William Cronon, Nature's Metroplis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).
Michael Williams, Americans and their Forests: A Historical Geography (1992).
Thomas R. Cox, et al., This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (1985).
Agnes M. Larson, The White Pine Industry in Minnesota: A History (1949; 2007).
Robert F. Fries, Empire in Pine: The Story of Lumbering in Wisconsin, 1830-1900 (1951).
Paul Wallace Gates, The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University (1965).
(NB: the opening few minutes of the lecture finished off the discussion of Great Plains wheat-growing in the Red River Valley of the North and flour-milling in Minneapolis from the end of Lecture #15 on "Farms and Markets," so you'll find those notes at the end of that note sheet.)
We're back now to the Chicago River, the grain elevators, and the section of the river where the Main Branch splits into the South Branch and the North Branch. Today's story hinges on this little part of the landscape of Chicago. If by the 1850s Chicago was the largest grain and meat market of the world, it was also the largest lumber market in the world. Why?
A vital frontier economic activity which has been pretty consistently neglected by historians is lumbering. Almost no standard texts in American history or even western U.S. history devote more than a page or two to the lumber industry. Yet we've seen in the lecture on Great Plains farming what a serious challenge the lack of wood represented for agricultural settlers on the prairies and plains. The settlement of all of the U.S. West -- indeed, the whole of the continent -- depended on a continuous supply of wood for buildings, fences, fuel, transport, tools, plow handles, etc. Before the rise of coal in the second half of the 19th century, wood was also the chief fuel used for all sorts of processes. Historians so often overlook the importance of wood and forests in all aspects of material life, especially prior to the 20th century. (Even Wikipedia, on which we often rely so heavily in this course, is remarkably weak on the history of logging.)
The great timber woods of 19th-century America were all coniferous softwoods – pine, fir, cedar, redwood, and most especially, in the northeastern U.S., white pine. One great advantage of white pine in a landscape without railroads is that it floats, whereas maple and oak and other hardwoods do not. If rivers were how one got this crucial raw material to market, its capacity to float was crucial. In this lecture, as is the case in so much of this course, we'll trace how raw materials were moved across landscapes to travel from their point of production to their point of consumption. It's the story you'll read about this week in Chapter 4 of Nature's Metropolis.
The story of pine begins in northern New England, especially Maine — the dominant lumber-producing area of the U.S. until the middle of the 19th century. Bangor, Maine was the leading lumber center in the world at that time. But by mid-century, Maine forests near the coast and along major riversheds were being depleted, and experienced lumbermen began to look westward for better opportunities, especially to Pennsylvania and New York.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Saginaw River in Michigan—a watershed very rich in white pine—became a major white pine producing area: lumber was shipped into Lake Huron and Lake Erie, then transported via the Erie Canal to Tonowanda and Albany, NY, which became the largest lumber markets in the U.S.
Saginaw shipped mainly east, but as settlement in Illinois, Indiana, and southern Michigan expanded, new lumber areas began to be harvested in the 1850s and 1860s at Muskegon, MI; Green Bay, WI; and Marinette-Menominee on the MI-WI border, that shipped mainly toward these emerging western markets. It was from these watersheds—all of which flow into Lake Michigan—that companies shipped to the exploding lumber market in Chicago. Chicago became the supplier of wood to those sodbusting farmers on the plains that we saw in last week's lecture, as well as to settlers making farms in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
Methods of labor and capital in the Great Lakes lumber camps were, at first, very much like those of Maine. The shanty was a center of camp activity, and probably more than 80% of men who come to dominate Wisconsin and Michigan lumbering came from a handful of New England states with experience in eastern lumber.
The interior of the camp hut was crowded and a very masculine space filled with young, hardworking men. Place yourself inside the hut using all of your senses: imagine the smell of baked beans, bacon, wood smoke, sweat and drying clothes producing a characteristic stench. Remember, too, that as time went on, it was not just Yankee, English, and Irish workers in these spaces, but also French-Canadian, German, Scandinavian, and Polish workers – Northern European populations from forested nations contributing their expertise to Midwest lumber operations. As we've already seen in an earlier lecture, this is also the period that the Menominee nation begins serious (and significantly more sustainable) logging practices on its reservation northwest of Green Bay.
Working men typically bound themselves by winter contracts or annual contracts -- $100 in cash along with room, board, and laundry in exchange for work from sunrise to sunset or at least 12 hours, whichever was longer. Contracts were generally struck either at camp or at labor-recruiting centers in major metropolitan markets like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Some portion of these workers labored seasonally during the winter, because during the warm months of the year they were employed as farmhands. Men were generally hired in the fall—consistent with the striking seasonality of lumbering, which took place mainly during the winter—and many loggers also worked the agricultural harvest when wages there were high, returning to woods in the winter. So the lumber industry was inversely seasonal with agriculture.
Much of the work of cutting trees went on all winter long, because massive and heavy logs could only be moved when the ground was frozen and iced. Logs piled up along the banks of frozen streams all winter, and then, come the spring thaw, meltwater would allow the logs to float downstream to the sawmills, which were principally located in towns on the shore of Lake Michigan. Once a tree was down, workers used a crosscut saw to cut wood to manageable lengths. They loaded the logs onto sleds consisting of runners and flat bed pulled by horses or oxen, maneuvered the horses to a nearby skid road, and then transported the logs to a nearby stream or river where they were stacked for the duration of the winter. Skid roads were watered every night to make sure the ice coating them was sufficient for heavily loaded sleds to slide. The system worked fairly well, though there was a real challenge with braking on down slopes to avoid killing the horses pulling the logs. Workers needed to achieve just the right balance of ice and sand in such places.
For photographs depicting this era of logging in the upper Midwest, you can visit
https://recollectionwisconsin.org/lumber-camp-life
or enter the word "logging" in the search box of the Recollection Wisconsin site
https://recollectionwisconsin.org
or, for that matter, do a Google Image search for "Wisconsin logging photos" or "Minnesota logging photos."
When viewing photographs of nineteenth-century logging, notice the size of the logs and recall the interior photos we've seen from earlier lectures: trees of such wide diameters cannot be found in most of the Midwest today. The nineteeenth century saw a long-term decrease in the size of merchantable timber as mature trees were cut and only younger ones remained, cut on more frequent rotations that prevented them from ever attaining mature size.
At the end of skid road was a frozen stream that for most of the year was so shallow that no log would float on it. The whole lumber season depended on the few weeks in the spring when floodwaters were high enough to carry logs. So regulating the spring melt, building dams to store water to even the spring flow, and transporting logs only when streams were at their peak flow, was a crucial part of the seasonal callibration of the lumbering process. When and if that time came, men hurried to shove piles of logs into streams, and then rode downstream with them (much like the ways cowboys accompanied cattle on their way to market) to keep them moving.
Deforestation, of course, was one product of this process, though at increasing distance from rivers or streams, as logs had to be transported ever greater distances to get them to navigable watercourses, hauling logs became ever loss profitable. Here another challenge of the seasonal nature of this industry presented itself: in winters with insufficient snow to assure the size of spring floods in the streams, a whole watershed might be threatened with financial disaster. City markets where wood was sold were constantly skittish in January through March over the state of snowfall in the northern forests.
Another challenge associated with this process of transporting logs in streams and rivers was that most logging operations in the mid-nineteenth century were fairly small-scale, many of them operating in a single watershed and sharing the rivers in that watershed with other companies. How could one keep logs from different companies separate from each other? Companies began using log marks or branding, just as was done with cattle. The state of Minnesota alone has more than 20,000 log marks on file.
The mixing of logs from multiple companies in a single river created a major problem at other end of stream, at Lake Michigan, where most of the sawmills that would cut logs into lumber were located. Who was going to sort out all of these logs? That job was a collective problem, so mills generally combined to create a boom company – an organization responsible for maintaining elaborate sorting structures at the river's mouth, and then delivering the sorted logs to the sawmills while keep track of the property rights of individual logging companies along the way. As you can imagine, boom companies became choke points in the process of moving lumber to market.
Choke points like these create valuable opportunities for companies able to gain control of them: John D. Rockerfeller, for instance, made special deals with railroads, for example, to monopolize oil refining in eastern Ohio, setting up the conditions that made the monopoly power of the Standard Oil Company possible. In the 1980s, Microsoft's control of the "choke point" of the Microsoft DOS and then Windows operating systems gave it enormous economic power. Because the boom companies supplied services on which all loggers on a given stream depended so heavily, they became very powerful, serving as coordinating agencies for lumber production on that watershed. Their birth pointed the way toward coordinated corporate control of the entire lumber industry, as we’ll see.
In addition to the problem of sorting logs at the mouth of the river, there was also the problem of logjams, which occurred when a single log got stuck in the middle of a river, and thousands of other logs piled up behind it in an enormous tangle of wood that could sometimes become miles long. Men worked desperately to clear such jams, but that was hardly an easy task. Jams were a logger's nightmare. Smaller ones might be solved by men loosening it from the sides and on the front using "peaveys," metal or wooden poles with hooks at their end. This was highly dangerous work. For large jams, horses were used to pull logs from the sides of the river, or dynamite was used at the center of the jam, though this often damaged many logs. One of the most dramatic moments of logging came when a jam was about ready to break, with a few key logs remaining. A few men volunteered to go out on the front of the jam with axes, a rope around their waists. They chopped away until they heard the enormous roar of moving logs, then were hauled back to shore by their comrades pulling on the rope, bruised or bleeding or sometimes even killed.
Logs eventually arrived at mill towns, where they were sawed into lumber of various sizes and either shipped off directly or stacked for drying. Most lumber in the 19th century was used in a much greener condition than is typical today, when kiln-drying of lumber has become normal practice. As a result, the lumber used in nineteenth-century buildings was always at risk to warp. The heavy demand from railroads, farms, and builders was so great that few buyser waited until lumber had adequately dried. So uneven floors, windows, and door frames of 19th-century farmhouses are historical documents which provide quiet evidence of the rapid rate at which green lumber was consumed on the western frontier.
From drying yards, lumber was loaded onto sailing ships or steamboats on Lake Michigan and taken to urban markets, principally Chicago. So let's now turn to Chicago.
By 1856, Chicago had surpassed Albany as the greatest primary lumber market in the world, the result of increasing demand from areas of frontier settlement as railroads moved across Illinois toward Iowa. Maps in Nature's Metropolis show the percentage of Chicago lumber coming from various points, and reveal that the bulk of wood was coming across Lake Michigan especially from Muskegon and Green Bay – a clear core/periphery relationship developing between the city and the logging areas that supplied it.
Once in Chicago, where did this lumber go? To the "Lumber District" on the South Branch of the Chicago River, a vast area consisting of little more than countless stacks of drying lumber intermingled with the canals and railroad tracks that received and shipped to wood between producers and consumers of that product.
Lumber in Chicago was handled in such enormous volume that the city's wholesale merchants literally bought and sold it by the shipload, one of the only places in the country where this occurred. It’s hard today to imagine what it meant to dump so much lumber on a single place. In 1883, Chicago lumber receipts peaked at over one billion board feet. The lumber district of Chicago became a distinct, underpopulated area of the city, a fire hazard, and a center of significant labor activity.
Chicago used some of this wood, especially in the wake of the 1871 Fire that destroyed so much of the city's downtown, but most of it was only passing through. Lumber went everywhere that railroads did, farther and farther west as steel rails were constructed ever farther out onto the grasslands (which had such inadequate timbers supplies of their own). Railroads were themselves huge consumers of wood: for fuel, for the ties that provided support for rails, for freight cars and depots, and so on.
As had happened in Maine, lumber near streams was continuously cut and disappearing. To expand the areas from which lumber could be profitably harvested, producers started building narrow-gauge railroads in northern Michigan and Wisconsin. With the construction of these small—intended to be temporary—rail lines, lumber was increasingly not floated downstream but instead loaded onto and transported on freight cars. Unless wood could be gotten to mills, lumbering became too expensive; railroads supplied the solution. Small-gauge lumber roads pushed ever deeper into forests by 1870s, allowed previously unprofitable areas to be cut, and also gradually liberating the industry from its dependence on navigable waterways as the only way to ship logs to mills and markets.
Smaller trees were cut but left to rot on the forest floor, so one consequence of this wasteful harvesting technique was fire. We all know of one iconic urban fire in U.S. history: the Great Chicago Fire, on October 8, 1871. By the time it was extinguished, it had burned 3.3 square miles of the city; 300 lives were lost and 100,000 residents were left homeless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire
But we likely know less about the even more horrific fire that happened that same weekend: the Peshtigo Fire, October 8, 1871. That fire burned 1875 square miles and killed an estimated 1500-2500 people, making it the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_Fire
The scale of the fire was in part caused by the accumulated fuel load on the floor of the forest (as well as by the drought and high winds that contributed to two such famous fires in widely separated locations occurring at the same time). The emergence of wildland firefighting in the U.S. was partially a response to wildfires like these during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
So here's the last part of this story: as logging roads made their way into the North Woods, starting in the late 1870s there was a steady decline in the percentage of Chicago’s total receipts arriving by lake. This number fell continuously after 1880; by 1900, less than 40 percent of wood arriving in Chicago came by boat. Railroads were now crucial, not only for selling but for receiving lumber in the city. This was true of all lumber markets in the country. Notice the relative reliance of places like Muskegon and Green Bay on Chicago: virtually all of their harvest was going to Chicago, though maybe only 10% or 15% of lumber sold in Chicago came from any one of these places. Looking at the maps in Nature's Metropolis of Chicago's geography of lumber supplies and sales helps us see changes in where the city was getting its lumber: new big inland areas in Upper Peninsula of Michigan had opened up with the coming of the railroad. The result in both city and country, in Chicago and the North Woods, were massive changes in regional landscapes.
Chicago’s hegemony was temporary: remember, lumber, like mining, was a classically unstable economic activity in the 19th century, continuously destructive of its own resource base. By the 1860s and 1870s, Chicago was beginning to receive competition from a series of producing areas on tributaries of the Mississippi River. Producers could float lumber to, say, Iowa mill towns and compete with Chicago via the Wisconsin River, the Black River, and especially the very rich pine forest regions of the Chippewa River. Logs flowing into the Mississippi River watershed encountered east-west railroads on the western bank of the Mississippi River in Iowa. Logs unloaded from the Mississippi were milled into boards in Iowa towns, and then put back onto the railroad to be transported to treeless regions in the grasslands farther west: Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas.
Rivers flowing into the Mississippi River were larger and more regular than those flowing into Lake Michigan, so new transport developed – rafting. Logs were assembled onto frames, and set afloat downstream. Here we can look to the Dells as an example: rafts were large, slow-moving structures enabling what we might think was a calm, lazy life … but the Dells could be dangerous and turbulent. Rapids in the narrow Dells could test any raftsman’s skill, and rafts could break apart in the turbulence. Note men steering at the front and back of a large lumber raft.
At the Mississippi River, rafts were dismantled and logs were sold to mills. Key Mississippi River milling centers developed at Clinton, Davenport, Burlington, and elsewhere, with lumber then being shipped west on major railroads.
But there's another story here that points toward the rise of corporate lumbering in the twentieth century. Let's look at a very specific place to see this narrative unfold: the Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann Mill in Rock Island, Illinois.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser was almost certainly the single most important figure in American lumbering, the Rockerfeller of the industry, responsible for transforming it into its modern corporate form. He is not nearly so well known by historians as he should be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Weyerhäuser
Born in the Rhine Valley of Germany in 1834, he came to the U.S. in 1852 at age of 18, working in humble jobs in the East before setting up the Rock Island mill in 1860. From there, he began learning the nature of the Mississippi Valley lumber business. In particular, he realized that the whole trade of the Mississippi depended on a handful of choke points: La Crosse just downstream of the mouth of the Black River; Praire du Chien at the mouth of the Wisconsin River; and the mouth of the Chippewa River. These three choke points could potentially control three major watersheds of western Wisconsin's white pine forests.
As an interesting aside: the area in which Western Union telegraph magnate Ezra Cornell amassed acreage for Cornell University's Morrill Act land grant for New York state was white pine land in the Chipewa River watershed of northwestern Wisconsin. Ezra Cornell (1807-1874) helped Cornell University reap an unprecedented endowment of 5 million dollars (worth almost $100 million dollars today) by carefully withholding pinelands bought via Morrill Act public lands scrip until their price was maximized. (For a detailed history of the way Wisconsin forests helped underwrite Cornell's endowment, see Paul Wallace Gates, The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University, 1965.)
At the mouth of the Chippewa, the river divided in two: one stream was navigable, the other was a backwater called Beef Slough. Weyerhaeuser began to make arrangements to control Beef Slough, and eventually succeeded in making that backwater the largest lumber center in the United States. What Frederick Weyerhaeuser realized was that if you could control Beef Slough, you could control the Chippewa white pine market.
http://www.almahistory.org/images/GESELL_Back_Story_3_--_Beef_Slough.pdf
He created a pool called the Mississippi River Logging Company in which most mills on the Chippewa River eventually took part--not always happily. Mills upstream from Beef Slough resisted vehemently, but Weyerhaeuser controlled the river and began buying up other companies – so that by 1887, only one independent mill was left on the Chippewa River. Like Rockerfeller’s monopoly on oil refineries, Weyerhaeuser had found a controlling link in the lumber chain. His mills eventually coordinated the activities of the entire Upper Mississippi Valley, mounting formidable competition to the Chicago lumber market.
Because of the Mississippi River’s size, Beef Slough was able to assemble larger lumber rafts than had ever been seen before. The rafts were enormous, now pushed by steamboats and pulled by tugs. Photographs help us understand the scale of these rafts: crews built substantial structures aboard and camped on them, eating at picnic tables. The growing scale of operations, as in cattle and mining, was a sign of growing corporate dominance.
As we've already noted, 19th-century lumbering practices were wasteful and ultimately destructive. Michigan production (the main supplier of wood to Chicago) plateaued in 1880s and fell rapidly thereafter. By 1910, Michigan, which had been a major exporter in the country, became a net importer. Maps of Michigan supplies in 1920 tell us much about where the lumber industry moved once the Great Lakes forests were gone, with southern yellow pine being imported into the state in increasing quantitites.
The decline of Minnesota lumbering happened only a little later. As in Maine, the decline of Minnesota lumbering happened with the migration of big lumber interests to new areas: yellow pine forests of the South, and the Douglas Fir forests of the Pacific Northwest. By 1915, the last big lumber raft had made its final journey downstream. Birch trees were primary successional species in the North Woods, becoming iconic symbols of North Woods tourism and also sources for a growing paper industry. The challenge of the northern Cutover in the Upper Midwest for the next half century pointed the area towards replacement industries: pulpmills and tourism. By then, major corporate interests had moved from white pine to different kinds of wood (hardwoods, pulpwoods) or gone elsewhere to other parts of country entirely.
Among the corporate interests moving west was Frederick Weyerhaeuser. In 1891, he moved to St. Paul, and bought a house almost next door to James J. Hill, the Great Northern Railroad magnate. The two talked endlessly and—even though Weyerhaeuser tended to doze off during Hill’s monologues—he listened long enough to learn that he should begin purchasing land in the Pacific Northwest.
In 1900, Weyerhaeuser bought from Hill 900,000 acres at $6/acre, one of the largest single land purchases in U.S. history. At 10 cents per 1000 board feet of lumber, Weyerhaeuser rapidly became the largest holder of timber in Washington state. He brought his Midwestern experience with him as he moved his business west.
The Pacific Coast had of course had a lumber trade with California for years. The early character of this trade is shown by the location of its chief centers: all along the coast. These were akin to Chicago's trade routes on Lake Michigan. Using streams and flumes like those that also characterized mining in the Sierra Nevadas, trees were logged and milled along the coast, then delivered to harbors where sailing ships were loaded up, much as Lake Michigan ships had been. These ships proceeded on to San Francisco, the chief lumber market of the West Coast. San Francisco played a wholesale gateway role much like Chicago’s.
But also like Chicago, San Francisco lost its dominance in the lumber market by end of the nineteenth century.
Pacific Northwest lumbering had some important differences from the Great Lakes, which necessitated altering the techniques lumbermen brought with them from the Midwest. For one, some tree species in the Pacific Northwest (cedars, redwoods) were much bigger than their counterparts in the Midwest (white pines). Saws replaced axes in the redwood country of California, and were rapidly adopted all up and down the coast for most big trees.
Once cut, the work of sawing felled trees into logs was much more challenging. Workers used oil to keep the blade working, and confronted the big question: How could one move these enormous logs once they were cut? Winter, which was the chief season for lumbering in the Midwest, didn't work on the West Coast: there was too little snow; the ground was too wet and muddy; there was no easy way to ice skid roads most of the time. So summer was the preferred period for moving logs. Oxen, then horses, were used at first, pulling logs on skid roads well greased by a grease monkey.
With fewer rivers in the Northwest, there were not many floating operations. So workers also confronted this challenge: how to move logs over land? Answer: the skid road. A skid road was simply a set of smaller cross logs lining a road. A cable at center points along the way replaced horses hauling logs. A great revolution came in 1881 with John Dolbeer’s invention of the steam donkey: a steam engine used for hauling. The steam donkey pulled logs along a log trough called a fore-and-after. The log was loaded into the fore-and-after, a cable attached, and the log could be pulled for miles until it finally reached the mechanical donkey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dolbeer
The fore-and-after was obviously insufficient. It was logically replaced by rails if capital investment could justify building railroads with cars to haul the lumber, though cables were still used for hauling on steep inclines.
In flatter areas, locomotives could be used, and long lumber trains became increasingly common in the early 20th century. Lumber trains meant increasing capital costs, as did large trestles to support rail lines. Only big investors and corporations could afford the wages and materials for this kind of infrastructure. But once a railroad was built, it could be used to haul not only logs, but also workers, changing the whole structure of lumber camp activities. Lumber camps increasingly became semi-permanent central camps that were bases of operations with tendrils of railroads extending out from them.
The mass of wage labor at the core of lumbering in the Northwest made this area a center for radical union activity in early 20th century, the heart of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizing. Lumber camps were close communities that were predominantly male and diverse in their ethnic identities.
When an area became logged out, lumber bunkhouses were loaded onto rails and moved to new area. As work moved onto steeper slopes and more remote areas where rail investment was not worthwhile, new techniques for clearcutting were developed. One of these techniques was the use of a spar tree: high climbers removed branches from a tree and eventually cut off its top, clinging for dear life while the tree swayed back and forth under the strain. Cables were then attached to this spar tree, an engine was brought into place, and logs were hauled to central point, aerially, from hundreds of yards around.
The imperatives of capital investment created incentives for the modern technique of clear-cutting, which would become controversial to later environmentalists, since maximizing capital investment meant stripping bare and entire forest to maximize return on capital--though the imperatives of capital investment then also created incentives to replant deforested land which in earlier areas would simply have been abandoned as cutover.
The result of the spar tree technique was an enormous pile of logs at the base of the spar tree. This pile was called a cold deck, which could be as much as 1.25 million board feet, which then took 2-3 weeks for an average mill to cut. This drove towards a greater efficiency of harvest. So with the spar tree, lumbering was moving toward an era of clearcuts. Saw milling itself changed from up and down vertical saws, to rotary saws, to enormous bandsaws capable of cutting these immense trees; from mom-and-pop operations to mechanical handling; a increasingly globalized economy of wood; and the emergence of branding.
Paul Bunyan – our quintessential hero of the woodlands, seemingly a folk creation of the lumber camps – actually entered American popular culture via an advertising campaign in 1914, becoming the trademark of the Red River Lumber Company in Minnesota. For the story how Paul Bunyan entered American popular culture, seeClearcutting was itself a kind of landscape that was made possible by increasing investments of capital. Though you may not see this landscape in a positive light, it was one also being replanted, something that did not happen in the Wisconsin Cutover.
In the early 20th century, we also see the emergence of the National Forests. Part of what justified their creation was the national perception that forested lands were being harvested unsustainably. A famous (though not entirely accurate) series of maps first created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture appears in Paullin's historical atlas that summarizes the transformation of the national landscape brought about by the story we've explored in this lecture:
http://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/3/a/?view=plate
(click the right arrow to step through the series of four maps)