Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

CHAPTER XII
THE LUMBER YARD OF AN EMPIRE

I am in the heart of one of the great timber producing districts of Canada. Every year millions of feet of logs are floated down the Ottawa River. This stream is eight hundred miles long, and, with its tributaries, taps a vast area of forests that feed the maws of the paper and the saw mills of the city of Ottawa. I have watched the latter at their greedy work, which they carry on at such a pace that the cry is being raised that the woodlands of the Dominion are being denuded, and that conservation measures must be adopted.

I have seen great tree trunks squared into timbers so fast that it was only a matter of seconds from the moment they came wet out of the river until they were ready for market. My neck aches from looking up at log piles as high as a six-story apartment, waiting to be converted into matches in one of the world’s greatest match factories. You can imagine the size of its output when I tell you that in one year it paid the government nearly two million dollars in sales taxes. At other mills piles of pulpwood, nearly as big, are soon to become paper, and in one I watched huge rolls of news-print taken off the machines and marked for shipment to the United States.

Canada is cutting down her forests at the rate of about three thousand millions of feet a year. Still this is only a fraction of one per cent. of the estimated timber resources of Canada, and the cutting can go on for a century before the supply is consumed. In the area of her forests the Dominion is exceeded only by Russia and the United States and she is second to us in the amount of lumber produced. The British Empire reaches around the globe, but half of all its forest wealth is in Canada. Not only the United Kingdom, but South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, and New Zealand depend on this country for a good part of their lumber supply.

The Canadians are now getting from their trees a per capita revenue of about seventy-five dollars a year, and this income their government is trying to safeguard. They see in us a terrible example of the extravagant use of natural resources. Of our eight hundred and twenty-two million acres of virgin forest, only one sixth is left, which we are cutting at a rate that will exhaust it in twenty-five years. This does not allow for new growth, which we are eating up four times faster than Nature produces it.

More than nine tenths of all the forest lands of Canada are owned by the government, so that she is in better position than we to control the cutting and provide for the future. In practically every province, lands good only for trees are no longer sold, and one fourth of the forest areas have been permanently dedicated to timber production. Each province administers its own forests, and there is much similarity in their conservation measures and other restrictions. The usual practice is to sell cutting rights to the highest bidders, under conditions that yield substantial revenues to the government and make it possible to supervise operations.

It is estimated that two thirds of the original stands of timber have been destroyed by forest fires, which are still causing enormous losses. Large sums collected monthly from the timber users are being spent for fire protection. Every railroad is compelled by law to maintain extensive patrols on account of the sparks from locomotives. Several of the provinces use airplanes equipped with wireless telephones or radios to enable their observers to report instantly any blaze they discover. Some of these planes are large enough to carry crews of eight or ten men, who swoop down upon a burning area as soon as it is sighted. In Manitoba an airplane recently carried firefighters in thirty-two minutes to a forest that was three days’ canoe journey from the nearest station.

Suppose we go up in one of these patrol planes, and take a look at the forests of Canada. We shall have to travel over one million square miles, for that is their area. One fourth of the land of the Dominion is wooded. The forests begin with the spruces of the Maritime Provinces and the south shore of the St. Lawrence and extend across the continent to the Pacific slope, and northward to the sub-arctic regions. There is still much hardwood left, especially north of the Great Lakes, but the conifers, or evergreens, make up about eighty per cent. of the standing timber, and furnish ninety-five per cent. of the lumber and the pulpwood. In passing over southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, we shall see a vast area of prairies, the lands which now form the great wheat belt. The foresters say this land once had forests but that they were destroyed by fire in ages past.

We see the finest trees near the end of our air journey. This is in British Columbia, a province that contains the largest, most compact, and most readily accessible stand of merchantable timber in all the world. It has more than half the saw timber of Canada. In this area, which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Douglas fir is the predominant type. The trees are sometimes forty, fifty, and sixty feet thick, and a single log will make a load for a car. A whole tree may fill a train when cut into boards. Here sixty-foot timbers that will square two or three feet are nicknamed “toothpicks.”

Twenty years ago the chief commercial wood of Canada was white pine. It was then the aristocrat of the north woods, and was cut from trees between one hundred and fifty and three hundred years old. Its place has now been taken by the spruces, of which there are five varieties. The spruces form about one third of all the standing timber of Canada. The annual cut amounts to something like two thousand million feet, or enough to build a board walk sixteen feet wide all the way around the world. Notwithstanding this the government foresters estimate that within the last twenty years insects and fires have destroyed twice as much spruce as the lumberjacks have cut down.