History of the Forest 283 



Clearings had to be made to secure even the little space 

 necessary for the building of villages. The clearing of 

 fields for crops was a tremendous undertaking. Timber 

 was the one thing of which the early settlers had a great, 

 and to them worthless, superfluity, — for there was no 

 local market and the facilities for export were very insuffi- 

 cient. Naturally the settler came to look upon the forest 

 as his most formidable enemy ; it hindered his early move 

 in the development of the country and fostered the wild 

 animals and still wilder Indians. No wonder he looked 

 on the forest as something to be destroyed and handed the 

 feeling down to his children, completely overlooking the 

 almost invaluable benefit that he was receiving from such 

 an abundant supply of cheap lumber. 



For a hundred years after the first settlement, no man 

 traveled far enough west to discover a country that was 

 not heavily wooded. The question of timber supply never 

 entered their heads, for the supply seemed to them truly 

 inexhaustible and under the circumstances the conception 

 of a lack of wood was inconceivable. A very small per- 

 centage of the wood that had to be cut for other purposes 

 could be used, and enormous quantities of it had to be 

 burned to get rid of it. Little was cut for the value of the 

 wood itself. 



Only as the towns developed was there any call for wood 

 from a distance, and even then the geography of the 

 country was such as to hide from them the distance to 

 which the forest frontiers were being driven. Lack of 

 transportation in inland Europe had given the people 

 early warning of what would eventually take place in the 

 country as a whole. In America the settlements were all 



