The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-06-17
LAST OF PINES IN
 WISCONSIN WOODS Former Great Industry Has AL
 most Disappeared CHIPPEWA'S MILLS GONE Where Twenty Billion Feet of Fine Logs Were Taken From Before
 the Supplies Gave Out.
 Camp Supplies.

gears ago. writes a correspondent of the Milwaukee Sentinel, when I came to Chip tpewa' any one claiming that the pine on Ffhe Chippewa river would be all gone in 1906 would be considered a fit subject for Mendota. Although numbering had com lmenSed some twenty years previous to that tme it was still in it's infancy, and the pine on the Chippewa was considered ineXhaustible.
 In the heydey of numbering there were in the vicinity of forty sawmills on the river. Today there are but two. and their life is short I heard an old surveyor about forty years ago, one well aequaint- ed with the pinery say that there had been made about five billion feet of pine on the Chippewa and the tributaries above Chippewa Falls. But how wide the mark. About that time the Beef Slough com pany Abandoned last year for want O. 1ogs) commenced business on the river. 1t f1oated out of the Chippewa an aver- age of half a billion feet of logs a year during that period, making the gross amount of 20OO0 O00,O0O feet disposed of from that source alone, and probably ,half that amount has been sawed up by the home mills. showing how little the old pioneers knew of the great wealth that surrounded ther1.
 The old everyday familiar logging streams, the Fisher Jump, Flarubeau, Deer Tail Thornapple (of Deitz fame), Brunett, Weigore and Court d'Orreilles We hear of no more They tell their his tory by their stumps. The green tops have vanished. Yellow river has a few years respite granted it, and when the last monarch of the forest has fallen there then Chippewa's numbering industry will be thing of the past.
 Superior Quality of Pine.
 The quality of the pine had no superior, If 1t had an equal. The log timber of the Jump and Thornapple was the delight of all lumbermen. Even in it's declining days its lumber carried off the first prize at the St. Louis Worlds exposition in 1903 But back to the old days of cherished Tecollections. The first sawmill on the river was built by Jean Brunett at Chip pewa Falls in 1886 and Is still running and in all probability will be the last to hang up it's saws. From the original one sash sawmill cutting not to exceed one mli1an feet of lumber a year it is now and has always had the name of being the largest sawmill In the world" cut ting as high as seventy million feet of lumber a year, besides train loads of Hath and shingles. After passing through
 
 Into the possession of its present own CTS, the Chippewa Lumber and Boom company. about twenty-five years ago.
 One of the strangest things in early day logging on the river was the distance the 1oggers went for their logs considering that the country adjacent to the mill abounded in the finest quality of pne to be had just for the cutting. For in those days no one thought of buying govern ment land or pine you just went on and took all you wanted. The principal log ging was done around Bellies Falls and the Court de Orreilles river. over sixty miles north in a straight line and over one hundred miles by the tote road. Hay ing to get all their supplies from Chip pewa Falls, the expense of getting them to camp was great for under the best of circumstances the roads were poor and passable only when. Even the hay for the cattle was hauled from the same source In those days there was no such thing as baled hay. so you can imagine the con- ditioE and cost of a load hauled that dis tance through the woods on a tote road after five days journey, and sometimes longer
 But. then. everything was primitive and there was not great variety in the pro- vision line for the men. It consisted chief ly Of salt pork bran. flour, black strap molasses and tea or coffee. Sugar? No, Cream? It makes me laugh and it was nllgnty lucKY camp that had a supply or that all winter I remember in the winter of 1857 I cerked for the mill com~ pany from whom all the supplies were furnished. We ran out of pork by the middle oe winter and could get no more until the keelboat came up the river in the spring But we had on hand quite a supply of codfsh which was served out in place of the pork There was lttIe pleasant joking among the men over the 1enter change. but no kicking The men took to the fish and worked just as hard
 Present Day Supplies.
 What contrast to the present day SUD- plies! Every camp now must have it's butter. eggs pie and cake. They turn up their nose at that old standby pork It must be Armour's best hind quarter or they jump the camp, and these are the Fellows that call themselves lumberiacl,s What parody on the old boysr
 Great changes have also taken place in the methods of logging It Is like going back to the fail and the wooden plov Cattle were the only animals used i'm hauling figs. Horses were unknown. The go-devil was the vehicle of conveyance. This primitive machine was constructed of two crooks, about six feet long the crooked ends joined together with a beam across the middle, forming a capital A the apex rounded off like a capital N It was hitched to the yoke of oxen by n chain passing around the cross beam then running through a hole at the apex of the A. One end of the log rested nm