplies were located, of much of the benefit which otherwise 

 would have accrued to them from this resource. It is therefore 

 to be expected that to counties like Langlade, Shawano, Forest, 

 Lincoln, Taylor, and others, the standing hemlock and hardwoods 

 promise to be of greater value than was their former stand of 

 pine. 



Forest, Climate, and Waterflow. 



It is conceded by all that the forest exerts a beneficial influ- 

 ence in tempering the rigors of a cold continental cHmate with 



