22 
PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE AREA. 
The territory covered is that part of the State lying north of a line 
from Green Bay to the mouth of the St. Croix River, with the counties 
of Portage, Wood, and Jackson as southern projections. It involves 27 
counties, with a total land area of nearly 19,000,000 acres, or about 53 
per cent of the entire State, and contains almost all of the present 
supplies of lumber-size timber of both pine and hardwoods remaining 
in Wisconsin. 
Topography.—Over 90 per cent of this territory is a broad slope, 
which rises gently from the southeast, south, and southwest to a flat 
divide running near to and parallel with the south shore of Lake 
Superior. About 9 per cent is occupied by the more abrupt slope from 
this divide to the lake. 
In going from east to west the divides between the several large 
rivers which drain the larger slope are very gradual, almost imper- 
ceptible, and in some cases are entirely lost in labyrinths of lakes and 
swamps. Hills over 300 feet high from their base are scarce; a few 
‘¢mounds” or isolated steep hills with extremely narrow bases rise out 
of the sandy plains of Jackson and Clark counties, and a few larger, 
more massive hills occur in the valleys of the Wisconsin, Chippewa, 
and St. Croix rivers, and there is arange of low, broad hills which form 
the crests of the Iron and Copper ranges, but on the whole the hills and 
hilly tracts do not occupy over 5 per cent of the total area, while about 
45 per cent is level upland and about 50 per cent is rolling country, of 
which a considerable portion is steep rolling “kettle” or ‘‘ pot hole” 
land. 
Soils.—The greater part of this area is covered by deep grayish clay 
and loam soils, bearing everywhere a forest of mixed hard woods or 
hard woods and conifers. A narrow belt of fertile ‘-red clay” land 
skirts Lake Superior and is stocked with a unique mixture of conifers 
and hard woods, remarkable in the species which are associated, resem- 
bling more the regular pinery of the sandy lands than the mixed woods 
of the loamy soils. A very variable mixture of loam and sandy loam 
overlies the land about Green Bay; also parts of Chippewa, Dunn, Bar- 
ron, and Polk counties. About Green Bay this land bore a very heavy 
forest of pine with a fair mixture of hard woods. In the western counties 
part of it was openings and part bore heavy pine forests. Throughout 
this area the presence of sand is indicated by the characteristic White 
Birch. Sandy lands, continuous with the sands of Waushara, Adams, 
and Juneau counties, form the southern edge of this district through 
Portage, Wood, Jackson, Clark, Chippewa, and Dunn counties. These 
sandy lands are either Oak and Jack Pine openings, i. e., brush prairies 
scatteringly covered by low, bushy Oaks and dense groves of small 
Jack Pine, or else they are regular pineries covered by dense stands of 
valuable pine, without hard woods. 
Within the large loam-land area there occur three rather well-defined, 
