Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Canada’s supply of spruce is of enormous interest to us, for it feeds a great many of our printing presses. In one single year Canada has cut as much as four million cords of pulpwood, and four fifths of this goes to the United States in the form of logs, pulp, and finished paper. We Americans are the greatest readers on earth. We consume about one third of the total world output of news-print paper. Our presses use more than two million tons in a year, or nearly twice as much as Europe, which has five times our population.

A generation ago Canada had not a dozen pulp mills, and only ten years ago its product was but one sixth that of the United States. Since then our production has hardly increased, but the Canadian output has so grown that it will soon exceed that of the States. Indeed, the industry now ranks second in the Dominion. I have before me estimates showing that machines already ordered for new mills and additions will add to the Canadian capacity something like four hundred thousand tons a year. Canada now has more than one hundred paper mills, and if all were run full time at full speed, they would turn out nearly two and one half million tons of paper in a year. The world’s largest ground pulp mill is at Three Rivers, in Quebec, the great paper-making centre I have mentioned in another chapter. That province has also the largest single news-print mill, with machines that are turning out a continuous sheet of paper more than nineteen feet wide, at the rate of about eleven miles an hour, or eighty thousand miles a year. Not long ago one hundred tons of paper a day was the largest capacity of any mill. Now this is almost the standard unit in the industry. A four-hundred-ton mill is operating at Abitibi, and plants of five-hundred-ton daily capacity are already planned for.

It takes about a cord of wood to make a ton of news-print, or enough, if rolled out like a carpet, to paper the pavement of a city street from curb to curb for a distance of three and one half miles. A year’s output of a hundred-ton mill would make a paper belt six feet wide reaching four times around the waist of old Mother Earth. Take a big Sunday newspaper and spread its sheets out on the floor. You will be surprised at the area they cover. Now if you will keep in mind that it sometimes takes more than a hundred tons of paper to print a single issue you will realize how fast the forests of Canada are being converted into paper sufficient to blanket the earth.

It is several centuries since Shakespeare found

Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones and good in everything.

It remained, however, for our age, and especially North America, to make these tree tongues speak. The world never had enough paper until the process of making it from wood was discovered, and even now it can hardly cut down its forests fast enough to satisfy the insatiable demand of the printing press. I have visited paper mills in both the United States and Canada, and have watched the miracle of transforming a log into the medium of paper that carries the messages of our presidents, the doings of Congress, the news sensations of the times, or the strips of comic pictures we see every morning. Let me tell you how it is done.

Most of the Canadian paper mills are located on rivers. The trees are cut during the winter, and hauled on sledges over ice and snow to the banks of the nearest stream. In the spring the logs float down with the freshets, and the only transportation expense is the crews of men who follow the “drive” and keep the mass of logs moving. Sometimes jams or blocks occur that can be loosened only by dynamite. As the logs move down stream the mills catch them with booms strung across the river. Each mill picks out its own logs and releases the rest to continue their journey.

Labour agents in Montreal, Quebec, and other cities are now recruiting gangs of lumberjacks for this season’s operations. A single firm of this city employs six thousand men and has two thousand at work in the woods every winter. The lumberjacks live in camps, which each year are pushed farther north as the forests diminish. The work is hard, but the men are well fed and have no expenses, so that they can, if they choose, come out of the woods in the spring with a good sum in cash.

At a mill, the logs are fed into the machinery by means of conveyors, and they hardly stop moving until they come out as paper. The first step is to cut them into two-foot lengths and strip off the bark. Then they are ready for grinding. This is done in batteries of mills, each containing a large grindstone making two hundred revolutions a minute. Several of these two-foot lengths are put into a mill at a time, and pressed against the grindstone in such a way that they are rapidly torn into fine splinters. As the wood is ground up it falls into the water in the lower part of the mill and flows off. I asked a workman to open a mill I was watching to-day. As he did so I reached in and drew out a handful of the dry pulp. It was hot, and I asked if hot water was used. He replied that the water went into the mill almost ice cold, but that the friction of grinding was so great that it soon boiled and steamed.