Cheyenne transporter. [volume] (Darlington, Indian Terr.) 1879-1886, 1883-07-28


logs floating closely together would
cover n water area of considerably
more than four miles square.
Up the Saginaw in a wide region,
reached either by the river or its tribu-
taiies, the great pine saw-log, often
three feet in diameter. has its birth
Pine forests, now rapidly thinning out,
once covered several thousand square
miles around the headwaters. Enter.
ing that lumber region in the late au-
tumu, the iumbermen establish camps,
round which during the whole winter
long the axes resound, the tall trunks
fall, and in sections are rolled to the
adjacent streams for the spring floods
to bear away. Floating down to the
main river the "boom men" pick out
each owners logs rs identified by the
brand, and gather them inside of the
booms, which may be CURLY described
as long tree trunks chained together at
the ends, often inclosing o smooth wa
ter surface of several acres. The
coves OF the Saginaw-called locally
"baycus" Il term borrowed from the
lower MissiSsippi--ar specially adapt
CN lOl tuc SdtHCA III dllO vi y dlllHdllOu
of these log armies. The military
metaphor, indeed, has peculiar fitness
here, for the logs are mustered side bv
side in companies held together by q
rope fastened to each log by devise
not unlike tie domestic clothes-pin. As
the logs down stream are worked up by
the tireless mills, these upper booms
are drawn upon for more, until the
freezing river finds them quite empty,
and another winter comes on to yield
its fresh supply.
But these extensive systems of lum-
ber-cutting by wholesale, in which the
strong mills work up logs as though
they were bits of wood, have brought
their inevitable and logical bane. Like
TIE traditional mills of the gods, they
grind slowly but surely to retribution
which must ere long overtake the lum-
Der industry of Michigan. Not long
ago immense tracts in the state were
covered by splendid pine forests; now
the lumber regions are fast contract
ing, and complaint at their reckless
exhaustion is heard all over the state.
The Saginaw board of trade will surely
the local resources of the Saginaw val
ley or to its foremost industry; yet in
its last annual report it declares that
according to the most authentic es-
Inmates there were only five billions of
feet, board measure, standing white
pine at the end of 1882, and the present
annual cut is about one billion feet.
We think the estimate OF standing pine,
however, about two billion feet too
low. How long we shall continue to
manufacture pine lumber in the Sag
inaw valley no one can safely predict,
but the end of the supply OF timber
will come just as certainly as it has
now come to those magnificent pine
ries of the Cass river, which first made
Saginaw lumber famous in the mar
kets of the world. Ii to this omin-
Gus forecast of the local board of trade
| add the statement that the cutting of
hardwood lumber is the merest trhe
as compared with the pine. saving in
dustry, the seriousness of she menace
to the industrial future of this valley
may be fully realized. But another
vicious element, the tariff, underies
and penetrates the whole question.
The present duty on trough wood" l.
e., logs, is 20 per cent. ad valorem, and
on sawed boards 81 for
each one thousand feet - duties
which are practically prohibitory,
at least as compared with the imports
of lumber which under free trade we
might get from Canada. Our des-
picable tariff, in other words, is not
merely enhancing the price of natural
product of first necessity, but is eX-
hausting our forests-'protecting," "
that is, vast and national industry to
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