REDWOOD FORESTS OF THE PACIFIC COAST 149 



eight inches in diameter are cut and sent to the mill, and knotty 

 stuff is sawed, on the Pacific coast nothing less than 16 inches 

 in diameter is sawed, and clear lumber only. If the redwood 

 were used as economically as the southern pine, these estimates 

 of its stand might easily be 50 per cent greater. The forests of 

 Washington and Oregon are very heavy, but they by no means 

 equal the redwoods in density. The most heavily forested county 

 in Washington, Skagit, contains an average on its forest land of 

 but 28,000 feet per acre, and in Oregon the stand is no greater. 

 Of course, there are in these states individual acres, and even 

 square miles, which are vastly more heavily forested ; but so» 

 also, are there in the redwood strip. On Mad river, near Eureka, 

 a lumber company is at work in a tract of several square miles 

 which actually cuts 150,000 feet per acre. 



There is on record a single acre, near Garberville, which yielded 

 in the mill 1,431,530 feet in lumber. There was sufficient lum- 

 ber on this acre to have covered it with a solid block of frame 

 dwellings ten stories high. A redwood tree of average size, say 

 five feet in diameter at the butt, furnishes enough lumber to build 

 an ordinary cottage, and many trees have been cut each of which 

 would suffice for half a dozen such houses. One tree is on rec- 

 ord as having scaled 66,500 feet. A tree was felled in a lumber 

 camp near Eureka in 1898 which was 16 feet in diameter inside 

 the hark, and which scaled over 100,000 feet, and there is stand- 

 ing in the same neighborhood a tree 22 feet in diameter which 

 scales nearly twice as much. Such examples of wonderful yield 

 might be multiplied to any extent, hut this would merely in- 

 volve repetition. 



The redwood strip is composed of the westernmost of the Coast 

 ranges, with the valleys between them. It is narrow at the north, 

 in Del Norte county, where it is not over five to six miles in 

 breadth. It widens in Humboldt count}' to an average of 10 to 

 12 miles; then south of Eel river, in the southern part of the 

 county, its continuity is broken for a few miles. At the north 

 edge of Mendocino count}' it commences again, and in the cen- 

 tral part of that county attains it greatest breadth, of perhaps 

 2D miles. Farther south, especially in Sonoma county, the red- 

 woods scatter, being found in detached clumps and groves, which 

 become more and more scattering southward. The trees, how- 

 ever, remain as large as elsewhere. 



The closest and finest growth is in Humboldt county, near the 

 northern end. That portion in Mendocino and Sonoma counties 



