18 MISC. PUBLICATION 162, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
yellow pine. Western white pine, sugar pine, and western hemlock 
also are valuable timber trees of this region. a 
In California grow the celebrated giant sequoias (“bigtrees”) and 
redwoods. The redwoods are found in a strip 20 to 30 miles wide 
along the coast, extending from the southern borders of Oregon into 
Monterey County, Calif. The bigtrees grow farther inland on the 
western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Because of the comparatively 
smal] number remaining, practically no lumber is now cut from the 
bigtrees. 
Other species found in the Pacific coast region are mountain hem- 
lock; noble, silver, lewland white, white, and Shasta red firs; Western 
redcedar, incense, Pert Orford, and Alaska cedars; Sitka, Engelmann, 
and bigcone spruces; western and Lyall larches; lodgepole, knobcone, 
and Digger pines; Monterey and Gowan cypresses; western and Cali- 
fornia junipers; single-leaf pion; oaks; ash; maples: alders; cotton- 
wood; buckeye; laurel: and madrofia. : 
HOW OUR FORESTS SERVE US 
ForEsT PRopwuctTs 
For many of us the forest is no longer close at hand. Nevertheless, 
it has continued to contribute more and more to our needs until today 
the uses to which its resources and products are put are legion. 
The principal forest product, of course, is wood—one of the world’s 
most useful raw materials. Wood provides us with shelter, imple- 
ments, furniture, and many other articles intimately associated with 
our daily lives are made of it. It gives us most of the paper that goes 
into our newspapers and books. Our railroads are laid on wooden 
ties, and in millions of homes throughout the country wood is still the 
sole or principal fuel used. It is also used in mining the coal and 
drilling for the oil which heat countless other homes and provide 
power for industries and transportation systems. In short, nearly 
all of the products used by the American people, whether vegetable, 
animal, or mineral, use wood somewhere in the process of production, 
distribution, or utilization. 
During World War II, wood has been one of the most critically im- 
portant war materials, needed in enormous quantities for barracks and 
cantonments, for war factories and housing for war workers, for 
wharves, ships, aircraft, truck bodies, gunstocks, explosives, and hun- 
dreds of other war requirements. Vast amounts have been used for 
boxing and crating ammunition and supplies for shipment to the men 
at the fighting fronts. The armed forces actually have used a greater 
tonnage of wood than of steel. The war brought home as never before 
the fact that wood is an indispensable material. 
As a result of our enormous demand for wood, there has developed 
a large group of industries engaged in the manufacture of forest 
products. Foremost among these is the lumber industry, which has 
to do with felling the trees, cutting them into logs, and getting the 
logs to the sawmill, where they are sawed into boards and rough lum- 
ber (fig. 12). Planing mills remanufacture some of the rough lum- 
ber into finished lumber, sash, doors, blinds, and other products. Still 
other plants use the rough lumber for the manufacture of shoe lasts, 
spools and bobbins, woodenware novelties, toys, and other turned- 
