96 WHITE PINE. 
nor would the labor of extracting it be easy, since the White Pine occupies 
exclusively tracts of only a few hundred acres, and is usually mingled in 
different proportions with the leafy trees. 
The vast consumption of this tree for domestic use, and for exportation 
to the West Indies and to Europe, renders it necessary every year to 
penetrate further into the country, and inroads are already made, in quest 
of this species only, upon forests which probably will not be cleared for 
cultivation in 25 or 30 years. 
The persons engaged in this branch of industry are in general emigrants 
from Hew Hampshire, led by inconstancy of character or by the desire of 
amassing rapidly the means of purchasing a hundred acres of land* for 
the establishment of their families. In the summer they unite in small 
companies, and traverse these vast solitudes in every direction to ascertain 
the places in which the Pines abound. After cutting the grass and con- 
verting it into hay for the nourishment of the cattle to be employed in 
their labor, they return home. In the beginning of winter they enter the 
forests again, establish themselves in huts covered with the hark of the 
Canoe Birch or the Arbor Vitæ, and though the cold is so intense that 
the mercury sometimes remains for several weeks from 40 to 45 degrees 
of Eahrenheit, below the point of congelation, they persevere with unabated 
courage in thir work. When the trees are felled they cut them into logs 
from 14 to 18 feet long, and by means of their cattle, which they employ 
with great dexterity, drag them to the river, and, after stamping on them 
a mark of property, roll them upon its frozen bosom. At the breaking 
up of the ice in the spring, they float down with the current. All the 
logs fhat come down the Kennebec are stopped at Winslow, about 120 miles 
from the sea, where each person selects his own, and forms them into rafts 
with the intention of selling them to the proprietors of the numerous saw- 
mills between that place and the sea, or of having them sawn for his own 
benefit at the price of a half or even of three quarters of the product in 
abundant years. 
When I was at Winslow in August, 1806, the river was still covered 
with thousands of logs, of which the diameter of the greater part was 15 
or 16 inches, and that of the remainder (perhaps one-fiftieth of the whole) 
20 inches. The Blue Ash and the Bed Pine were the only species mingled 
with them, and these not in the proportion of one to a, hundred. The logs 
which are not sawn the first year are attacked by large worms, which form 
in every direction holes about two lines in diameter ; but if stripped of the 
bark they remain uninjured for thirty years: the same remark is applicable 
to the stumps, which resist the influences of heat and moisture during a 
great length of time, and it has passed into a proverb, that the man who 
The price of land in the County of Kennebock, in 1807, was five or six dollars an acre. 
