Great Lakes Forest

Revisiting My Archive

Susan L. Flader (a former Western and Environmental Historian at Univ. of Missouri) described The Great Lakes Forest: An Environmental and Social History (1983) as a “multidisciplinary consideration of ecological and institutional change in the forest environment of the upper Great Lakes region” (xix). The essays, she said, are based on “an ecosystem conception of history”, ecosystems being a relatively new concept that rejected the teleology of “climax” nature in favor of a more dynamic equilibrium of interacting factors. The point of studying this Great Lakes Forest as the pine forest of 19th-century logging is because the rapid removal of the white and red pines was a major event in American history. As was the discovery that the cleared land, despite the many promises of boosters, was mostly “north of the effective limits of agriculture”, a fact that would have a huge effect in the aftermath.

One essay in the collection, by Duncan Harkin, presented a counter-history of sorts with a description of the Menominee Reservation forest, which a native tribe has managed on a sustainable basis for over a century. This approach has not only supported the native community; the forest contains three times the board feet of the average Wisconsin forest. Another counter-example (described by R. J. Burgar) was the experience of Canada, where most of the cutover remained under public ownership long enough for people to realize the land would not make good farms. This allowed the government to shift to a long-term forest management policy for about 96% of the province of Ontario. These may be some ideas to return to, depending on the direction my research takes the story of the white pine forest.

In the volume’s first chapter, Eric A. Bourdo, Jr. set the scene with a description of the forest. The white and red pines sought by lumbermen lived in a northern mixed forest that existed south of the boreal forest (taiga, coniferous wetland forest of the subarctic) that “parallels the northern shore of Lake Superior from just north of Sault Ste. Marie to northeastern Minnesota” (6). Bourdo said the largest white pines “almost invariably grew on mounds” that “must have been established on piles of mineral soil that accumulated when the roots of a large windthrown tree decayed” (9). He cites evidence of extensive stands of pine growing in areas that had burned or “in the tornado track within an older stand”, which provides an interesting perspective on the contingency of the pine forest (9-10). He even speculated that widespread drought and fire about five hundred years ago may have been “responsible for the development of the ‘Lake Forest’ of white pine” (7). Similarly, fire was a factor preventing the white pine forest from regenerating. Bourdo said “repeated wildfire in the aftermath of logging…killed seedlings [and] often virtually sterilized the sites” (14). Bourdo also suggested that while large white pines sometimes reached diameters of fifty inches, most of the trees had diameters of twenty to thirty inches and produced four sixteen-foot sawlogs (14-15).

In a later chapter on “The Lumbering Frontier”, Charles E. Twining described the early development of the “pinery”, beginning with a quote from Wisconsin Congressman Ben Eastman that “Upon the rivers which are tributary to the Mississippi, and also upon those which empty themselves into Lake Michigan, there are interminable forests of pine, sufficient to supply all the wants of the citizens…for all time to come” (quoting from the Congressional Globe, 1851-52. 124). Twining said this “pinery reached from Lake Winnipeg on the north to the westernmost headwaters of the Mississippi on the south” (about a half-hour from where I lived in Bemidji) in a band that paralleled the Great Lakes, included Pennsylvania, and terminated at the Atlantic from Delaware Bay to the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The best density and quality, Twining said, could be found in the center of this region in lower Michigan. Twining also mentioned that “When we speak of logging districts, we are speaking specifically of river systems, watersheds, the Ottawa in Ontario, the Saginaw in Michigan, the Chippewa in Wisconsin. Pineries that were not well served by such systems had to await the completion of rail construction before contributing their produce” (132). This fact explains the sequence of events in the lumber industry, including the “Wisconsin Central Railroad lumbering district” (1870s to 1892) and the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad, also beginning in the 1870s.

One interesting element of Twining’s article was his observation that “Those who worked in the pineries in the winter commonly labored on their own pioneer farms during the other three seasons” (132). He went on to talk about the “condition of labor in general during the period,” making the point that people typically put in 12-hour days at very strenuous work (133). I think the bigger point is that seasonal lumberjacks who had their own small farm businesses may have come tot he seasonal work with a different mentality than year-round wage-workers. They may have been more difficult to organize than wage workers in similar extractive industries like mining. Twining noted that the cash wages they received in the lumber camps were important, because “the incidence of homestead failure increased after the lumbering frontier had passed.” Ironically, it may have been the extra money they were earning in the winter camps that kept many marginal little farms going; obscuring the fact that agriculture wasn’t really sustainable up north.

Twining also mentioned that the owners and operators of lumbermills were “providing the only employment in a great many communities whose sole reason for being had to do with the business of lumber.” Closing a sawmill, or even taking lumber at sustainable levels, put people out of work who were often neighbors or friends. This may have contributed to the impulse to take all the lumber as quickly as possible, regardless of the environmental consequences, in addition to the profits that accrued at the centers of capital. Although people may have known they were “living on borrowed time…the days were busy, the pioneers were young, and the future was full of promise.” Just as people expected that building materials would inevitably evolve up from logs to lumber to brick and stone, Twining said, they believed they would progress to the next thing once the trees were all gone. Finally, Twining suggested that it’s difficult to imagine that a place or lifestyle that is prosperous may only be temporary. He asked, “how does one accept the possibility that the grandeur that once was, was the unnatural condition?” (134). He suggested that many people of the time did not see the “sack” of the forests as a declension; and seemed perhaps to be talking about more than just the forest.