Yet from the enormous quantity of lumber which will be transported by Lake during the present year, one would not guess that the great fleet which will carry it is fast nearing the end of its usefulness in this way. In every lumbering camp along the Lakes, in the great forests of Minnesota, and in the wilderness regions of Canada, unprecedented effort has been expended in securing “material” because of the high prices offered, and the result has been something beyond description. Recently I passed through the once great lumbering regions of the Lakes to see for myself what I had been told. Michigan is stripped; the “forest” regions of Georgian Bay are scrub and underbrush; for hundreds of square miles around Duluth the axe and the saw have been ceaselessly at work, though there is still a great deal of timber land in the northern part of the State. In the vast lumber regions of a decade ago, once lively and prosperous towns have become almost depopulated. Scores of lumbering camps are going to rot and ruin; saw-mills are abandoned to the elements, and in places where lumbering is still going on, timber is greedily accepted which a few years ago would have been passed by as practically worthless. A few years more and the picture of ruin will be complete. Then the lumber traffic on the Great Lakes will virtually have ceased to be, the old ships will be gone, and past forever will be the picturesque life of the lumberjack and those weather-beaten old patriarchs who, since the days of their youth, have been “goin’ up f’r cedar ’n’ pine.”
A Mining Town on the Mesaba Range, where a Few Years ago the Deer and Bear Roamed Undisturbed.
But even in these last days of the lumber industry on the Lakes the figures are big enough to create astonishment and wonder, and give some idea of what that industry has been in years past. Take the Tonawandas, for instance—those two beautiful little cities at the foot of Lake Erie, a few miles from Buffalo. Lumber has made these towns, as it has made scores of others along the Lakes. They are the greatest “lumber towns” in the world, and estimating from the business of former years there will be carried to them by ship in 1909 between 300,000,000 and 400,000,000 feet of lumber. In 1890, there entered the Tonawandas 718,000,000 feet, which shows how the lumber traffic has fallen during the last nineteen years. It is figured that about 10,000,000 feet of lumber, valued at $200,000, is lost each year from aboard vessels bound for the “Twin Cities.” In 1905, the vessels running to the Tonawandas numbered 300; this year their number will not exceed 250—another proof of the rapidly failing lumber supply along America’s great inland waterways.
“This talk of a lumber famine is all bosh,” I was informed with great candour a short time ago. “Look at the great forests of Washington and Oregon! Think of the almost limitless supply of timber in some of the Southern States! Why, the stripping of the Lake States ought not to make any difference at all!”
There are probably several million people in this country of ours who are, just at the present moment, of the above opinion. They have never looked into what I might call the “economy of the Lakes.” A few words will show what part the Lakes have played in the building of millions of American homes. At this writing it cost $2.50 to bring a thousand feet of lumber from Duluth to Detroit aboard a ship. It costs $5.50 to bring that same lumber by rail! Conceding that this year’s billion and a half feet of lumber will be transported a distance of seven hundred miles, the cost of Lake transportation for the whole will be about $3,750,000. The cost of transportation by rail of this same lumber would be at least $7,500,000, or as much again! Now what if you, my dear sir, who live in New York, had to have the lumber for your house carried fourteen hundred miles instead of seven, or three thousand miles, from Washington State? To-day your lumber can be brought a thousand miles by water for $3 per thousand feet; by rail it would cost you $7! And this, with competition playing a tremendous part in the game. When lumber is gone from the Lake regions, will our philanthropic railroads carry this material as cheaply as now, when for eight months of the year they face the bitter rivalry of our Great Lakes marine?
“When the time comes that there is no more lumber along the Lakes, what will be the result?” I asked Mr. Calbick, the late President of the Lumber Carriers’ Association. He replied:
“Lumber will advance in price as never before. No longer will the frame cottage be the sign of the poor man’s home; no longer will the brick mansion be the manifestation of wealth. It will then cost much more to build a dwelling of wood than of brick or stone. The frame house will in time become the sign of aristocracy and means. It will pass beyond the poor man’s pocket-book, and while this poor man may live in a house of brick it will not be his fortune to live in a house of wood. That is what will happen when the lumber industry ceases along the Great Lakes.”
Harbour View at Conneaut, Ohio, Showing Docks and Machinery.