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Show Chapter XIX Early Efforts to Protect Public Timberlands Covered with towering stands of virgin hardwoods and conifers, the eastern shore of North America was in 1607 a formidable place to land and make a permanent settlement. Though the first settlers came from countries where trees were cherished and protected, they quickly learned that in the New World the forest was an enemy where Indians lurked. True it provided lumber for building, fencing, fuel, and game, but it had to be destroyed to make way for growing crops. Forests: Deterrent to Progress Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Americans slashed, cut, and burned their way through the forests, destroying enormous quantities of growing timber while utilizing little, in their effort to make farms. At a very modest estimate, 150 million acres of the improved land in farms in 1900 had been cleared of its forest cover by the patient labor of the original settlers and their descendants. Would it be too much to estimate the land in its original state as having 4,000 board feet to the acre on the average? At this rate, 600 billion board feet had been for the most part destroyed by a people to whom the profits in land use came from producing crops, raising livestock, and establishing towns and cities. What appears to be reckless use of natural resources to a later gen- eration was sound economics to the pioneers.1 This attitude toward the forest is well shown in a series of sketches written by an English emigrant to the backwoods north of Lake Ontario in 1833. Upon the family's arrival the previous year it had engaged a number of Irish choppers to clear and fence 10 acres for which their compensation was to be $14 an acre. When the trees were cut down, the trunks sawed into logs and drawn into great heaps by oxen, the family had "a glorious burning. . . ." 2 To effect this the more readily we called a logging-bee. We had a number of settlers attend, with yokes of oxen and men to assist us .... My husband ... set the heaps on fire; and a magnificent sight it was to see such a conflagration all around us .... Sometimes the fire will communicate with the forest and run over many hundreds of acres. This is not considered favourable for clearing, 1 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967), pp. 22-43. James E. Defe-baugh, History of the Lumber Industry of America (2 vols., Chicago, 1907) , 1:284, estimates that there were 524,800,000 acres of wooded land east of the Mississippi at the time white men came to America. If one allows only 2,000 board feet to the acre, this would bring the amount of board feet to 1,049,600,-000,000. This figure does not include the enormous amount of lumber in the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain states. It is easily understood why settlers who faced such a tremendous extent of forested land, first looked upon it as an enemy. 3 Mrs. C. P. S. Traill, The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer (London, 1836) , pp. 131-32, 192-94. 531 |
