Clearly they knew that the pine would not last. But the old axiom is, the plow follows the ax. And it happened in those states, and it happened in the Ohio River Valley and it happened in Wisconsin, and agriculture was able to take over as the next economy. The belief was that farming would come here to Northern Minnesota and be successful. So, much of Minnesota's forest lands changed into cultivated fields, pastures, and meadows.
Old photographs show the towering white pine stands of Superior's North Shore laid bare.
But farming was to fail in much of Northern Minnesota, and as lumbermen moved on into the Arrowhead and Mississippi headwaters, the plow wasn't the only thing following the ax. Jeanne Coffee is director of the Hinckley Fire Museum. All they wanted was the trunk of the tree. They didn't want the tops, or the branches, so that was left to lay. That became known as slash.