BY M. J. MUNN

ZAVE you ever looked at the glistening front of a piano, or the polished floor of the ballroom, or, to remove to more meditative surroundings, the table at which you write, the chair in which you sit, or any of the thousand other objects made from wood which daily attract your eye, and wondered how that particular bit of matter came to have its present position, shape, and appearance? Have you ever gone further, and tried to trace back to their fountain-head the devious currents which drift together these floating bits of forest wreckage? If you have, you perhaps have come partially to realize the immensity of the debt owed by man to the tree.

From the time the first armor-clad Spanish cavalier fashioned his cross-bow, or replaced his broken lance, in the darkened corridors of that boundless American wilderness, on through the long periods of exploration, colonization, organization, and development of what is now a mighty commonwealth, teeming with life and restless energy and supporting a highly complex civilization, there has been a constant, ever-increasing, insatiable demand for the products of these forests. For the purpose of supplying this incessant need of man for the Wood Useful and the Wood Beautiful, there has grown up with the country a magnificent industry whose innumerable branches permeate every fiber of our business life, and for whose sus

From "The Cosmopolitan Magazine." Copyright, 1904, by International Magazine Company.

tenance and perpetuity mighty forests daily crash to earth and forever fade away.

For example, during the year 1903 there were cut, in the United States, over one hundred million trees more than one foot in diameter. These represented a solid block of wood one mile square and nearly five hundred feet high, and if cut into inch boards would have been sufficient to lay a floor one mile wide from New York to St. Louis. The forests of the United States are falling at the rate, it is reckoned, of about forty-five square miles a day. Yet almost within the memory of men now living, every plank used by the pioneer was laboriously "whipsawed" out by hand, or split from the log and flattened into plank form with broadax or adz as a "puncheon."

The cause of this phenomenal growth of the lumber business of the United States is characteristically American. Aside from the increasing demand for lumber resulting from the rapid development of the country, it is largely the direct effect of improvements in the methods of reducing trees to lumber. Cheap and abundant timber, favorable transporting facilities, and an almost limitless sale for the finished articles, have offered an irresistible challenge to Yankee ingenuity for the invention of rapid, labor-saving machinery in every department of the work. This, together with a thorough systematization of the business, has given to us another marvel of the Western world the modern lumbering plant.

The lumber industry is at the present time the fourth in value of products among the great manufacturing industries of the United States, being exceeded only by the iron and steel, the textile and the slaughtering and meat-packing industries. Upward of seven hundred million dollars of capital is invested in the various lumbering establishments, and more than three hundred million wage-earners

are given employment. About one hundred and twenty million dollars was paid out in wages during 1903, and forty billion feet (board measure) of lumber were produced by the mills, valued at over six hundred million dollars.

The most valuable of the common kinds of timber is the white pine, from which the bulk of the ordinary sawn. lumber is made. This species has its home in northern New England and in the northern half of the lake states, and is found in no small quantities in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Since the partial destruction of the white pine in New England and northern New York, spruce has become the principal commercial timber in that section. Hemlock is also found along very much the same range. Southern yellow pine grows in all the Southern States, and western yellow pine is the commonest pine of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states. Sugar pine is found mainly on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada range.

The up-to-date lumbering concern is separated into three natural divisions, each of equal importance. First, the logging department, whose function it is to secure and deliver to the sawmill the raw material in the shape of sawlogs cut into suitable lengths for lumber. Next come the sawmills and planing-mills which manufacture this wood into various sizes and grades of lumber, and prepare it for the market. The third department has to do with the transportation and sale of the finished article. An important adjunct to the first two of these is the repair department, which, in addition to its evident function, has charge of the purchase and instalment of new machinery. Each of these in turn is divided into numerous sections, under competent foremen; yet all work in such perfect harmony, and are balanced with such mathematical exactness, that any marked change in the production of

one instantly receives sympathetic response from each of the others.

Evidently the first thing to be taken into consideration in the establishment of a modern sawmill is that of securing control of a sufficient supply of timber to justify the large expenditure necessary to put the mill into operation. When these preliminary difficulties are at length overcome, and the mill is established ready for cutting lumber, it still needs the best business talent for its successful operation. Take, for example, the logging department of one of our large mills. When we begin to consider the task of cutting, and transporting from one to one hundred miles, three hundred thousand square feet of heavy logs, each weighing several tons, in the ten hours of each working-day of a year, for a score of years, we are appalled at the immensity of the undertaking. Yet that miracle is actually being performed by logging outfits in almost every lumbering state of the Union. And that, too, against natural obstacles which to the layman appear insuperable. The diversity of conditions in various parts of the country has of necessity led to the invention of machinery, and to the adoption of methods, best suited to the section in which they are found. In many regions, logs are supplied to the mills by contract, at a fixed price per thousand feet board measure. The task of keeping filled the ravenous maws of these huge timber-eating monsters is not an easy one. Logging companies who undertake it put up a stiff forfeit for every day that the gluttons go hungry.

Practically all the cutting is done by hand. The Patent Office at Washington has models of many ingenious devices for doing this work by machinery, but some inventive brain has yet to produce a practical machine that will take the place of the primitive weapons of the pioneer,

the saw and the ax. These, however, have been brought to a high degree of perfection, and in the hands of the skilled lumber-jacks work wonders. In cutting the timber, the men work in pairs. Their tools are a saw, two axes, two iron or wooden wedges and a measuring-stick; and last, but not least, in pine timber a liberal supply of kerosene is needed to prevent the saw from becoming gummed by the copious flow of crude turpentine from the trees.

The process of felling is simple in theory yet sometimes most difficult in execution. But few trees stand quite vertically. So in a thick wood, where the danger of lodging is great, it is often necessary to throw them at various angles to their "lean." This is done by cutting a deep notch with an ax about three feet from the ground, on the side of the tree toward which it is to fall. On the opposite side the saw is inserted a little above the notch. Often the tree "pinches," fastening the saw. The crack must then be forced open by a wedge driven in behind. The improper placing of this wedge, a sudden gust of wind, one side of the saw cutting faster than the other, or a hundred other things, may happen to send the toppling tree crashing down in a wrong direction. Yet the skilled lumberman solves the most difficult combinations at a glance, and fells his trees with the unerring aim of a rifleman.

The logs are next cut into lengths varying from ten to one hundred feet rarely more than thirty feet-depending upon the length of tree, and the use to which the lumber is to be put. The sawyers are usually paid per thousand feet, the price varying with locality, grade of timber and lengths of sawlogs. The standard price for average pine timber is about fifty cents a thousand feet board measure.

From ten to fifteen thousand is a good