382 



The National Geographic Magazine 



fords through its three great branches — 

 the logging industry, the sawmill in- 

 dustry, and the planing-mill industry — 

 a means of livelihood to considerably 

 over a million persons. The annual 

 value of the products, which has mul- 

 tiplied nearly ten times in the last half 

 century, is $566,000,000. 



But although the rapid development 

 of the lumber industry has had far- 

 reaching results in furthering every 

 branch of manufacture which depends 

 upon wood, it has been fundamentally 

 unsound in principle. The settler who 

 cuts and sells trees without forethought 

 from land fit only for forest growth has 

 not enriched himself in the long run. 

 The havoc which has been wrought in 

 the forests of the United States has 

 turned trees into money, but has put 

 the balance on the wrong side of the 

 sheet by rendering vast areas unpro- 

 ductive. It is the history of all great 

 industries directed by private interests 

 that the necessity for modification is 

 not seen until the harm has been done 

 and its results are felt. This fact has 

 been emphasized in the lumber indus- 

 try — in the earlier days by the instinct- 

 ive feeling of the colonist against his 

 natural enemy, the forest, and later by 

 the remarkable inducements offered by 

 lumbering for present profit only. 



The first settlers had two objects in 

 view in their attack upon the forest — 

 the one to clear land for their farms, 

 the other to procure wood for their 

 buildings, fuel, and fences. As the 

 tide of colonization rose, and as the 

 uses for wood in manufacture increased 

 in number and extent, lumbering rap- 

 idly assumed the proportions of a busi- 

 ness enterprise, and from supplying 

 only personal wants it became profit- 

 able to supply also those of others. 

 With an apparently inexhaustible sup- 

 ply of timber available, and with an 

 insistent and growing demand, the lum- 

 ber industry came to offer remarkable 

 opportunities for money-making. Step 



by step with its development improve- 

 ment in tools and machinery took place. 

 The changes that enterprise and inge- 

 nuity have wrought in the American 

 sawmill are no less wonderful than 

 those which have taken place in the 

 American locomotive. From ' ' whip- 

 sawing," in which the boards were 

 sawed out by hand, to the modern steam 

 sawmill, with its railroad, its planing 

 mill, and its cut of nearly half a mil- 

 lion board feet per da}', is a long step, 

 but it has not taken much over fifty 

 years to accomplish it. In effective 

 methods for the harvesting and manu- 

 facture of lumber the American lum- 

 berman has no superior, nor is he 

 equaled in his disregard for the future 

 of the forest which he cuts. 



It is natural that the lumberman 

 should not turn eagerly from a S3 r stem 

 whose only aim is to secure the highest 

 possible present profit from the forest 

 to one which includes provisions for the 

 production of a second crop upon the 

 lumbered area. Under conservative 

 methods lumbering becomes a legiti- 

 mate industry for the production as 

 well as for the consumption of its sta- 

 ple. It no longer offers, however, the 

 short cut to fortune which it proved to 

 be so long as an abundance of timber 

 rendered the old methods of lumbering 

 possible. It is difficult for lumbermen 

 generally to realize that the time for 

 practical forestry has fully arrived, 

 but signs more significant than any- ex- 

 isting statistics point to the imminent 

 failure in the supply of certain timbers 

 in the United States. From the data 

 available there is no way to foretell ac- 

 curately the time necessary to exhaust 

 this supply of merchantable timber at 

 the present rate of consumption. A 

 good many estimates of the merchant- 

 able timber standing have been made, 

 some of which have already proved fal- 

 lacious. 



To predict accurately how long it 

 will be before the United States is con- 



