[CHAPTER VII.]
IN THE FOREST.
In preceding chapters the characteristics of the country west of the Mississippi have been set forth; but many a man seeking a new home would be lonely upon the prairies. The lumberman of Maine, who was born in the forest, who in childhood listened to the sweet but mournful music of the ever-sighing pines, would be home-sick away from the grand old woods. The trees are his friends. The open country would be a solitude, but in the depths of the forest he would ever find congenial company. There the oaks, the elms, and maples reach out their arms lovingly above him, sheltering him alike from winter's blasts and summer's heats. Even though he may have no poetry in his soul, the woods will have a charm for him, for there he finds a harvest already grown and waiting to be gathered, as truly as if it were so many acres of ripened wheat.
It is not difficult to pick out the "Down-Easters" in Minnesota. When I hear a man talk about "stumpage" and "thousands of feet," I know that he is from the Moosehead region, or has been in a lumber camp on the Chesuncook. He has eaten pork and beans, and slept on hemlock boughs on the banks of the Madawaska. When he cocks his head on one side and squints up a pine-tree, I know that he has Blodget's Table in his brain, and can tell the exact amount of clear and merchantable lumber which the tree will yield. His paradise is in the forest, and there alone.
The region east of the Mississippi and around its head-waters is the Eden of lumbermen.
The traveller who starts from St. Paul and travels westward will find a prairie country; but if he travels eastward, or toward the northeast, he will find himself in the woods, where tall pines and spruces and oaks and maples rear their gigantic trunks. It is not all forest, for here and there we see "openings" where the sunlight falls on pleasant meadows; but speaking in general terms, the entire country east of the Mississippi, in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, and in that portion of Michigan lying between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, is the place for the lumberman.
The soil is sandy, and the geologist will see satisfactory traces of the drift period, when a great flood of waters set southward, bringing granite bowlders, pebbles, and stones from the country lying between Hudson Bay and Lake Superior.
The forest growth affects the climate. There is more snow and rain east of the Mississippi than west of it. The temperature in winter on Lake Superior is milder than at St. Paul, but there is more moisture in the air. The climate at Duluth or Superior City during the winter does not vary much from that of Chicago. Notwithstanding the difference of latitude, the isothermal line of mean temperature for the year runs from the lower end of Lake Michigan to the western end of Lake Superior. Probably more snow falls in Minnesota than around Chicago, for in all forest regions in northern latitudes there is usually a heavier rain and snow fall than in open countries. The time will probably come when the rain-fall of eastern Minnesota and northern Michigan will be less than it is now. When the lumbermen have swept away the forests, the sun will dry up the moisture, there will be less rain east of the Mississippi, while the probabilities are that it will be increased westward over all the prairie region. Orchards, groves, corn-fields, wheat-fields, clover-lands,—all will appear with the advance of civilization. They will receive more moisture from the surrounding air than the prairie grasses do at the present time. Everybody knows that the hand of man is powerful enough to change climate,—to increase the rain-fall here, to diminish it there; to lower the temperature, or to raise it.
The Ohio River is dwindling in size because the forests of Ohio and Pennsylvania are disappearing. Palestine, Syria, and Greece, although they have supported dense populations, are barren to-day because the trees have been cut down. If this were an essay on the power of man over nature, instead of the writing out of a few notes on the Northwest, I might go on and give abundant data; but I allude to it incidentally in connection with the climate, which fifty years hence will not in all probability be the same that it is to-day.
Having in preceding pages taken a survey of the magnificent farming region beyond the Mississippi, it remains for us to take a look at the country between the Mississippi and Lake Superior.