1888
May 9
Cadillac, Michigan
Cloudy and cool with a few light showers.[?] 52 at noon.
  Dwight went out a mile or two in the forenoon
and shot nine or ten birds. Immediately after dinner
we started off together taking a buggy and driving
to a lumber camp three miles E. of town. For the
first mile the road led through the usual open
waste of chopped stumps and prostrate logs & over
a hill of no great elevation. Saw Juncos, Grass finches,
a D. palmarum and a pair of Troglodytes aidon.
Then we reached the woods, the first primeval
forest of white pine that I have ever seen. It was
a revelation - wholly unlike what I had imagined.
The trees were crowded together, almost as closely it
seemed to the eye but of course not nearly so much in
reality, as corn stalks in a corn field. Nine tenths
of them were pines, the remaining tenth red maples
and hemlocks. Of the pines perhaps one third were
P. resinosa, the remaining two thirds P. strobus. The
needles of both were much shorter than in the east
those of P. resinosa not longer than eastern P. strobus.
Their average height was certainly fully 100 ft. &
there were very many trees that must have been
150 ft. Few of them had any branches whatever
less than 50 ft. above the ground. The maximum
spread of their tops was not over 20 ft. and the
average probably not more than 12 to 15 ft. Their
trunks tapered very little, rarely at all perceptibly,
to the lowest branches. Their bark was rough &
deeply furrowed. Few trees exceeded three feet in
diameter at the base. There was little undergrowth
& usually none but the ground was cumbered by