Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1894 — WASTING WESTERN FORESTS. [ARTICLE]

WASTING WESTERN FORESTS.

llnvoo Wrought by Lumbermen Who Hwmy a Power that 1m Autocratic. A Western lumber expert declares that almost the whole forest area of the country Is now In the possession of men who arc ruthlessly despoiling it of trees. “I have been appalled,” he said to a writer for the New York Evening Tost, “oy the havoc that has laid millions of acres bare by ax and Hood and flames, changing the reserve treasure spots of the people into unsightly wildernesses.” The few square miles of forest reserved by the Federal Government and the States here and there he regards an mere drops in the bucket. Drawing a picture of the immeuse personal power of the lumber king of the Northwest, he says: “The land is his and the product thereof; the mills and water power are his; the stores and necessaries of existence are his; the cattle and horses are his; and all the people are his retainers and servants; the weal or woe of the community is weighed in his hand, the happiness of many families •trembles at his word.” Admitting that lumbering operations have Increased the population and built up towns and settlements, he points out that the work has been a wasteful and a criminal one. “Even the most ordinary means,” he says, “would have prevented the lo3s of millions of trees by Are and many years of labor and life, for communities have been lost forever in the immense piles of slabs, refuse, sawdust and ashes that surround and overlie hundreds of milling plants. Stock enough to support a whole generation has teen burned up, rotted, or run off in streams; in the haste to get rich the large things only have been seen, and the little things have been overlooked; the future has been sacrificed to the greed of the present. The men who make the millions out of these operations when the timber is all felled and the mill silenced pull up their stakes and fold their tents in the night, like the Arab, and steal away to fresher fields—leaving tens of thousands of former dependents behind, to shift for themselves."