The Sentinel=record., 1912-09-22
|SO0,OOO,OOO FEET
 OF LUMBER SOLD.
CALIFORNIA LUMBER COMPANY MAKES BIG PURCHASE FROM
 FORESTRY SERVICE.
Probably the Largest Individual Sale of Standing Lumber in the
 Worlds History.

ter Graves Is on his way to San Fran cisco to make final arrangements un- der which a California lumber com pany will purchase 800 million feet of timber on the Sierra National Forest. The timber has already been awarded, after public advertisement, to the highest bidder, but under the terms of the advertisement the final signing of
 the contract will not take place until
 the company has been shown on the
 ground what timber the government
 will reserve from cutting in order to
 preserve good forest conditions ana
 provide for reproduction
 The company will be allowed It's full
 800 million feet. but naturally 1t will
 not be allowed to cut clean. As a
 rule the forest service reserves some
 thing like one-third of the forest stand
 in applying forestry on government
 holdings A marking board made up
 of one man sent from Washington,
 one from the district office in san
 Francisco and the local foresr super
 visor will carefully mark sample
 area, to show how the restrictions
 on cutting will be applied Repre-
 sentatiyes of the company will then
 go over this area, after which Chief Forester Graves and his assistants will, it is expected, make snal arrange
 ments with the company in San Fran.
 cisco and the contract of sale will be signed.
 The forest service" said MT. Graves, in speaking of this sale, "has received number of inquiries wneth. CT in selling so much timber to q single purchaser, the government may
 not he opening the way "to a mono. polistic control of local lumber mark. cts. Other correspondents are dis, turbed lest the sale prove a bad bar
 gain for the government through the
 rise in value of the timber in the 22 years during which the company will cut.
 Such large and longtime sales of | national forest timber as that to the
 California company are a new devel-
 opment in the forest service Great | bodies of mature but inaccessible timber can be put on the market only
 If sale contracts are let on terms
 which will justify very heavy initial
 investment in transportation facilities
 In entering into such contracts. how l ever, special safeguards to protect the | public against monopoly and to pre- | vent an undue speculative profit tC the purchaser are employed.
 The national forests contain. in all
 the equivalent of nearly 600 billion
 feet of timber now of merchantabl,
 size, besides young growth for futur,
 harvest. Because of it's remotenes! from market and the wild, mountain. ous country, without transportation | facilities, in which most of it lies
 only small percentage can now bt
 sold on any terms. Most of it would
 cost more to get 1t out than it would | bring. The sale of less than one-ffrh
 of one per cent of our total supply
 to one company leaves plenty of room for competition by other companies.
 "The timber which has been sold to
 the California company lies well back
 in the Sierra Nevada mountains and will require the construction of 70
 miles of standard-gauge railroad to open up the area. Since this road will also open up other national forest timber and will be a common car rier it creates another safeguard against monopoly. The company is given a cutting period of 22 years to remove the timber. besides an addi- tional two years for the construction of logging and manufacturing facil- tiles The sale was publicly advertised for six months in order to give an op- portunity for all who wished to com pete for the contract to make bids, as
 is done in all large national forest sales.
 No business organization would un- dertake the heavy investment neces- sary in such cases unless the handling of large body of timber and a sui ificient period in which to remove it
 under practicable logging conditions are assured. The great difficulty in making such long-term sales is to es- tablish a price which will be fair to both sides. No one can foresee fu- ture conditions well enough to know what stumpage will be worth ten, 15 or 20 years hence.
 Consequently the terms of sale provide for the readiustment of stump age prices every five years. The ba- sis for fixing the prices will be, in each case, the prices of manufactured lumber in the markets where the tim Der is sold during the preceding two years.
 For several years the forest sery- ice has been selling in the neighbor- hood of million dollars worth of na- tional forest stumpage per year, but this combined with what is cut for free use is only about one-eighth Of what might be cut without reducing the permanent stock of the forests. The supply will be kept up through
 growth By making long-term sales it will be possible greatly to increase the amount available for present needs of the timber consuming public,
 without endangel1ng future supplies
 through overcutting. It will always re-
 main true, however, that vastly the
 greater part of our timber sales will
 be to small purchasers, who are fa-
 vored wherever possible. Monopoly
 is impossible as long as the door is
 kept open for such purchasers. Out of over 5,600 sales made in the fiscal
 year 1911, about 40 were for over
 S5 900 worth kof timber to a single