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Show EARLY EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC TIMBERLANDS 535 deal with was the cutting of trees for the fuel used by all the steamboats plying the western rivers before the Civil War. Small boats used from 12 to 24 cords a day, larger boats consumed 50 to 75 cords. At first the crews would "wood up" twice a day, salvaging driftwood and cutting trees which lined the streams. Later, woodyards were established on the banks, the supplies often being furnished by squatters on nearby public and private land. Boats would draw up to the yards, quickly load with the aid of all hands, and then rush onward. Few deplored the ravages of the boat crews, the woodyard operators, or the squatters. By mid-century the drain on existing supplies of timber had become very heavy, and coal was beginning to replace wood.9 Before the era of steamboating on the western rivers passed, the railroads were cutting deeply into traffic by water, especially in the 1850's. By 1865 it was estimated that railroads were using 6,500,000 cords of wood annually, in addition to hundreds of millions of board feet of construction lumber and millions of hemlock, chestnut, and oak ties.10 The riverboats and railroads did not require the best timber for fuel and, except for the early days when the boat crews hastily cut wherever they stopped and whatever they found, contractors and woodyard operators used tops and branches and refuse wood for which there was no other demand. Trees fit for dimension lumber were held for construction purposes. Prairie farms and developing western cities created an almost insatiable demand for lumber, particularly white pine. Wherever it was found in quantity mills would 9 Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers. An Economic and Technological History (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), pp. 133, 264-69; Walter Havighurst, Voices on the River. The Story of the Mississippi Waterways (New York, 1964), pp. 64-65, 212-14, 216. 10 United States Commissioner of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1865, pp. 210-34. be established on the nearest drivable stream giving rise to new urban centers on the Saginaw, the Manistee in Michigan, the Fox, the Wisconsin, the Black and the Chippewa in Wisconsin, and the St. Croix and Mississippi .in Minnesota. Farther down on the Mississippi the most modern mills were erected at Rock Island, Moline, Hannibal, Keokuk, and Dubuque and to them loggers drove their rafts of pine logs. Some loggers may have bought a quarter-section of land to give legality to their operations but they were not worried if their operations spread well beyond the boundaries of their tracts. Stories of the "big" or "rubber forty" abound in the pineries of the Lake States. Many loggers encroached upon land to which they had no title and thought no more of it than did the lonely settler cutting timber on an adjacent quarter-section belonging either to the United States or to an absentee owner.11 Less frequently did the millmen permit their crews to trespass on public lands, except by error, for they had too much at stake to risk their substantial investments. Years after large scale cutting in the pineries of the Lake States was under way there was no clear or well-established government policy toward the timberlands. As James W. Hurst has said, "the most important decisions in law about the disposal of the public timberlands in Wisconsin were taken by default."12 There was no 11 Samuel Trask Dana, John H. Allison, and Rus-sel N. Cunningham, Minnesota Lands (Washington, I960), p. 101. The land not being open to purchase before survey and there being no way by which timber could be legally bought, the commercial lumbermen resorted to "technically illegal cutting" which was regarded "as both justifiable and desirable" since it was the only way timber could be acquired for the development of the prairies farther down the Mississippi. 12 James Willard Hurst, Law and Economic Growth. The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836-1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 62. "Through the years in which the |
