I Millions of Idle

| Acres

§

1

Written by
P. S. LOVEJOY,

Of the University of Michigan Forestry Faculty;

and
FRED E. JANETTE,

Of The Detroit News Staff.

|

|

Series of Articles Published in The Detroit
News, May 24- June 4.

Published by The Detroit News', June, 1920.

|iii» -.

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While the world suff 'ers from a shortage of 'fore ft, products, millions of
acres of Michigan land that once yielded vast iffio[tJl ^Ainber'^y^today
•waste lands, fire-swept and deteriorating year by year, Fpryjard-Jojoking, men
who are wrestling with the problem belie-ve ihoA>'tJie\beoffie*&f/^icjtigaw up
not realize the gravity of the situation or the possibility of remedy. Their
plan is to restore to the wasted areas of this state the forest industry.

The series of articles to follow will present a study of the causes and con-
ditions creating Michigan's waste areas in the northern part of the state,
and give an account of what is being done to restore them to use.

P. S« Lovejoy, who contributes the first article of the series, is a member
of the University of Michigan forestry faculty, a scientist and a practical
woodsman of long experience.

By P. S. LOVEJOY

Of the Forestry Faculty, University of Michigan.

A third of Michigan virtually is bankrupt, unable to pay its way with
schools and roads, getting poorer instead of richer from year to year,
producing less and less of value.

This third of Michigan takes 10,000,000 acres or so, the most of it
being in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula, the rest in the
Upper Peninsula.

The bulk of these bankrupt lands were originally in pine forest.
From 1870 to 1900 Michigan led the world in the quantity, quality and
value of its timber exports. Today Michigan is a tremendous importer
of timber and other forest products. This is unusual but not in itself a
proof that anything is radically wrong. Ohio, also, was covered origin-
ally with timber and is now a great timber importer, and is, neverthe-
less, prosperous and thriving.

LAND GOES TO DISUSE.

But in the case of Ohio, the removal of the forests was followed
promptly by intensive agricultural development; the land went from a
lower to a higher kind of use. In Michigan the removal of the orig-
inal forests has not been followed by any other profitable use of the
land save on about two-thirds of the state, the balance of the land, being
today non-productive and "waste." The bulk of these idle lands has
been deserted and has been non-productive for upward of 20 years and
there is no accident about it. Most of the idle lands are sandy and poor.
As a rule, pine follows the sands as willows follow the creeks.

If Iowa were to be forced to import corn from New York or if
California sent to Florida for oranges, it would be no more preposterous
than to have Michigan, with 10,000,000 acres of idle stump land, import-
ing great quantities of forest products. We do that.

Michigan-grown hemlock, shipped 200 miles, sells at the same price
in Detroit as does fir grown on the Pacific Coast and shipped 2,000
miles. The hickory for the wheels of Michigan automobiles is coming
from Arkansas and Mississippi. The oak for Grand Rapids furniture is
being cut in Louisiana and Tennessee. Michigan does not even supply
itself with enough telephone poles and railroad ties, but imports poles
from Idaho and ties from Virginia.

450960

TIMBER-EXPORTS GROW.

Much of the paper on which our newspapers are being .printed is
made from Canadian spruce. Box-boards are being shipped in from
PentfSy^temia &n4 : Ar^ajisas and California. The state imports much
more'lffnfcer th£fi il Se'uls-and cuts much more timber than it grows, con-
stanjly grows, a.rjdl .cuts less and constantly imports more.
."The£ fijeigfci frill; On ^mp'or^ted lumber alone is costing Michigan around
$2,000;000'a'year, 'a'htf/e'a'ch'y'ear the freight bill is due to increase great-
ly as the sources of supply recede with the steady devastation of the
forests of the South and West. Meanwhile Michigan continues to sup-
port 10,000,000 acres or so of idle lands which a few years ago were
producing the most generally useful kinds of timber the world ever
had. White pine lumber practically is out of the market. There is
not a town of 5,000 in the state which does not import yellow pine
from the Gulf states.

On the face of things, such economic arrangements do not appear
very reasonable, but they are easy to account for. If we could get
the timber we needed from the neighbors, and at easy prices, why
bother with growing timber and why fuss about the situation?

SUPPLY DECREASES.

Perhaps that might be an all right way of doing save for one item —
the neighbor's supply of timber is not holding out.

Withing the lifetime of many persons now living, the center of the
lumber industry has moved from the New England country to Pennsyl-
vania, to the Lake states, to the Gulf states. The Southern Pine Asso-
ciation reports that within 10 years 3,000 big sawmills will be junked
and cut out and gone, and that the cut of Southern pine must drop
about 50 per cent. That leaves us the virgin forests of the Pacific Coast.
The United States Bureau of Corporations recently made a very elab-
orate check on the timber left in the United States and gives us 60
years to use up all the log timber at the present rates of consumption.
That's only long enough to grow a really nice set of whiskers. Already
the Pacific Coast timber, with a two or three thousand-mile haul, is to
be found in all the larger towns of the East. So the lumber industry
has made its last jump.

HERE IS CHOICE.

When the Coast timber begins to run short, in 20 years or so, we
can take our pick between Russian timber and Amazon timber, or we
can do without timber. If we do not care for those alternatives, of
course we can grow some more timber, and pulp wood, and cooperage
and box stuff, and trees to yield turpentine and rosin and tannic acid
and acetic acid and wood alcohol and charcoal and rifle butts and air-
plane propellers and lead pencils and clothes pins and ax handles and
bridge timbers and railroad ties and such other items as seem useful
to have around in generous quantities, when and where needed, and
which come from the forests and from no place else.

Whenever we get ready we can grow all the timber we want. Grow-
ing timber is a simple affair. All you have to do is to stick a little
tree into the right sort of ground and wait.

PROCESS OF PLANTING.

If you want pine or spruce trees, and if you do not want to depend
on luck, first you get the fresh cones from the trees and take out the

seed. Then you put the seed where it will be happy and in a couple
of years you have a pine or spruce tree as long as your little finger. -
Then you pick out the ground to set it in, and that is easier than with
some other plants. You can't look at a field and tell just how good a
place it is for buckwheat or timothy, but if you have a piece of land
covered with big old pine and spruce stumps, you dont' have to be a
soil chemist to find out whether pine or spruce will grow again where
they have once done well.

But one does not like to use rose ground for sunflowers or corn
ground for buckwheat. Each crop belongs in its place. We could
raise a lot of very fine cottonwood in the corn belt country, but we
never will. Each crop should go into its appointed place. If we want
to raise timber we ought to find out where it can be grown to the best
advantage, everything considered. That is a very simple matter.

MANY ACRES OF "WASTE."

Michigan, for instance, has something over 10,000,000 acres of idle
land which once grew fine pine, but which is now idle land. Wisconsin
and Minnesota have twice as much of that land as has Michigan.
Georgia has 20,000,000 acres, and a dozen other states have from
5,000,000 to 15,000,000 acres each of idle, cut-over, logged-off, non-
productive, "waste" land.

As a matter of fact, we have so much idle former forest land that it
has become embarrassing. Germany is bigger than France, and Texas
is bigger than Germany. If you blocked up the cut-over forest lands
of the United States and put them down over Texas, they would cover
that sizable state and thousands of square miles would stick out over
the edges. If you wanted to survey those cut-over lands and cross
each square mile once, and had an airplane, and made 100 miles an
hour, and traveled 10 hours a day, your trip would take you the greater
part of a year.

TIME IS A FACTOR.

So there isn't any difficulty about finding a suitable place to grow
timber if ever we decide we want to do such a thing. Whenever we
get ready we can get the seed and the ground is waiting, and that is
all there is to it except the matter of time which is required between
planting and harvest. A tree takes its own time about growing, and
no amount of urgency or money can hurry it up very much. But we
know how fast the different species grow under different conditions,
and we know how long we will have to wait in order to harvest pulp
wood or ax handles or bridge timbers. The average tree from which
our common lumber is coming is around 250 years old. Most of our
paper is made from spruce, and the average spruce cut for pulp is over
100 years old. But, by matching the right species to the right soil, and
helping out here and there, we know how to get a right decent sawlog
in 100 years or even less, and we know how to grow a very satisfactory
kind of pulp wood in less than 50 years.

TIME TO START FORESTS.

Considering all these things, it would seem that the only important
thing left was to determine whether we wanted to begin raising timber
as a crop, and if so, just when. And if the Bureau of Corporations is
right in saying that our old virgin sawlog timber will be gone at the
present rate of consumption in 60 years, and if it is true that the pulp

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mills are so short of spruce that they are moving into Canada, and if
it is true that the Canadian authorities report that they are finding out
that they have very much less spruce than they thought, and if it takes
at least 100 years to make sawlogs and some 50 years to make good
pulp wood, it might seem advisable to do a little something in the way
of starting new forests in the fairly near future, as it were. But one
should go rat'her slow with radical innovations, of course, and look be-
fore he leaps and not do anything foolish and not get run off his feet by
sentimental considerations, and be calm and take it easy and rather
look out for log-haired theorists — and that is just what we have been
doing.

PINE NEARLY OFF MARKET.

While we have been taking it easy the undisputed fact has developed
that hemlock lumber costs around $60 a thousand feet in Michigan and
that white pine is practically off trie market; that Michigan has more
than 10,000,000 acres of idle former forest land and a constantly grow-
ing freight bill on imported lumber; that the pulp mills are moving to
Canada; that we are the most generous users of forest products in the
world; that France and Germany have for centuries kept about a fourth
of their entire land area in productive forests and still have been forced
to import more and more timber — and that, within 50 years, in spite of
anything we can now do, we shall be down to a per capita consumption
of timber no greater than that to which France and Germany have be-
come adjusted through many centuries and with which they are barely
able to maintain their industries.

Really, the only question is: Will it take hemlock lumber at $100 a
thousand feet and news print at 10 cents a pound to get us started?
Nothing now can prevent such prices except the starting of new for-
ests which can come into maturity so as to fill the great timber deficit
which will be evident enough within 50 years.

WARNING RIDICULED.

There is nothing at all new about all these things. Thirty-five years
ago Dr. Spaulding, at the University of Michigan, had it figured out
that it would be well to keep Michigan's pine lands at work. He was
laughed at. Practical people, especially the lumbermen, informed him
that there was "enough pine in Michigan to last forever" — and believed
it, too. Twenty years ago Charles Garfield, of Grand Rapids, saw
what was coming and tried to get something dpne, and was laughed
at. Practical people, especially the lumbermen, stated that it was a
well-known fact that "pine would not follow pine." Fifteen years ago
Prof. Roth told the state officials that if they would let him run the
tax-reverted state lands he would make them pay and could build them
up into properties which would yield a fair rate of interest on a valua-
tion of $50 an acre. For this he was called names and some of the
newspapers had a lot of fun about it — print paper then being easy to
get and not worth 4 cents a pound.

NOTHING BEING DONE.

So things have run along- in the good old way and now we are
caught short, and good old Michigan has a third of her acres out of
a job and getting poorer, year by year. And still nobody is doing
much of anything about it all. It's just as well to be practical, you
know.

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If you travel around the state and ask questions, the chances are
that almost everybody you meet will agree that it would be a right
good idea for somebody to start in growing some timber as a sort
of regular crop. If you ask where it would be practicable to begin,
probably you would be told that the Government was doing something
or other out West. Weren't there national forests or something?
Haven't we a state forest some place up-state? There are and we
have. But of all the timber left in the United States less than 15 per
cent is on the national forests, and of all the timber cut last year less
than 3 per cent came from the national forests, the balance being
from privately owned forests.

RAGGED LITTLE PATCHES.

And the state forests of Michigan consist of ragged little patches of
country so thoroughly logged off and so burned over that the owners
quit paying taxes on them. Altogether, the state forests aggregate a
fraction of a million acres and the state has a full 10,000,000 acres of
idle lands not in the state forests. So the existing Federal and state
forests are not going to help very soon or very much.

If you inquire you will find that the bulk of the idle lands are owned
by lumbermen or former lumbermen. If you look sharply you may
discover that it is written into the Washington records that some 30-odd
concerns "own" some 6,000,000 acres of Michigan — a sixth of the state.
If you interview some of these concerns and ask how they managed to
pick up so much land you will not be treated with courtesy. If you
ask what they propose to do with so much land you will be told that it
is none of your business. If you ask why they prefer idle and non-
productive land to land covered with growing timber you will be sneered
at and told about the fires. If you ask why they don't keep the fires
out you will get an impatient answer to the effect that fire and idle
brush land go together as do fleas and a dog — and that, anyway, it is
up to the state to keep out the fires.

WHAT STATE SAYS.

If you ask about it at Lansing y.ou will find out that the game war-
den is also the fire warden; that he reports to the Public Domain Com-
mission, and that the Public. Domain Commission feels very strongly
that fires are quite a misfortune in the state. The secretary of the
Public Domain Commission is also immigration commissioner, and,
if you ask, he will give you some nicely illustrated literature concerning
the wonderful agricultural possibilities of the cut-over country, concern-
ing further details of which you are referred to the state geologist and
the Agricultural College.

If you want to make a nuisance of yourself and travel further
around the spiral the state geologist will tell you that he has nothing
like a soil survey of the idle lands; that he would like to have and
regrets that he has not and, therefore, that he can not, unfortunately,
furnish the details concerning which you ask.

DETAILS ARE SCARCE.

Then you can try the Agricultural College and the folks there will
also regret that no real soil survey has ever been made; that detailed
information concerning the location, nature, value an.d possibilities of

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the cut-over country is rather scant, and that they would be perfectly
delighted if someone would get something done about it, and why not
find out just what it was that happened to the Soil Survey Law which
passed the Legislature a couple of years back?

Back at the State House you will be told that there was such an
act, that it was passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor,
and then, as a measure of war economy, something happened which
let the appropriation lapse, and why not ask about that at the
Governor's office?

CASE OF BANKRUPTCY.

Put it in common business talk and it comes out clearer. What is
the essential nature of the case? Why, it's a case of bankruptcy;
some millions of acres of land do not pay enough in taxes to cover
the cost of assessing and collecting the taxes and attending to the
administrative routine. The owners and the interested parties do not
seem to be able to fix things up. Creditors are getting uneasy. What's
to be done in a case like that? Oh, get a receiver appointed.

All right, now we have a receiver. What will be do? The very
first thing will be to stop the wasting of assets. Then he will 'have a
full inventory made. Then, having found out just what he has on
his hands, having located liabilities and assets, he can proceed to plan
things so as to wind up the concern or get it on its feet again.

Our receiver will find that to stop the wasting of assets it a real
job. The biggest item will be in getting rid of the fires. If it had not
been for the fires all those idle acres would today be producing timber —
good timber and lots of it; the lands would have stayed productive if
it had not been for the fires.

CARELESSNESS IS CAUSE.

To keep fires out of a forest country is not easy, but still it is simple
enough. First you must prevent them from getting started if possible.
About 95 per cent of all fires are due to carelessness. To cure that
sort of carelessness requires large doses of skillfully administered pub-
licity— an advertising campaign. Also a little law enforcement. A
little law enforcement would increase the publicity, too. Matter of
novelty and surprise generates interest, as it were. A lot of the fires
could be prevented from starting.

But some fires will start in spite of all one could do. The job of
putting them out is simple enough. The first thing is to have a system
of lookouts and patrolmen which can detect the presence of a fire
within a few minutes of its start, get its exact location, and report the
facts to headquarters. Headquarters then sizes up the situation and
sends a competent crew equipped adequately so as to get it to the site
of the fire within an hour or so after the fire first showed up. The crew
then puts out the fire, or if it can't, that fact is reported back swiftly
and reinforcements come in a-flying.

WHAT ABOUT COST?

If the receiver for the bankrupt part of Michigan has all this ex-
plained to him he will begin to be doubtful. "All very well," he will
say, "but what about the cost of all t'hose roads and trails and lookouts
and telephone lines and tools and what-not? How could I ever justify
such expenses?"

"By preventing the wasting of assets," he will be told. "It s cost-
ing you a whole lot more right now, in losses, than it would to prevent
those losses. Sooner or later, ev-ery acre of all that idle country is
going to be put to profitable work. It will be made to grow something.
Maybe farm crops, maybe forage crops, maybe timber crops, but all
of them depending on the soil. The better the soil t'he better the crops
and the other way around, too. Now fire destroys the organic mat-
ter in the soil, and that means the humus and the nitrogen. Nitrogen
is already the limiting factor in most of our soils. And a common
every-summer fire running over fresh-cut forest or virgin forest, will
burn up organic material containing nitrogen that would cost you, on
the market, around a hundred dollars and up. Every succeeding fire
takes a little more and, finally, just about every bit of it.

FERTILITY BURNED OUT.

"That's the biggest reason these lands are idle and why so many
millions of acres are worthless for farming. Fertility has been burned
out. To prevent that will be worth vastly more than the cost of stop-
ping fires.

"Or you could justify it another way. Figure the cost of replacing
the young trees burned up. Take the extra low costs of raising and
planting trees on the State Forests and apply that to the number of
good young trees that burn and it runs into millions of dollars every
year or so. The fires have killed out most of the pines and ot'her
good trees, but they keep trying to get back and, with half a chance,
a lot of the country would go back into pulp and log timber in just a
few years. To prevent fire losses in young timber would justify the
cost of stopping fire.

"Or figure it out on another basis. What is the north country worth
for recreation purposes? How much money do people spend in order
to get into a cool and pleasant green land where there is good fis'hing
and hunting and a fine place to play?

FIGURE TOURIST BILL.

"Add up the money spent for railroad fares and automobile traffic
and in hotel bills and in building and maintaining summer homes,
and the business developed for summer tourist traffic and from hunt-
ing and fishing and trapping, and what's the gross? If it were so low
as $15,000,000 a year, that would be about a dollar an acre for all the
idle land and the good land in the north part of the state. But how
much tourist and summer traffic will develop in a country full of
black stumps and scraggy brush and smoke, where one never knows
when it is safe to take a side road or when his camp may be burned
out or how often fire will burn over his favorite hunting and fishing
grounds? To stop the fires would be a good investment on this count
alone."

"Well, that sounds all rig'ht," the receiver might say, "but what
would it cost to stop the fires?"

The answer to that would be that 5 cents an acre a year would do it
if it were properly spent. If that runs up into a lot more money than
has been spent for fire-fighting in the past it is because, while we
have had some fire-fighting, we have never had fire protection.

MIGHT GET OLD ACT.

If the receiver we have supposed to be appointed for the bankrupt
area of Michigan were a long-headed receiver, after checking things
over a while, probably he would decide: "It would be worth it, but we

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could never put it over without more backing than we could expect
to get — unless . . Wonder if the newspaper could be made to see this?"1
Suppose the price of newsprint went on up to five cents and then
seven cents a pound iand the newspapers did see it and the fire job
was really taken hold of and was working out, the receiver's next job
would be to get an inventory of his layout. Maybe he could get again
into life the old act that passed the Legislature and received the Gov-
ernor's signature and then died. Then there would be crews out in
the brush, running lines, taking soil samples, mapping the old timber
and the young timber and the brush areas and the farm and grazing
lands and generally taking stock of what there is in the shop.

GOOD FARMING LAND,

When the reports came in and were worked up, the receiver could
open a tract-book and say: "There's 9,000 acres of really good land
which, right now, as things are, could be farmed profitably. Ought to
be farmed. Jake, look up this tract and find out why it isn't being
farmed and dope me out a good scheme of getting the right folks on
that land right away."

Or it might be grazing land which, as things are right now, is un-
doutedlyx capable of supporting a profitable grazing development. The
receiver could proceed to get that unit to work.

When a lot of the really first-class tracts were being settled there
would be time to figure out what to do with the balance of the propery.
Some of it would, obviously, be worth more for growing timber than
for anything else. The land classification would indicate just where
such lands were located and just what condition they were in. The
receiver could turn such lands over to somebody who understood that
sort of work.

INVENTORY COMPLETE.

Finally, there would be left a lot of land of dubious character; not
of a quality or area or location to permit a profitable agricultural or
profitable grazing development now, as things actually are, and still,
perhaps or probably, useful for such purposes in the future. Maybe
some land would need drainage, other land might be all right, but too
expensive to clear, other land just beyond the edge of profitable use in
agriculture because of soil conditions.

With those lands the receiver could take his time, being very busy
putting real settlers -on real farm lands and real timber on real timber
lands. He could take his time about the balance of the lands of dubious
character. H[e might find ways of working them into use or he might
let them lie idle, or he might turn them into timber producers pending
the time they might become more useful for something else. Anyway,
having his inventory, he would know what he had, the condition it was
in and what he would have to do to get all his property to work.

STEPS TOWARD INVENTORY.

All of which is a nice little picture but nothing but "dope."
And that is the way things stacked up until this spring. In April
there was a meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science and a special
session devoted to the discussion of these affairs. The resolutions
finally adopted called for the reinstatement of the soil and economy
survey of appropriation and an amendment of the original law so as
to provide an expert Board of Control to advise with the State
Geologist as to the best ways of running such a survey. So far so

—10—

good; steps have been taken looking toward a real inventory of our
state's lands.

But to complete such a job properly will take years and years, and
in the meantime settlers are settling, assessors are assessing, ^tourists
are touring, fires are burning, forests are disappearing and a 'third of
the state loafs in desolation. There are those, perhaps, who, hesitating
over the prospects, may recommend that nothing be done until the
big inventory job is all complete. A good excuse for doing nothing
can always find a welcome home, but not that excuse for this occasion.

MAPS TO BE AVAILABLE.

It was reported at the Academy of Science meeting that .a set of
maps was already in existence, which, with a little editing, would
serve excellently as a stop-gap between the almost total lack of
information under which we now labor, and the final completion of the
big-job inventory. Those maps will shortly be made available, no
doubt.

According to the Academy of Science, the most urgent step in
any program calculated to put all the state's acres to permanent and
profitable work is the stopping of the fires. This can be done: is
perfectly practicable, said the Academy. This is the job of the Public
Domain Commission, and it is up to the Commission" to get after
the job in the very near future, said the Academy. All of which is
just more "dope," perhaps.

BIG TREE NURSERY.

To be sure, the forest rangers on the National Forests are catching
fires while they are little, and putting up their lookouts and telephone
lines and working their heliographs and caching their fire-tools along
the trails and making arrests when somebody gets inexcusably careless
with fire in the woods, and, of course, up at the State Forest near
Grayling, the state forester is putting tractor-plowed fire lines about
his plantations, and keeping out the fire in spite of the* fact that the
counry all around him burns over every little while. And, of course,
he is running one of the biggest forest tree nurseries in the world and
planting millions of little pines on the poor old lumbered-over.
burned-off, tax-reverted "waste" lands of the state, and making them
grow right along as nicely as can be. even though the lumberman
knew that "pine would not follow pine."

An.d, to be sure, the secretary of one of the development associations
says that "Wisconsin is getting ten good settlers to Michigan's one.
Wisconsin has a real soil survey and acts as though she wanted to
get settlers, whereas Michigan — but what's the use?"

PLAYING IT SAFE.

Seeing that things are as they are, and that we are practical people,
not visionary; with our fee-t on the ground; progressive, to be sure,
but not carried away by theories and radical notions; playing it safe
and sound, rather than fussing about the hypothetical future, the mere
fact that a third of Michigan, 10,000,000 acres or so,, is idle, barren, fire-
spent, getting poorer and more desolate, is nothing of any particular
importance. Hemlock lumber is only $60 a thousand and newsprint
only 4 cents a pound. If, for any reason, the future should bring, hem-
lock to $100 a thousand and newsprint to 10 cents per pound, why,
then, if it seems an appropriate thing to do, the matter may receive
adequate attention. Or it may not. Timber is a long-time crop and
l\o degree of urgency and no amount of money can hurry it to maturity.

-u-

(In the article leading this series, devoted to a study of Michigan's
waste land problem and a project for making the disused areas once more
productive, P. S.^Lovejoy of the University of Michigan Forestry faculty,
stated that "a third of Michigan 'virtually is bankrupt," told of the wealth
in forest products that this area once produced, and outlined a program of
restoration. He covered a vast geographical area and a far-reaching econ-
omic problem in a condensed statement. The Detroit News has undertaken
to explain the details from sources of information arising on the land
itself, and to try to make clear what is being done to cope with the prob-
lem, ivhat might be done, what the benefits would be to the whole State and
to users of forest products — which is everybody everywhere — and how the
individual citizen of Michigan can help. The following ten articles are de-
voted to that purpose.)

By FRED E. JANETTE.

(of The Detroit News Staff)

ARTICLE I.

Two errors of judgment, not unnatural to their day and generation,
the same misjudgment that operated to produce bankrupt lands in many
sections of the country, worked in the minds of Michigan citizens in the
palmy days of the lumber industry. These errors of judgment were,
first, that there was sp much forest that the supply of lumber and other
forest products was practically inexhaustible; and, second, that farms
would follow and keep relative pace with forest clearing.

Everybody now sees and feels the effects of these mistakes. On the
one hand we have a lumber shortage which means costs of dizzy height
—lumber in general has advanced 97 per cent in price in the last 12
months — and on the other hand we have, here in Michigan alone,
3,000,000 acres' of one-time forest land in arrears for taxes; a record of
more than 2,300,000 acres in arrears for 5 years running, reverted to the
state, literally bankrupt and foreclosed; with millions more so unproduc-
tive that they have to lean on wealthier sections of the state for support
for their roads and schools and other public necessities. And there are
5,000,000 acres on the tax rolls of an assessed valuation of $5 an acre,
average; the taxes not collectable on vast stretches of them.

SECOND OF ERRORS.

This is the picture in plain black and white, and merely outlined, of
a non-productive and sometimes absolutely bankrupt area three times as
large as the whole state of Connecticut.

There are 36,000,000 land acres within Michigan. In round numbers,
sufficient for comparative purposes, 18,000,000 are in farms. Now one
comes to consideration of the second of the primal errors of Michigan's
citizenry in the palmy days of the lumber industry — that "farms would
follow the lumberman." They actually thought that the denudation of
the land in those days, with no replacement of the forest wealth, was a
blessing — that the forest was a foe that had to be conquered to give the
agriculturist his chance. There is a remnant of that tradition still to be
found lurking in the remoter sections of northern Michigan. But it
has finally sifted down, in the main, to the minds of that species of gen-
try with which the state is all too familiar — the sort engaged in selling
lands of starvation quality to ignorant home seekers. The lumber in-
dustry is pretty well gone, or going, in upper Michigan, but the "sucker"
industry is still going, with growing handicaps.

-It-

HAS NOT KEPT PACE.

The total farm area in this state, exclusive of the fruit farms, is
8,856,000 acres. That is part of the area which the statisticians allot
out of the state's 36,000,000 acres to the farmer. It is the part which
the agriculturist has actually improved. Then there is an allotment
of 6,000,000 more acres— conceded, proclaimed and properly advertised
as farm land of sufficient worth to pay a living- if worked. But it has
not been improved. Without setting foot on the millions of bankrupt
acres with view to tillage, the farmer has a field within the confines
of this state as big as the State of New Hampshire in which he has
not even broken ground.

This tells two stories in one breath. It tells how agriculture has
NOT kept pace with land clearing; and it tells how unmitigatedly
foolish, when not actually criminal, is the "sucker" industry of selling
thin sand lands in remote Michigan to men who might be working
on better land.

NOT ALL BANKRUPT.

But if we are going to get anywhere that will be a departure point
for going forward we must be fair. Perhaps the passing use of the
term North Michigan in the foregoing is not understood as meant.
The bankrupt lands of Michigan are in Northern Michigan. But not
all North Michigan lands are bankrupt lands, nor even starvation
farming lands. Right here this newspaper takes pleasure in falling
back upon its own record in this matter. Many columns have been
printed in recent years to make known the successful efforts of
agriculturists on northern lands and to hearten the state with prophecy
of wealth in foodstuffs that bade fair to come from them. Not a word
of all this is now recanted. The lands were there then, and they are
there now — the most of them awaiting the exact discovery that waits
on a land inventory. But if the lands are there and farms are there,
the farmers are not in any such numbers as of old The explanation
does not need to be made at length. It is high wages in the towns
and, cities. Nevertheless, these lands are agricultural lands, and not
waste lands, vnot in the category of the 10,000,000 virtually bankrupt
lands. They are oases in a desert.

Our business in the former days wa& on the oases Now we are
about to explore and appraise the desert, leaving the farmer to raise
farm crops and see who can raise a crop on the desert, and what.
Just one thing is insisted on: while "one man is trying to work 160
acres in the best sections of the state," which Dean Shaw, of the
Michigan Agricultural College, has told t'he writer is a common fact,
and while there are approximately 1,750,000 idle farm acres in Michigan
because there are not farmers enough, it will continue to be insisted
and taken for granted that attempt to divert farmers on to. lands that
haven't been able to pay taxes for a period of years is economic
criminality and ought to stop — especially as there is a better way to
restore the desert to production.

INQUIRE INTO OWNERSHIP.

Dropping the term "desert," which doesn't sound nice, let the inquiry
be into the ownership and present control as a property of the bankrupt
empire of 10,000,000 acres. The end in view is an answer to the ques-
tion, how best to make these unused acres productive. The land, its
amount, location and control are the first consideration.; then the care
of what of value may now exist on the land; lastly, improvement by
cultural methods.

The areas considered in connection with this inquiry as to the pos-
sibility of restoring the forests are located, some areas small, some large
in all the northern counties above a line drawn from Saginaw Bay to
Lake Michigan, taking in, as the southern tier of counties in the area
to be examined, Arenac, Gladwin, Clare, Osceola, Lake and Mason. This
means all north Michigan, including the upper peninsula — 42 counties.
Just as there are some of the best lands in the state north of this line,
notably in the Upper Peninsula, there are bankrupt lands below it. But
the area defined is logically to be called the area wherein lies the bank-
rupt lands of Michigan.

REVERTING TO STATE.

Corporations and individuals own by far the largest number of acres,
and their holdings include vast areas of non-productive lands. These
are the cut-over timber lands, memento of the by-gone lumber industry,
standing idle, fire-swept from year to year, on the books, of course, as
an asset — as a matter of fact when the interests of the whole state and
all its people are considered, a liability. Among these private holdings
are millions of acres verging from those on the assessors' books at $5 an
acre or less to the ones which the owners are allowing to revert to the
state because of non-payment of taxes. What private persons own,
exactly, as to the number of acres, is not so important except from this
last consideration — as a reservoir from which flows a continuous stream
of acreage into the state's ownership. It is with state ownership that
the present problem has to do, as of first consideration. It is the land
to which they themselves hold title that the people of Michigan can re-
gard as the first element in the problem of what to do to make the
idle acres again grow trees. What private persons do or won't do can
be forgotten for the time being. The state has its own land, idle, non-
productive, and public attention can with most profit be turned in
that direction.

The public owned lands are of several sorts. State tax lands are
of largest volume. There are University and Agricultural College
lands, and Federal areas of comparatively small size. It is the state
tax lands af which, and to the administration of which, the people of
Michigan must look for practical experimentation in the labor of re-
storing the idle lands to profitable use.

SOME IS RESOLD.

When private owners have failed to pay taxes for five years the
land involved may by law be deemed abandoned, and it becomes state
property. .The Auditor-General gets it. He has thus acquired, for
the people of the state, 2,300,000 acres since 1893. The reversion of
this "five-year" land to the state is continuous, reversions occurring
daily. The process of bankruptcy of these lands goes steadily on. The
rate of reversion is about 3,000 acres a month.

Some of the land the Auditor-General resells — a very small propor-
tion; some he trades for other lands of similar value in order to group
up the state's holdings, but the great bulk of the increasing estate has
gone into and continues to go into the hands of the Public Domain
Commission.

Here is where the active work of "doing something" with the
bankrupt lands of Michigan is going on. What this commission is
doing, its plans and accomplishments, and the possibilities of accom-
plishment afford the outstanding, concrete example of what could and
should be done with the entire 10.000,000 acres of idle land within
the state. There, reclamation has begun. There it is planned to
re-establish the forests of Michigan.

ARTICLE It

By far the largest owner of bankrupt land in Northern Michigan
is the state.

The state, as landlord, at this time has title in a million acres, in
round numbers. The amount varies from day to day, as lands revert
for taxes and trades are made to consolidate the public holdings. The
greater part of this state-owned territory has been organized into a
public domain. Lands in the public domain are not on sale, except to
round out and perfect its geographical organization. The greater part
of Michigan's landed estate is therefore out of the market.

Most of the privately-owned land where bankrupt or near bankrupt
acreage prevails is on the market, but not much is being sold now,
except for grazing. Traveling northward, making inquiries as to land
ownership as you go, you will find that the size of individual and
corporate holdings increase. In the Upper Peninsula a trifle more than
30 concerns own 6,000,000 acres.

Lands in general are being spoken of — timber lands, potential farm-
ing lands, grazing lands and waste lands. There are two or three
corporations on this side of the Straits which appear to have title in
acreages that aggregate as much as some of the large Upper Penin-
sula holdings. There are many persons who would like to know just
how much, and also how much of each kind of land. There is the
United States Government's Agricultural Department, for instance,
more especially the Forestry Bureau. A Congressional resolution,
originating with Senator Arthur Capper, calls on the Forestry Depart-
ment to find out how much standing timber is left in this country.
The department has been trying. The result in Michigan has been
similar to the result achieved by investigators from the University of
Michigan and by The News scout, who followed the trail up into the
State Assessors' office. All these visitors were asking the same ques-
tions. ':v. -'•••'' : - • i- i -J
DEAL IN DESCRIPTIONS.

To the questions about ownership and extent of ownership this was
the answer: The field books of the* assessors contain the information,
but it never has been assembled. Getting it in form to answer the
questions would mean the work of several relatively expert persons
for several weeks.

What the assessors deal with is descriptions, not names of owners,
in their formulated records. While tax levies are made on individuals
and corporations in their names, they get a bill, not for their whole
properties but for parts according to descriptions numbering hundreds
for some owners. Segregation and assembling of these areas according
to ownership, with illuminating notes as to the character of the lands —
timbered, cut over, swamp or what not — would be valuable information
and the assessors are quite willing to let anyone who wants it come
and take it. The men from the United States Forestry Department
took a look, proclaimed the value of the data in the field books, said
they ought to have the material in assembled form, and that they
might be back. That was mont'hs ago and they have not returned.

In the assessors' office the opinion prevails that the information
would be valuable for the state — especially since there seems to be a
remarkable new and growing interest in Michigan's one-time timber
lands, now waste lands. Not only the foresters but the soil men of
the University and colleges, the development bureaus and persons of
forward-looking tendencies generally are beginning to ask fundamental
questions about those lands.

—15—

\3. OF M. SEEKS ACTION.

They want to know what denudation of North Michigan lands has
to do with lumber costs and the shortage of houses in big towns and
little, and they want to know why fence posts are costing so much in
a "timber state," and so on. But assembling these facts as to ownership
of lands in detail, as to the precise character rather than the market
value only, of the lands and their hereditaments, is no part of the state
assessors' business. They haven't any appropriation for such work.
They think the matter might well be attended to.

But one concrete suggestion was encountered in a rather lengthy
inquiry into this matter. It appears that the University of Michigan
extension department, sensing the interest in and importance of this
nation-wide inquiry into forest products and the forest industry, wants
to do something. If money could be found to finance the job, the
assessors at Lansing would be more than willing to let the skilled
students the University sends out have the use of the field books. It
seems to be up to the University Board of Regents.

Outside of areas which the state acquired from Government land
grants in the old days, and virtually all of which went long since in
sales to lumbermen and homesteaders, and grants to educational
institutions, the state's land as we find them today, the million acres
spoken of at the beginning of this article, are lands forfeited to the
state since 1893, when the state tax homestead law went into effect.

MANY ACRES FORFEITED.

By operation of this law, turning back to the state land once deeded
to private persons but on which they failed to pay taxes, a total of
2,300,000 acres have passed through the auditor-general's hands. He
has resold to homesteaders since 1895 a total of 445,798 acres. So much
for the first effort of the colonizer and land developer to develop for
agriculture and allied industries the cut-over lands left by the lumber-
man. How well it succeeded in the palmy development days may be
judged from the fact that 190,598 acres were later forfeited to the state
again for non-payment of taxes. Homesteaders retain title to this day
in the remaining 255,200 acres.

The reversions that are going on now, adding to the state's owner-
ship land at the rate of 3,000 acres a month come, some of them, from
these retained homesteads, but the largest part now, as formerly, from
the old-time lumber companies or their successors who are holding
their cut-over lands hoping — for what, who knows? Exploitation for
agriculture grows annually less hopeful, and yet prices for cut-over
lands are rising. If you ask why, the answer is that, still hoping to
^ell, the owner must double his sale price every 10 years to catch up
with his tax outlay and the compounded interest on his investment.

The state lands are in the hands of the auditor general, as "land
agent." He sells when he can, trades with other Governmental owners
when they have land the state wants, and turns the rest over to the
Public Domain Commission to run as a business undertaking for the
state.

REPLANTING IS TASK.

He has turned over the 650,000 acres spoken of above, and adds to
it virtually all of the 3,000 acres that are coming in every month. The
Public Domain Commission, like the auditor-general with the residue
of the state lands, carries on a business of buy, sell and barter, to con-
solidate its holdings and organize them for business administration.
The real business of the commission is to conserve what resources are

—16—

found to have been left by the former owners and trying to reclaim
the land — protecting what forest growth exists and replanting the
forests that 'have been devastated.

Two things are to be considered in connection with this big-public
estate of 650,000 acres. One is that while there is some good land scat-
tered on it, it is the poorest land in Michigan. The other fact of note is
that it pays taxes, every acre of it.

It is the poorest land in Michigan as a matter of course. It is the
land made up in largest part of homesteads and cut-over lumber lands
which couldn't afford to pay taxes five years in succession and was
allowed to revert. It is bankrupt land in t'he real meaning of the word.
That is the broad fact. There are comparatively large areas of good
land in the public domain, some of it, as will later be shown, capable
of yielding today thousands of dollars to the. state treasury from sale
of standing timber.

OPPOSITION AT FIRST.

Good or bad, as stated, all pay taxes. The reason for this throws
a vivid light on conditions under which the would-be regenerators
of the bankrupt lands would have to work. Up to 1917 there was
opposition all through the north country to the policy of turning these
bankrupt acres over to the Public Domain Commission for withdrawal
from the market. At first it was the local patriots and the exploiters,
joining chorus in the chant that the lands ought to be sold^ by the
auditor-general and "the farmers given a chance to develop" them.
Latterly the chances of getting farmers on to such land becoming
more and more remote, the opposition centered on the true-enough
claim that withdrawal of these lands would mean that the counties in
which they were located never would derive any tax money from
them — a genuine hardship in the poorer counties and a valid-enough
argument, in spite of the fact that the lands in question had reverted
because they did not pay taxes. They might, some time.

The argument was wiped out at the legislative session of 1917 by
enactment of a law which requires the Public Domain Commission to
pay a tax of 5 cents an acre on all its holdings, and of this amount
the counties having public domain lands get their share. What helped
to enact this law was a provision in it that the money so derived must
be used for the construction of highways. If there is anything these
interior northern counties dote on it rs highways. They need them.

PUBLIC PAYS TAXES.

So the public pays taxes on its North Michigan domain, whether
some of the other fellows do or not. Next, naturally, we want to
know about income — and here we are, again, back on the main track.
We will hardly need to be told that the public domain is not earning
its taxes, much less earning anything for the public — not at this time.
What we want to know is, what are our representatives on the job
doing to make the proposition pay out — taxes anyhow, with a view
to net income sometime? That is the main track spoken of.

Answering that question, one must of necessity at the same time
furnish facts that will answer the larger questions about the 'conditions
and prospects of the whole 10,000,000 acres of bankrupt lands, among
which lie the acres of the state domain. Remember that the public
domain is a sample of the whole — worse land, but better administered,
as probably will be agreed when the facts are set forth. The conditions
of the country and' the problems of the people on the land, as also the
problems of the people on the undeveloped lands and in the towns and

—17—

cities, of all Michigan, in support of whatever remedial measures may
be adopted, are practically the same whether the lands be public or
private.

The forces that operated to make bankrupt the lands the state owns
are still operating. They are forcing into bankruptcy millions more
of acres which the state, if it doesn't look out, may become the owner
of, as Sinbad "owned" the Old Man of the $ea.

PROBLEMS ARE GIGANTIC.

The job of putting a stop to or at least mitigating the force of
operation of these bankrupting causes is the same on the private lands
as the public lands; as also the problem of restoring the lands to use
and profit once correction is affected.

These problems are concrete. They are reality itself, and they are
gigantic, some of them. There is one, among the most important, that
might not occur to any one considering the reclamation of disused
lands as a land and crop problem, merely. Off hand, it might be said:
well, there is the land, poor quality, of course, nothing on it much that
is marketable — the problem is to make things grow on it that will pay.
But that is not where the problem begins for the forward-looking
men who have the reclamation of the bankrupt acres of Northern
Michigan at heart.

The simile of a location for the re-establishment of a business
would line up closer to fact if not vacant land, but a factory building
were conceived. If it were a factory building to be re-equipped and
set going, but which stood disused, vacant and but little watched, this
one necessity would instantly occur to mind: what we have, the vacant
building, must first be protected.

That is the case with the northern lands. About a third of our
potential "forest factory" is fire-swept every five to six years. When
he gets all the facts an average person would inquire with some impa-
tience, what's the use of talking about beginning to re-establish the
forest industry on the old-time forest lands when what is left is liable
to be burned? The answer would have to be: very little use, indeed.

DESTROYS LAND'S VIRILITY.

And the man having knowledge of what a real forest fire really does
would wonder what the impatient one would say if he knew, as Mr.
Lovejoy in preceding articles has stated, that the fires not only burn
the growth on the lands, but burn up the land itself, its virility, making
it little by little, a desert more and more incapable of reclamation.

The forest fire menace is the hurdle on the threshold of the waste
land problem. This can be proved by telling what the fires have done
to make so much of north Michigan bankrupt, what they are still
doing, and what, possibly, can be done about it.

ARTICLE III.

There are men now living, men who don't admit that they are ^ld,
who still have in their ears the screech of the circular saw that ripped
through obese pine logs and yowled through dense forests that cov-
ered the lands which today appear in these chronicles as the "bank-
rupt lands of noftnerti Mie'hlgiin." For more than 20 years, that .is,
from 1870 to beyoild 18%.. Michigan led the world in lumber produc-
tion, dropped seeefid td Wiscb'hsin in the hefct ileeil'H *nd by the end

of the following 10 years had dropped suddenly out of the list of eight
important lumber producing states of the union. The Southern pine
industry had developed, and the Northwest coast industry was get-
ting on its feet in those later years.

12 MILLION ACRES.

In Michigan,_ in the palmy days of lumbering and denudation of
land, there were lumbered off or burned 12 million acres of pinery.
The figure is given by Filibert Roth, head of the University of Michigan
Forestry faculty. And at 15,000 feet of lumber to the acre this meant
180 billion feet — all pine; while 8 million acres of hardwood at 10 thou-
sand board feet to the acre yielded 80 billion more. The total lumber
logged OR BURNED in North Michigan the professor estimates at 260
billion feet, and as an estimator in this field of inquiry Prof. Roth, one
quickly learns, has the reputation of being pre-eminent.

Loss by fire interests us just now. Fire has run neck and neck with
the lumber operators in the wholesale job of' devastating acres by the
millions. Now the yowl of the circular saw is hushed in these lands,
down to -the merest murmur, the camps are "folded and gone," but the
fires are not gone. .They continue in the business of denudation and
desert production.

ONE-THIRD BURNED.

While lumbering was active, and lumber towns flourishing, and rail-
roads reaching tentacles farther and farther into the land to take in
supplies and bring in the products of the camps and mills, fire was
eating up, according to Prof. Roth's estimate, something less than 23
per cent of the timber which nature had set on the land. The lumber-
men themselves commonly estimate the fire loss of those days to have
been fully one-third.

The Michigan lumber cut today is not to be sniffed at, considering
demands and prices — it is now about a billion feet a year, over
$75,000,000 worth, taking the forest growth off 100,000 acres every
twelve month, adding that much area every year to the millions of acres
of stump lands now existing. These are Prof. Roth's figures again.
What is left is very valuable indeed, and what could be put back
would be much more valuable, both of which facts need to be borne
in mind as bearing on the fire question. But what the fires did besides
burning up about $1,200,000,000 worth of trees, reckoned on values of
the time of the old days of lumbering, is really most important of all,
and for this reason: What the fires did then in addition to burning
timber they are doing to this day.

What they did, and continue to do, is to make absolute, complete
and all but irretrievable the havoc wrought by the timber cutters.
First take the superficial aspects of this moving picture of advancing
desolation.

Towns dwindled when the timber stands receded before the saw
and ax, and nothing industrial of equal consequence came in to take
the place of lumbering. All native Michiganders, even in the largest
cities, where live people who never saw a pine tree, know about that,
realizing well the general effect. What is not so well realized is how
completely the fires that crept over the devastated lands, through the
"slashings" and through what timber tracts the first operations had
left, completed the devastation begun by the lumbermen. Much less
is it realized that besides burning the forest growth, virgin and second
growth, the fires burned the soil itself.

—19—

Even a forest fire rias something good about it. The greatest
enemy of the bankrupt land area, second or even equal to the hurry-up
lumber operator, has been fire; but fire also has been the servant
of the farmer in clearing, and it has been the agency of nature in
helping restock denuded lands. Fire that may destroy the seed of the
remnant, solitary white pine, cooks the hard cone of the jack pine,
pops out the seed and aids that species, for one, to propagate.

THE JACK PINE'S DAY.

This fire susceptibility of the white pine and fire resistance of the
jack pine helps to account for the spread of the latter humbler and
less valuable species on areas where once the majestic White pine
flourished. But the once despised jack pine is not so despicable nowa-
days. Timber shortage and famine prices have brought him well for-
ward in the esteem of men who once anathematized him.

Jack Pine on white pine land is a symptom of what the fires do to
the soil. They do more than that. Just what, let Prof. Roth tell:

"Fires destroy the mulch of leaves, twigs and rotting limbs. The
mulch varies from 500 pounds an acre in good jack pine to 2,000
pounds of leaves alone in a forest of beech and maple. The leaf fall
of 1919 is, say, a ton per acre in a good stand. This is rotted and
turned to leaf mold by 1923; the leaf mold of 1920, '21 and '22 mean-
time covering the ground as a layer of dead leaves, the more recent
firm and dry on top. Insects, fungi, bacteria and worms are all at
work and are necessary to good fertile soil. A heavy fire burns all
this, -often two to four inches down.

WOULD COST $10 AN ACRE.

"If this land were farmed at once the ashes would be too deep on
much land, but on the whole would be of some help; but the mulch,
the mold and the living things necessary to make this leaf mold are
all gone. It would cost not less than $10 an acre to get this land back
where it was, only as a good beginning; and it would take a number
of years. The poorer the land the harder, the slower the recovery."

Here the professor, without having it exactly in mind, is talking
about that million-acre estate of We, Us & Co. Ours is the poor land —
poorest of all, the land "slowest to recover" from fire damage. We
must remember this when we come to take account of what the
administrators of our property are doing to protect us from fire and
to restock our land.

When removal of the forest and the sawmills gave the average
lumber town of North Michigan a jolt backwards, beginning along
in the early '90s and continuing down to today; when fires came up
through the slashings and the wasted lands that had grown up to
scrub oak and poplar; and when they burned up many towns and
drove their populations into the lakes or sent them flying, scorched
and half naked, over the warped rails of the railroads, seeking for the
safety they didn't always find, the fires had not done all their damage.
Oscoda, in 1911, and Metz, five years before that, were tragedies so
great that nobody can forget. A fugitive flat-car load of people,
mostly women and children, burned to death near Metz. A steamer
happening along just save.d Oscoda's people, crowded on a wharf, while
the town burned up. These are only episodes in a long tale of terror.

FERTILITY BURNED OUT.

But, more than this, these fires burned out the fertility of the land.
Towns have dwindled, railroad spurs been taken up, homesteads

—20—

abandoned, much else of decay and desolation wrought, not only
because the lumber industry has gone, but because soil fertility, if not
quite gone, is so badly impaired that it starves out the farmer. And
when you starve out the farmer in a pioneer country you starve out
the town and the railroad. You remember about the homesteaders on
those 190,598 acres within what is now "our" landed estate— starved
out and their farms become the property of the state? If that much
territory drifted into starvation, you may well ask how much more
towns and villages along with the farms have suffered from famine.
If you asked, nobody would answer. Nobody could.

In the face of this lugubrious record, along comes, now, a
proposition to restock with forest growth such of these devastated
lands as are obviously and concededly not fit for agriculture. It must
be evident to all readers that there are available for agriculture
millions of acres more than are included in the public domain. That
is, indeed, the proposition — to restock with forest growth much of
this wasted acreage. It is necessary to come quickly to an under-
standing of what is meant by "restocking."
WHAT IS MEANT.

In the large, it means a proposal to begin to put back on the
bankrupt and near-bankrupt acres the forest industry that once made
it enormously wealth producing. And to put it back in a way not to
furnish another single harvest as of yore, but as a permanent, estab-
lished, self-perpetuating industry. "Putting it back" is another term
that must be explained.

Restoring, replacing for perpetuity, in small or large degree, the
forest industry of Michigan, restocking the idle lands with forest
growth, -means replanting as a part of the plan. Even more than that
it means assisting nature to do the work herself. Forests may fall
before the woodsman or go up in smoke, but the beneficent restorative
offices of Mother Nature go on forever, if not wilfully allowed to be
impeded.

Nature is doing her best to bring back to" production vast areas of
non-productive land in the region under consideration. As has been
hinted in the passing remarks about the jack pine taking the white
pine's place, she does not do her best work, doesn't replace No. 1
growth with No. 1, but with a poorer stock, unless she is assisted.
The first help, and perhaps the greatest help, she gets in the North
country is from the fire fighters — and their help isn't anything that
it ought to be.

Consideration of the fire element in the general problem will not
be complete without examining into the fire-fighting needs and per-
formances on the 10,000,000 acres of idle lands.

ARTICLE IV.

Owners of the Michigan public domain, the citizens of Michigan,
well may ask what is being done to control the fires which are burr
ing the remnants of the state's forest wealth and gradually reducing to
infertile mineral nakedness the soil on which the forests grew. They
may well ask the question in its relation to the state's own domain o
upwards to a million acres, and they can as legitimately ask it as per-
taining to the other domain of more than 9,000,000 acres belonging to
private persons.

For the land and forest question means food and housing for all
along with multitudinous other things, such as ties for railroads, now

—21—

lamentably deficient, constituting one of the big railway reconstruction
problems; such as shoes, the leather of which must have its tanbark;
such as newspapers, for they must have their^pulpwfJod, growing on
the stump — it is there that began the printed page which conveys to
you at this moment the fundamental facts having to do with the fire
menace on forest lands.

FIRE IS PERIL.

Something of the real importance of the forest industry which for-
ward-looking men are trying to save_and replenish, it is hoped, is be-
ginning to dawn on the minds of persons who are too busy with imme-
diate affairs to go back, and back, and back to the sources of things.

Control of fire in the woods and in the slashings, which are the
stump lands strewn with the tops and branches of trees left by the
lumbermen, would mean not only valuable property saved but prop-
erty created. Just merely mitigating the fire evil would do much.
What it would mean to many important industries and sources of the
supply in the daily life of the citizen will be more fully indicated later,
but take one qf them which, naturally, the investigator into these
things especially well remembers. Take pulpwood and the paper
supply.

"If you will keep the fires out of the Michigan north woods for 10
years," Prof. Roth remarked during a conversation, "there will be
5,000,000 cords of wood pulp in those woods not existing today, and
5,000,000 cords of wood pulp is equal to the entire amount of wood
pulp used in the United States in one year."

USES FOR PULP.

And newspaper use is not the only use for wood pulp. Pulp goes
into paper mache, strawboard, wrapping paper, bo.ok paper and many
other things. Mr. Roth, by his fire prevention program, would, in
a sense, supply all these industries from the depleted Michigan forest
lands alone.

On a large part of 15,000,000 acres of cut-over land lying idle in
this state, he pointed out, there is more or less of a second growth,
self-sown or self-sprouted, which will keep growing provided the fires
do not destroy it. He includes 5,000,000 acres more than we have
been dealing with; for there are cut-over lands in Michigan not rightly
to be included in the 10,000,000 acres of bankrupt or near-bankrupt
lands. If only 10,000,000 acres were to be converted into a real forest,
however — that is, by planting where planting is needed, filling in the
gaps left by voluntary seeding — these 10,000,000 acres would produce
yearly the 5,000,000 cords of wood pulp needed, Mr. Roth added.
Evidently he would include some hardwood lands of the Upper
Peninsula, where there is much of his 15,000,000 acres of cut-overs.
Much of this better cut-over land about the state is first-class grazing
ground. At that, it will be learned that dealing with OUR lands, the
public domain, approximating results could be accomplished.

SPARK CREATES HAVOC.

The statistician's figures are interpreted as being somewhat larger
than realizable in practice. Absolute control of forest fires — "keeping
them out" — is not expected by foresters or anybody else. Nowhere
in the world where forests grow, probably, is that possible. Relative
control is possible, and is accomplished in places, such as parts of
the United States Government forest reserves and the municipal and
state-owned forests in European countries. Fires in the woods and

__22—

on the sand plains of Upper Michigan there will always be, probably.
A locomotive spark or a cigaret stub has been known to burn over
an area equivalent to a county. Fires will start. Stopping them
before they get far is what fire "control" in North Michigan means.

J. Girvin Peters, chief of the United States Forestry Department
which co-operates with the Michigan and 23 other state governments
in fighting forest fires, estimated in 1912 that an average of 10,000,000
acres are burned over annually in the United States, with a money
loss of about $20,000,000. A sizable bonfire.

STATE'S FIRE LOSS.

Michigan's loss by forest fires for a period of 10 years ending in
1911, is declared in a circular of the Forest Fire Protective department
of the Michigan Hardwood Manufacturers' Association, to have been
$20,000,000. Of the annual loss, then, for a 10-year period, Michigan's
loss was one-tenth of the total for the country — all out of proportion
when one remembers that in these latter years Michigan's timber
wealth per acre does not approach that of western states which come
in the reckoning.

And note that these losses are of timber values only. Loss by soil
depreciation and because of the starving out of the farmers and town
dwellers dependent on forest or agricultural harvest is given no place
in the totals. Nor even is the damage to young stands of timber and
growth well begun but too young to be called timber, reckoned in.
The figures are for losses in timber merchantable as such at the time
of estimate.

Setting aside statements of values, of dizzying heights, take areas.
An average of half a million acres is burned over in Michigan every
year. The two active fire seasons are spring and autumn, spring the
worst, though this is not understood generally. The reasons will
appear when the details of forest fire fighting are given. One of J.
Girvin Fetters' men, who was here during the bad fire season of 1919,
reported back to his chief that "at least a half a million acres have
burned over in Michigan to date," and the date was in midsummer,
with the fall fires to come.

ESTIMATE BURNT AREA.

x Half a million "acres for every year may be argued against as too
large an estimate, but considering that there have been many "bad"
years equal to or worse than 1919, that there has been in time past
more to burn and less protection even than now, and that the effort to
minimize the facts of destruction has been stronger in the past than it
is now, the belief is that an estimate of 500,000 acres of fire in this
state for every year is not too large. That is the area of an average
Lower Peninsula county, burned over yearly. The fires have burned
every year for the last half century. Of course many of the same
acres burn over, again and again. It is, in fact, repeated fires on the
same land that work the real havoc.

You will want to be told at once, if you do not know, what is being
done about it. The forest fire fighting organization, its operation, the
cost, the results accomplished and what might reasonably be expected
to be accomplished — these subjects are of first importance in consid-
ering what should be done to make Michigan's bankrupt aeres, state
and private owned, remunerative.

TWO FOREST FIRES EACH YEAR.

The state maintains two forest fire departments, both under the
control of the Public Domain Commission. There is one for a part of
the state's own domain, another for North Michigan outside of that
area.

About half of the state's domain has been set aside as forest land
reservations, called in the vernacular of officialdom "state forests,"
though large parts of them are as bald as an Arctic waste. There are
about 325,000 acres in the Forest Reserve system, and 156,258 acres
in the eight forests that have been "opened," to date. The opening
plan now contemplates two new forests every year; so that, while the
plan has not been fully carried out, the number of state forests and
the number of acres in each of the opened forests is continually in-
creasing. "Opening" a state forest consists of marking its boundaries,
putting up a house and a barn, also a watchtower or two, stringing
telephone lines, and beginning construction of fire lines and setting out
trees.

FORESTER IS WARDEN.

Over the state forest the state forester is fire warden, and on h.is
domain the other state organization has nothing to do. The other
organization contends with forest fires over the rest of Northern
Michigan. This is one of the departments of a department subordinate
to the Public Domain Commission, the State Game, Fish and Forest
Fire Department.

Forest fire fighting in both departments goes along with something
else, in the case of the state forest part of the public domain it goes
with propagation of forests, and in the case of the millions of acres
outside the state forests, both public and private lands, it goes with
propagation of fish and game and enforcement of the game laws.
Secretary George L. Lusk of the Public Domain Commission is the
fire chief, leader of both fire wardens.

The state maintains a fire department to fight fires on private
lands for the same reason that fire departments are maintained in
cities, because property protection is a public function and duty. The
beneficiaries are taxed, of course. There are two private fire fighting
organizations among timber owners, but both moribund.

Fire fighting on that part of the public domain included in the
forest reserves is a very different business from fighting fires over the
millions of acres outside — the problem on the state's own land which
has been organized for use can be and is dealt with differently than
that on widespread land, more than nine-tenths of which is privately
owned. It appears to be a more difficult problem. At all events,
State Forester Marcus Schaaf appears to have better control of the
situation than the state fire warden and his men.

COUNTIES ARE GROUPED.

These latter have the job set for them of protecting not only most
of the 10,000,000 acres of bankrupt and near-bankrupt lands but mil-
lions of acres of contiguous lands which, some of them, are of very
great value because of standing timber on them. Indeed, there is yet
a substantial notion prevalent among these fire fighters that protection
of standing timber is their main job, if not their only job. You can
hardly expect the average deputy fire warden or his helpers to admit
the high cost of destruction of soil by fire until the fact has been called
to his attention forcibly.

For fighting fires in the vast territory outside the state forests, the
36 counties in the forest fire area have been grouped by Fire Warden
John Baird into 10 divisions, each a fire district in charge of a deputy
fire warden, who lives somewhere in his district. Assisting the 10
deputy fire wardens are 39 special men, apportioned among the dis-
tricts, and one inspector of railroad rights of way for t'he whole terri-
tory. These men serve all the year round. To these 50 men add, for
the fire season, 42 game and "fish wardens on the' regular payroll who
are instructed to give especial attention to forest fire fighting in the
season. All are under direct command of the State Fish, Game and
Forest Fire Commissioner.
COST OF FIRE FORCE.

This completes the standing fire fighting force to contend with fires
raging sporadically over an area four times the size of Massachusetts,
and burning on the average every year an area equal to a common
sized county. Burning in spite of the fire fighters and the fire fight-
ing. When fires rage large or become epidemic, casuals are called
out for the emergency, and the state and townships jointly foot the
bill.

This leads to a consideration of the finances of fire fighting and
begins to let the light in on the question, what might, as a matter of
plain business, be spent on this work.

ARTICLE V.

The plain evidence of the records is that Michigan's forest fire-
fighting business has suffered because of its partnership with the state's
game department. It has been subordinated. That is the fact obvious
to a person looking at the whole situation with an eye keen for prop-
erty values.

Without minimizing the worth of fish and game propagation, it will
be found, when the balance is struck, that the sportsman's interests are
accounted a very large figure in the total.

By comparison forest fire protection in North Michigan shows up
scantily beside game protection.

ONLY 50 FIREMEN.

The state provides the State Fire Warden, who is also Fish
anil Game Warden, with 50 men as a standing fire protection force.
And the area which these 50 men must "protect" is that from the north
line of the counties of Arenac-to-Mason up to the straits, across the
straits and westward through the Upper Peninsula to the Wisconsin
border. You could set New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and
Connecticut down on top of that territory and not much of them would
get wet.

In the fire season 42 fish and game wardens turn in to help the fire-
men, but they have their fish and game laws to enforce meantime.

This is the skeleton organization, filled in when crises arise by im-
pressment of help from the towns and farms. It should bemadded that
there are — or were last season — eight horsemen of the State Con-
stabulary operating from one point over one of the worst areas; out
of Pellston and through the northwest counties of the Lower Penin-
sula, acting as rangers to enforce the fire laws*, educate the public and
give warning of incipient fires. Every township supervisor is also, by
effect of the forest fire protection law of 1903, a fire warden. They
are seen at their height of action, as a rule, when it comes to drum-
ming up volunteers for emergency fire fighting.

— 25— t.iiu_ ^

MICHIGAN'S FIRE IDEA.

It is plain at once that Michigan's forest fire fighting idea seems
to be, basically, to have a small force of men widely dispersed over
a vast area, to raise the cry of "fire!" when the fire gets going and
rally the bucket brigade. The bucket brigade is no slouch, either.
For a mob organization it has done enormous work. The forestry
statisticians have taken pencil and paper and figured it all out, on the
basis of days' work at the going rate 'per day, multiplied into the
reported and estimated numbers of up-state natives who have labored
in heat and smoke to save themselves and their neighbors.

"In 1918 and 1919 they did free work they would not have done
for $8,000,000 in pay," says Prof. Roth.

The most ardent of forest and forest land protection advocates
have no idea of arguing for a force of regular forest fire fighters that
would take the place of any such public co-operation as this — rather,
to provide, a standing force that would inspire the natives to greater
effort of co-operation, because of its visible proof that the state
recognizes the size of the problem, the danger to lives and property,
and its determination to quit shirking its own share of the labor
and cost. , i ..4gj. tj(, *****

WHAT PEOPLE WANTED.

Many things could be set down in explanation of the riteagerness
of Michigan's professional forest fire protection organization and the
way it works.

In the first place, this organization is exactly what the people of
Michigan, through their Legislature, have said they want. Warden
Baird has just demoted the deputy state warden, William J. Pearson,
of Boyne Falls, who for years had charge of the district deputy
wardens. There is no place in the law fo'r a deputy state warden.
Pearson was appointed and his job laid out by William R. Gates, who
was Mr. Baird's predecessor.

Last year was so bad a fire year up north, so much burned that,
with the growing interest in forestry and waste land matters, the forest
fire protection department evidently began to get apprehensive. They
are reorganizing; and in so doing they are falling back on the 'letter
of the law which gives them being. The 10 district wardens are
hereafter to work under the authority and control of the State Fish,
Game and Forest Fire Warden — Mr. Baird.

MORE ARE NEEDED.

More needs to be done than this. The state warden and his men
will need help. In the last analysis the Legislature and the public
are responsible.

This last statement is to make widely known conditions and
necessities, changes in laws, and additions to appropriations. The
fire fighters hustle around on their vast job, accomplishing a great
deal, but overwhelmed by the size of the job, nevertheless; and they
are quite willing to explain their troubles, if you take the trouble to
ask. As for finding among themselves a man who can and will stand
up before the Legislature and tell the people of Michigan what they
ought to know about this business, and boldly state the necessities of
the case in dollars and cents— well, as public educators, they are pretty
good fire fighters.

One senses rather than finds in tangible substance the fact of the
Subordination of fire fighting to game interests. To one coming into
the state warden's office from days and weeks in the up-state forests

and slash lands and isolated farms on the clay oases in the sand coun-
try, the old, old fallacies about the woods and the clearings are clearly
perceptible, lurking in shadowy corners. All these people are Michi-
gan men, most of them native to the soil of the barren lands or next
door neighbors — steeped in the traditions of the north country.

"The early settler regarded the forest as a foe to be conquered. It
impeded agriculture, and it harbored wild beasts," said Orlando F.
Barnes the other day. He is chairman of the State Board of Tax
Commissioners, and was discussing laws that are inimical in their
effects to the restoration of forests on bankrupt lands.

It is not fanciful to suspect that the age-old tradition has its oper-
ative effect in the Michigan forest fire protection organization.

JUST ANOTHER ASPECT.

And there is another fact, especially appealing to the official mind.
The game department pays its own way; the fire protection depart-
ment, naturally, does not. Every dollar spent educating the north-
woods public in how not to start fires, every dollar spent stopping the
fires when they start by act of man or act of Providence in sending a
lightning bolt on an old and dry jack pine or a heap of slash, has to
come from the Legislature, that is from the taxpayer. And if the
public official, on the average, isn't modest about asking for money,
he is at least cautious about what he asks it for. And so long as so few
people realize how penny-wise and pound-foolish it is to let the north
country burn, just so long, undoubtedly, will the forest fire protection
arm of the state government hesitate to make its legitimate monetary
needs known.

Its legitimate money needs are known, at least have been figured
out by one man having as good knowledge of the whole problem as
any man in Michigan. Prof. Roth has done it. Besides being one of
the world's foremost teachers of forestry, he has been Michigan's
forester in years past, planted with his own hands waste areas up in
Roscommon and Crawford counties and along the Au Sable River.

HAS PREPARED FIGURES.

He has prepared figures for a forthcoming report of the Public
Domain Commission. In Prof. Roth's calculated study of the problem
the citizen who foots the bills will have something clear, concise and
determinative to go by.

Before Prof. Roth's figures are presented it remains to be told
what the fire protection organization is getting now. The report of
the game, fish and forest fire commissioner, in the Public Domain
Commission report for 1916-18, covers eleven and two-thirds pages
for game, and has a one-page summary for the forest fire report.
Turning back to the biennial report preceding, one finds eight pages
in the fire report — six pages of tables giving dates, areas and damage
wrought by fires, and costs of extinguishment. From July 1, 1914, to
June 30, 1916, what fires were put out and didn't burn out, did $8,276
damage in the Upper Peninsula, and cost $2,743.45 to put out; in the
Lower Peninsula they did damage, according to this report, of $24,827
and cost $6,842 to extinguish. In the 1916-18 period the cost to put
out fires totals $12,808. Putting out fires is small part of the fire
fighters' work. They have to patrol the lands, post notices, put up
towers and phone lines for watchmen, and do many other things.

EXACT COST LACKING.

The exact total cost of forest protection, outside of the public
domain devoted to state forests, is impossible to get at, because the

—27—

accounts are mixed with the fish and game accounts, as is natural, the
same men doing the same work in the same department.

The one definite figure obtainable is in the Auditor-General's
report, where there is an item, "forest fires, paid for suppression of,"
and this item, in the report of 1918, is $43,434.66. This is the amount
for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1918, and it includes the two-thirds
of the aggregate amount paid by the state as days' wages to emer-
gency fire fighters, the township paying the other third.

More particularly how the money was spent will appear in the
comparison that will be printed later along with Prof. Roth's
estimate of what should be spent.

ARTICLE VI.

Michigan spends $50,000 a year putting out forest fires. More is
spent in addition maintaining the skeleton forest and forest land pro-
tection organization on the millions of acres needing protection and
which lie outside the otherwise protected areas, of the state forests,
under the management of the Public Domain Commission. The
$50,000 plus, is expended by the State Game, Fish and Forest Fire De-
partment. The plus amount, spent for maintenance of the standing
organization and its equipment, never reaches $100,00 in a single year.

Michigan gets off cheaply. It does until one comes to reckon up
the fire damage and balance it against the expenditure. An ordinary
business corporation would fire a general manager who boasted about
how little fire hose he caused to be bought in a year, when the opposite
page of the ledger carried an account of fire loss that was over 27
times the cost of hose bought. That is what forest fire "protection"
and forest fire damage amount to in Michigan, from the comparative
point of view.

The annual loss of merchantable timber has been in recent years
$2,00,000 a year, timbermen say in formal reports. Add to this a mod-
est estimate of soil damage, of $5 an acre — Prof. Roth's figure — and
you would have to add to these estimates another big figure for dam-
age done to second growth, not yet large enough for commercial use,
but stock in hand, just as much so as calves and colts on a livestock
farm. This last figure nobody has mentioned, so far as known. When
you add them all together and balance them against the $50,000 to
$100,000 investment in fire fighting you quickly perceive that the in-
vestment is so smair that you wonder the waste has been allowed to
go on so long. The answer is that so few people have had the facts.

EUROPE'S FORESTS PAY.

Forest protection is better in Europe, where they have state and
municipal tracts of woodland that pay revenues to the public.

There they began restoring forests 200 years ago and have in some
countries kept pace with forest devastation. In the better adminis-
tered areas, as in Saxony, forest protection costs from 15 to 30 cents
an acre. These forests pay not only expenses but a profit into the
public treasury.

For Michigan, which is just beginning the work of forest
reclamation, money for protection will have to be invested, and the
state will have to wait upon rehabilitation of existing forests and
growth of new forests to get its money back — and wait still longer
for profits. But a beginning can not be made without spending money
for adequate protection of what now exists and what is being brought
into existence.

— 28—

It requires an outlay of S cents an acre on a 15,000,000-acre area
requiring protection. It will cost, in fact, 10 cents an acre adequately
to protect the 10,000,000 of idle cut-over lands and the 5,000,000 acres
which are not idle but timber stocked. Five of the 10 cents for each
acre, however, will be furnished half the protection, at least, at no cost
to the state. Timber owners have their own protection organizations;
mills shut down and whole towns turn out when there are big fires.
The public comes in without expectation of repayment when the job
is at its worst and costs the most.

$550,000 NECESSARY.

"If the state will spend $500,000 a year on organization and
improvements, the next bad fire season will not find the people
unprepared and helpless," says Prof. Roth.

A detailed estimate of the cost that should be paid out by the state,
independent of private help, and aiming to encourage co-operative
effort on the part of the public, by Prof. Roth, exceeds his offhand
estimate by $50,000. Here is Mr. Roth's summary of "a reasonable,
practical minimum for effective fire protection in Michigan annually
to be expended for the next 20 years":

State Fire Warden, at $6,000 and expenses $ 10,000

30 County Wardens, at $2,000 and expenses 90,000

Supervisors as Wardens, at $100 .40,000

500 special Wardens, at $200 ' 100,000

Clerks, printing, etc 10,000

Improvements, equipment, etc 200,000

Fire fighting, extra help, ordinary years. 100,000

Total .$550,000

For emergency years, a special standing fund of $500,000 for fire
Anting.

WOULD LEVY TAX.

To raise this money, Prof. Roth would have the state levy a special
tax of two cents an acre on all cut-over lands not part of actual farms;
a special tax of five cents an acre on all standing timber, and apportion
to the forest protection fund a part of all gun and hunting license
money. Generally, he says, this would yield the following returns
for forest protection:

Tax on cut-over lands (10,000,000 acres) $200,000

Tax on standing timber (4,000,000 acres) 200,000

Part of game protection fund, etc 150,000

Total '. $550,000

A special tax on land for forest protection is no innovation, he
points out. It has been in effect in Oregon since 1913. Voluntary
organizations of timber owners in all the timbered states pay acre
assessments, some of them as high as 25 cents an acre, where timber
tands are especially valuable and protection difficult. The average
assessment runs from five to ten cents an acre.

URGES EDUCATION.

Prof. Roth says educative work in forest protection should begin
in earnest. The public should be fully informed what fires in the
Northland mean in loss of forest products, deterioration of soil, de-

—29—

\stfuction to animal life, loss in revenues derived from the patronage
of sportsmen, and loss in revenues that might be derived from tourist
traffic and resorters were the country saved from fire and made more
attractive. More specifically, in the application of dollars to the
problem, he says, supervisors should continue as fire wardens, on
definite yearly pay, as stated in the table above. He would have a fire
warden for each county and 30 wardens in the fire area, instead of the
10 district wardens, as now. He would pay them about what the
district wardens are getting now.

He would have the state warden at Lansing empowered to employ
at least 500 patrolmen, or rangers, which is the meaning of "special
wardens" in the table. These would be men selected, so far as pos-
sible, among the local populations and would serve when called out.
More fire towers and phones and some fire lines to break up the most
dangerous bodies of slash are also comtemplated in the program.
There are now three fire towers standing in the vast area of the fire
country, and two or three more ready to go up, according to informa-
tion furnished at the state warden's office. There are no fire lines
whatever on this vast territory outside the state forests.

RESTOCK WITH TREES.

A proposal to spend $550,000 a year for forest protection, outside
the 650H00 acres of the public domain, the most of which the State
Forester will protect at a separate cost, will appeal to some Michigan
citizens as too much, to some others as none too much, depending on
the point of view. The point of view of some who think the figure
looks large may shift a little with further consideration of what the
financial returns are for protection investment. It is always to be
borne in mind that the proposition is to take a first step necessary
to reclamation of the idle lands by restocking them with trees:
Propagation of forests by assistance to nature is not conceivable
without protection. All authorities, state and national, have said that
many times.

P, S. Lovejoy, co-laborer with Prof. Roth, in the -University of
Michigan forestry department, whose comprehensive article led this
series, has written of "Timber Values as Affected by Fire Hazard."
He speaks only of one of the elements of value to be reckoned on when
waste lands are made to grow forests. That is merchantable timber.

FIRES IRREPARABLE.

"A burned factory," he points out, "can be rebuilt; a burned forest
cannot be replaced" — meaning, not without great lapse of time. Hence
forest fires do what is relatively irreparable damage. Hence it must
rationally be expected that forest protection will cost more in propor-
tion to assessed valuation at any given date than will fire insurance
on a building or a business.

Forest insurance cannot be purchased in this country.

Insurance c'harges buy indemnification for losses and replacement
of burned property. As has been explained, the system won't apply
where there can be no replacement of the burned property — or at least
the insurance companies take that view. The argument is, therefore,
that it must be expected that forest protection will cost more than
insurance. Protection must be raised to the highest possible point of
efficiency to avoid irrecoverable losses.

It will not strike the average reader that to put $550,000 a year
into protection instead of less than $100,000 in t'he effort to cut down an
annual loss in timber, second growth and land values easily approximat-

—30—

ing $3,000,000 a year, is such a steep. proposition. It will look even less
when it is reflected that something must be done to make recreation of
the forest a really practicable undertaking.

MOST FOR PROTECTION.

J. Girvin Peters, of the United Slates forest service, he who has
charge of co-operation with the states, says:

"It is significant that many states whose forest work was begun
mainly along experimental lines are now giving the larger part of their
time and t'heir appropriation for forestry to fire protection."

More money for the fire fighters to work with is not the only thing
needed — they need sme changes in these laws. Nothing radical ap-
pears to be desired. Nobody is advocating divorcement of the state
fire warden's office from the state game warden's office. There are too
rnny good arguments for keeping them together. The administrative
work is much th same, the territory is t'he same, and the ultimate
aim is the same — conservation of the state's resources and building
them up. Game. protection involves forest protection; the only wonder
is that the game protectors do not seem to realize how necessary are
forests to game interests.

NEED BETTER LAWS.

There are laws in some states requiring every timber owner to
provide a patrol system satisfactory to the state authorities. Other-
wise the state provides it and taxes the owner for it. Michigan's two
private co-operative forest protection organizations, one in the Upper
and one in t'he Lower Peninsula, are not as active, of recent years, as
formerly.

Slash disposal laws are better defined and more effective in some
states than in Michigan. In this state, while the forest fire protec-
tion law provides that the state fire warden and his men "may enter
upon lands and remove or destroy brush, and other dangerous com-
bustible material wherever necessary," there is nowhere in the vast
fire area perceptible any systematic purpose or effort to reduce the
fire hazard at this, its starting point. It appears t'hat the "may" of
the statute might well be made to read "shall."

Laws penalizing careless and malicious setting of fires that spread
and cause great damage may be adequate enough, as statutes, but they
are not enforced with anywhere near the vigor that the game laws
are enforced. The records of prosecutions stand easily 10 to 1 in
favor of the game laws.

STILL WASTE TIMBER.

Harvesting of timber goes on in this state. The cut approximates
1,000,000 feet of hardwood a year, and 100,000 acres are being added
every year to the millions o.f acres of cut-over lands. And one hears
all through the North tales of shiftless practices by lumbermen that
rival tales of the older days — tops and branches left lying, in quite the
fashion that the old-timers created the burnt-over slash lands all over
the North Country. Some states have laws regulating the cutting of
timber on private lands, and it appears on t'he face of it that if Michi-
gen were to put up $550,000 or anything like that for fire protection,
laws to make the slash makers take more care than they do would be
well justified.

There are other legal matters to be considered, as well as the tax
laws. One at least of which operates with the force of-a law of nature
to discourage th» attempts ©f private owners to re-grow forests; but

that is a subject that pertains rather to restoration of forests than to
t'heir destruction, anct will be treated of when reforestation is taken up.
Having considered something of the necessities preliminary to the
problem of restocking the idle acres it remains to be found out what is
being done and can be done to restock. The point of attack for that
study is logically the forest reservations of the Public Domain Com-
mission, where beginnings have been made, and to that area of the in-
quiry, the state forests, we now return.

ARTICLE VII.

On millions of acres outside the state forests the problem first to
be faced, as we have seen, is reduction of the fire menace as an as-
sistance to nature in her efforts to reproduce the useful trees, later
to assist nature by planting.

On the 650,000 acres allotted to the Public Domain Commission
for state forest reservations, the fire problem is well in hand, by con-
trast with conditions outside. Nature is being given her chance, and,
more, nature is being assisted. The whole program is to restore to
the millions of acres of devastated lands up north the forest industry.
About $55,000 a year is being spent to this end.

AN INFANT INDUSTRY.

Remember that you are about to scrutinize an infant industry. So
infantile that you are asked ,to examine the industry in the very mak-
ings of it, from practically nothing. It will be found to have some of
the puny, weakling aspects of a thing newly born. It is only about 15
years old in this state. It will be 45 years longer growing out of ado-
lescense; for it takes on the average 60 years for suc'h a tree as those
planted by the state forester to reach a size that makes a lumberman^
covetous. The pulpwood man and the chemical wood man, not to
mention the /barrel and box men and a host of others who can make
money scavenging forests, will be coming down on our youthful for-
ests long before the 60-year term is up. They are finding much now
in protected forest areas, and they would find much more in 10 to 15
years if fires were kept out.

Of the Public Domain Commission's 650,000 acres only 156,158
acres have to date been organized as a forest reserve. One has to put
in that "only," for large as the aggregate state forests are, one
can not forget that 100,000 acres of cut-over are being added to the idle
land area of this state every year.

The state forest domain is in eight forests. The newest one was
"opened" last summer. That is the Pigeon River reserve, in south cen-
tral Cheboygan county. "Opening" a state forest, as has been else-
where mentioned, consists in running the evxterior boundary fines, put-
ting up living quarters for the forester's men, a barn, at least one watch-
tower, telephone lines, then beginning construction of fire lines and
planting.

The other seven state forests, named in the chronological order of
their opening, are: Higgins Lake, Houghton Lake, Fife Lake, Lake
Superior, Ogemaw, Presque Isle, Alpena. There is, besides, a tract
of virgin white pine, Interlochen State park, in Grand Traverse county,
where the state forester gets much seed, but does not pursue reclama-
tion activities. 0

A— —32—

FORESTS SPREAD OVER STATE.

The eight state forests mentioned are widely dispersed through the
barren lands, and they are of diverse areas. The Lake Superior forest,
on the north shore of Luce County and beginning about 20 miles
west of Whitefish bay, runs westward to the Alger County line in a
strip 30 miles long and six miles deep. It is the largest, embracing
over 62,000 acres. The Ogemaw forest, just above West Branch — the
Michigan Central railroad line, is the smallest— -4,200 acres. A "map
of the state forests," issued by the Public Domain Commission, neatly
spotted in blue to show the forest areas, shows 74 of -these, one of
them down as far as Gratiot County; but this map reflects plans and
aspirations, not performances. The eight largest areas have been
opened. The others will be, some time, and they will be larger than
they now are. The commission is constantly making deals to extend
the forest reserve lines and to buy out such private parties as own
little tracts within the confines of all the areas.

If you ever take it into your head to have a look at the Michigan
enterprise of reclothing the barren lands with forests, the place to be-
gin is at the Higgins Lake reserve. Here are field headquarters. Here
is the state nursery, and the field office of the state forester. His
business office is in Grayling, 12 miles distant.

The ride from the railway station, past the state military reservation
at Portage Lake, is over graveled roads about half the way, then over
the typical sand roads of the cut-over country. The end of the road
is a group of modern buildings on the sh'ore of Higgins Lake — a
crystal clear body of water nine miles long and three miles wide, its
shoreline sparsely pre-empted by resorters, as yet, but gaining yearly
in popularity.

The largest building at forestry headquarters is the two-story
cement block residence of the custodian, electric lighted and steam
heated. All the buildings requiring it have running water. A hydraulic"
ram operating in a swale between the reservation buildings and the
lake shore, where a spring creek has been dammed to form a pond
in front of headquarters, supplies the buildings here and the nursery,
back from the lake a couple of minutes' walk.

Each of the opened forests has a resident custodian. The custodian
at the Higgins Lake reserve is also superintendent of the nursery.

SUPPLIES ALL FORESTS.

This nursery is the source of supply of seeding trees for all the
forests. It also supplies seedlings at cost price to private persons, in
lots of never less than 500 little trees. The nursery area is less than '
30 acres, and the building is not much to look at — a mere shed; but
the nursery grows seedling trees by the millions every year. The
planting practice, on land wholly denuded, is to put in 1,700 seedlings
to the acre. An acre with 50 full grown trees on it is a good "stand."
The surplusage provided in planting is the allowance for loss by death,
and the thinning processes pursued in silviculture — raising forests as a
crop.

"It is high time that we began cropping our forest lands instead
of mining them," as Orlando F. Barns recently remarked.

Artificial planting by the state began back in 1904, on a very small
scale with the Higgins and the Houghton Lake reserves as the operat-
ing grounds. Prof. Roth was then in charge of the field work.

The appropriation at that time was but $7,500 a year. By the close

—33—

of the fiscal year 1918 the commission was expending $54,702 for all
purposes on the seven forest reserves. In the last two years the
opening of the Pigeon River Reserve has been the largest work. It
cost, before the war, $6,000 to open a state forest. Now it costs
$12,000 to $13,000.

"Forestry is a financial undertaking, pure and simple. It's got
to be made to pay to succeed," State Forester Marcus Schaaf
remarked to the writer while he was wandering around the reserva-
tion. And^every minute of every day that one spends in watching
the operations of Michigan's forestry department he is reminded of
this point of view.

KNOWS VALUE OF TREES.

The forester looks upon his work as the labor of raising a crop of
commercial wood prdducts — lumber, pulp wood, chemical wood, ties,
posts and poles, and all the rest. He knows the value of forest cover
to animal life, appreciates the sportsman's and the tourist's interests,
realizes the health and scenic value to a state's general population of
living woods in place of barren lands; but when he reckons costs and
places them alongside yields to decide whether he is making progress
or not, he reckons in board feet and cords. v

He doesn't even reckon in what is of most importance to the citizen
wherever he lives. This is the value to the state of RE-ESTABLISH-
ING ON IDLE LANDS AN INDUSTRY THAT HAS BEEN
WIPED OUT, AND RE-ESTABLISHING IT IN PERPETUITY,
that dying towns may come back to life, populations that are drifting
away because employment is gone may find labor restored to them,
a whole country blighted made new again.

Growing a forest is a long-time job, involving a large investment
at a low rate of interest — from 2 to 3 per cent — and it is up to the
forester to show that, aside from what may be called the general
benefits to society, he must show financial benefit to the investor first
of all.

Whatever may have been accomplished to date in this state in
actual work, the state has a definite plan for the work, and it proves
up successfully on the basis of the forester's severe reckoning — it must
be shown that it pays.

Michigan's state forester has the problem of restocking what are
virtually denuded lands. It has been pointed out before that this
state-owned land, reverted to the state because of non-payment of
taxes, is naturally the poorest land anywhere in the area of bankrupt
acres. ,

"It is obvious that no receipts may be expected during the first
60 years," said Mr. Schaaf.

He was still speaking of commercial timber. There are small
annual revenues all the time — from sale of nursery product, sale of
second growth annually cut off in process of giving the most forward
growth its chance to develop, and there is destined to be a larger
revenue derivable from thinnings and forest scavenging as certain
industries develop and needs increase. Pulp and paper makers are
taking kinds of wood nowadays they snorted at a few years ago, and
there is the chemical wood industry — using up small stuff from
hardwood forests and turning out charcoal, acetate of lime and wood
alcohol. Michigan leads all the states in this latter industry. But, says
the state forester — —

"It must be apparent to any reasonable minded person that the
whole proposition is one in which the investor, in this case the state,
must be willing to make considerable financial outlay and forego im-
mediate returns for future profits. It is therefore a foregone conclu-
sion that, starting with practically nothing, the expenditures accumu-
lated during the first 60-year period, will be vastly in excess of the
meager receipts that may be expected in the meantime. Such invest-
ments must be made in order to create and build up the working capi-
tal of the forest, and theoretically at least not until 1978, the first year
of the second period of rotation, will a substantial output be realized
and the investment begin to return interest From that time forward,
'however, the returns will continue in perpetuity and in the same
amount, so long as the forest working capital is not impaired."

REAL PROFIT BEGINS EARLY.

Mr. Schaaf was here dating his reckoning from 1917 and looking
forward to the. first harvest of completely matured timber at the end
of 60 years. Sixty, years would be a long time for the average citizen
to look for returns on the tax money he is asked to put into a state
forest industry. But the case isn't really quite as bad as that.

A recent special report of the forester carries tabular statements
showing estimated outlay and estimated accretions of timber values,
year by year, for the 60-year period and beyond. It becomes perfectly
apparent to the layman studying these figures that this important fact
lies buried in fhem.

The increment of value in the forest catches up with the total of
increasing investment long before the 60 years expire. The 60 years
mark the first harvest period — the first collection date, and when the
harvest is realized it pays much more than the cost of production.
Back in the years before that date lies the point where value repre-
sented in t'he still growing tree overlaps the cost of growing it. It is
not harvested then, of course, because by not cutting it, it then begins
to leave cost farther and fart'her behind in the race between cost and
profit.

The rotation-periods — in a sense harvesting periods — for forests are
the same for all forests of similar tree population. The time element
is fixed, but when it comes to the matter of actual dollars invested in
a forest, the forest area has to come into the reckoning.

me state forester, in his calculations in 'his report, worked with
a definite area in mind. This was 4,500 acres for each year. That is
the planting plan of the Michigan Public Domain Commission, that
many new acres of new planting to be added to the replanted areas
in the state forests every 12 months. The performance has been less
than 2,000 acres a year.

Two causes have operated to keep the planting operations down to a
limit of less than "half of what the commission wants to do, is able
to do with the product of its Higgins Lake nursery as it is equipped
today. These causes have been, first, lack of money, and, second,
lack of men in some cases even when they had money for wages and
to buy tools and equipment.

The program calls for opening two new forests each year. That
has not been done. None were opened during the war period, and
but one since the war ended. There has been labor available, in some
districts where forests might have been opened, but not-enough money
for the purpose. The $55,000 a year undoubtedly i§ not enough to carry

-35—

out even the 2,000-acre planting plan of the past, considering rises in
costs. It certainly is not enough to carry out the 4,500-acre planting
industry.

Why exactly 4,500 acres, with some concrete facts in relation to
decided on as the real requirement of Michigan's state-owned forest
costs and returns will be the leading topic of the next article.

ARTICLE VIII.

In what has recently been written in these articles on the reclama-
tion of Michigan bankrupt lands by means of a plan to restore the
forests that once grew on them, the word "rotation" has been several
times used, and probably not clearly understood by some readers.

Rotation of crop, in the case of a forest crop, means substantially
that while two-year-old seedling trees are being taken out of the
nursery and planted on the barren lands or in open spaces in the
woods, earlier plantings have been growing toward maturity, each
year's planted area being a 12-month step toward the goal. In the
future years, when the state forester and his men shall begin
harvesting Michigan's first timber crop, others of his men will be
setting out on other lands "trees" that would make you laugh to look
at, if you were wholly uninformed and out of sympathy with the
work. These seedlings two years old are about as high out of the
ground as your shoetop, and it is not till you fall to admiring a sturdy
young tree shoulder high in the field and have been told that it has
been there, say, seven years, that you begin to realize what forestry
and forest cropping means.

BASIS OF PLAN.

Cutting off the matured crop at the end of the row and setting out
spindling plants at the nursery end means rotating the crop. A simpler
rotation than rotation of an agricultural crop, where one kind of crop
is made to follow another, year by year — done in agriculture for the
land's sake, principally.

"Of course we wouldn't want to cut off the whole crop of trees at
one time, if we could," said Marcus Schaaf, state forester. "It takes
too long to grow a crop. Constant supply of forest products is what
is aimed at." H*l«l

This is the basic reason, for the 4,500-acre planting plan .of the
Michigan Public Domain Commission. More particularly, the 4,500-
acre area is the allotment oL total acreage in view for annual plantmg
on the whole enormous state plantation, that the whole plantation
may develop each year its proper area of matured crop. No need to
inquire just how the state forester and the others arrived at this
figure — one can afford to accept something from the paid experts
without mangling his brain trying to master the intricacies of the
science.

THE DOLLARS INVOLVED.

Now, as to the dollars involved, in outlay and return.

It has been stated, earlier, in perfect confidence, that t'he $55,000
the commission is getting cannot be expected to finance the 2,000-
acre planting plan of the makeshift present. This is what the state
forester tells the commission will be the necessary investment for the
4,500-acre plan for a period of years reaching out to maturity of the first

—36—

planted area, his figures being based on the costs as they were in 1916:
There will 'have to be an annual expenditure of $150,000 for the first

30 years; for the second 30 years an annual outlay of $217,500.
The total investment during the 60 years would be $13,365,000.
The receipts at the end of the 60-year period, based on 1916 timber

values, now vastly increased and bound to increase still more, would

be $13,458,000.

INVESTMENT'S RETURN.

It is not to be assumed from these figures, however, that the forests
would not do more than merely gain a relatively small profit for the
state in all these years. Revenues would not wait on maturity of a crop.
Long before the race between outlay and actual money return is won
by the forests, the forests would become in fact self-supporting, and
independent of legislative appropriations.

Therefore, it is not to be understood ^hat "outlay" and "expendi-
ture" of $150,000 a year for the first 30 years, and $217,500 during the
next 30 years means state appropriations. It means that the forest
industry which the state would capitalize out of its pocket would
begin to put its money back into the business — when? Well, scrutiny
of the elaborate figures of the forester seems to show that they would
in about 30 years. The date has to be guessed at, for yields and
prices have to be guessed at — yields easier to guess than prices. Con-
sidering that famine in forest products impends — in lumber and pulp
wood especially — it doesn't wrench one's sense of probabilities to drag,
the self-supporting date for a properly conducted forest forward by
several years.

INCREASE OF RECEIPTS.

At the beginning of the second period of rotation, when the first
crop would be cut, says the forester, the receipts of that year would
be several times the legislative appropriation, and that would continue
to be the case, indefinitely. Then the forests would be turning into
the state's general fund a net annual revenue muc'h in excess of a-
ual outlay.

And all this, as the forester says and repeats, and wisely, is set
forth as a business proposition, pure and simple — board feet and cords
again, with no allowance for reclamations of land too poor to pay even
its taxes, no allowance for protection of wild life and making a desolate
country attractive, and no allowance for gain in community values,
towns revivified and people furnished with work and business.

The amateur inquirer, getting a sense of these values, naturally, be-
fore he gets a sense of the value of a tree, sometimes thinks the forester
is standing in his own light by sticking so close to his business text.
Every man tp <his trade, however; and it is clearly up to the man in
the street to get, first, the immediate business argument, since it is
a matter of investing his money in the project. When he has gotten
that, it is an open question whether the returns in ot'her things than
money from timber are not business also. Certainly anything that
enters into the labor of making a bankrupt empire first self-supporting
and then remunerative appears to be a business proposition.

DUTY OF COMMISSION.

One plain duty of the Michigan Public Domain Commission is to
take out of its shelved reports the 24-page study of State Forester
Schaa.f with all the elaborate tables, explaining the business aspect of

the commission's work, and publish it as a pamphlet for Michigan
citizens of business instinct to read — that is, if the commission knows
where it can get the money to do it.

Turn now from the cost of tree-planting and the value of trees
grown to a rapid view of the process of planting and taking care of
plantations.

The state's plantations are on the cut-over pine lands. The pine was
the prevailing occupant of the territory. Much hardwood there was,
of course, taking the whole 650,000 acres of Public Domain Commission
territory into view. Conifers, the "evergreens," grew on the poorer
lands, however, and it is the poor lands that are being reclaimed by
the commission.

This cuts down the number of species of trees dealt with, not only
to t'he cone-bearing trees but it cuts down the conifers to four species.
They are three natives and one foreigner. White Pine, Norway (red)
Pine and Jack Pine grew on these worst devastated lands, and the
White and Norway were the especial fruit of the devastating lumber-
man's ax.

FIRES GET PINE.

They grew on the uplands of sand or sand permeated with clay.
In the lowlands grew many other varieties, also lumbered off, but not
so cleanly in the early days as the big trees of the plains and hills.

Aiming first to restock the worst denuded lands, the state forester
deals, then, with the native White Pine, Norway and Jack Pine. Fires
and later lumbermen have been getting the Jack Pine which the earlier
lumbermen scorned.

These three and one other are being planted. The other is the
Scotch Pine. It nowhere grows native in this country — it is unknown
to t'he lumber dealer. It is of the general nature of our native Jack
Pine, but grows somewhat bulkier. There doesn't seem to be much
choice between them, as to timber quality — both are inferior to White
and Norway, prone to 'limbage," and consequently full of knots when
sliced by the saw. Both can, and now do, enter into the making of pulp
as a sort of adulterant of the essential Spruce, and both can be
reckoned on for lath, box boards and the like.

PROTECT SWAMP TREES.

The value of the Scotch, like the Jack Pine is that it will grow on
the poorest land. That makes it and the Jack Pine the foremost friend
of man — of the men who have the job of reclaiming the worst of
Michigan land.

White Pine is planted on the best lands, where White Pine origin-
ally grew; Norway with it, and also down on to the second best lands;
and Jack and Scotch Pine on the thinnest lands. That is the general
rule.

No Spruce to speak of, for that must grow on better lands than the
White Pine requires. No hardwood, for essentially the same reason.
Lowland and swamp trees are merely being protected and helped
along by judicious thinning — reclamation in these cases waits on re-
clamation of the more barren areas.

It will be seen that the reclamation plan of the state's forestry
department is modest, while it is nevertheless gigantic. The amount
that needs to be done to put North Michigan back on a timber bearing
basis on anything approaching the old-time scale is staggering to con-
template,.

NEED GROWS DA1LV.

"But," the reclamationists rightly argue, "the size of the job is no
argument against beginning the work. Certainly not when the necessi-
ties of the case can be seen to be daily increasing, as well as the mag-
nitude of the work of catching up. We can't begin sooner than now,
and we can speed up according to our abilities as we go along."

"According to our abilities" means according to the amount of
money the people who own the devastated land, the Michigan taxpayer,
is willing to invest in the job to get it going and keep it going until
the crop begins to return money that will make investment on capital
account no longer necessary.

One hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year put into the job
would mean for the average taxpayer about the price of one cheap
cigar each year. The trouble the reclamationists appear to be in is
to make the average citizens see the advantage of denying himself that
one cigar a year. The trouble with the reclamationist is that he hasn't
taken the public by the ear and made him listen.

The public will have an ear more sensitive to the argument when it
knows more about the job and what progress is being made by the
State to accomplish it, so furnishing an example for other land owners
to follow. This leads back to operations on the state forest reserves,
where tree-planting is but one of the two most important phases of
the work. And this leads to the subjects of fire lines, fire towers,
telephone system in the forests and similar matters. They will be
discussed in the next article.

ARTICLE IX

A long, narrow road, a mere trail, rises in a sinuous line from the
Jack Pine plain, in the Higgins Lake State Forest Reserve, to the top
of a hill whereon looms against the sky the spidery tracerv of a watch
tower.

Sixty feet above the hilltop and far above tire tops of trees on the
hill slopes and in the valleys, on the square platform atop the tower, a
youth in a vivid red sweater was lounging on the rail and casting his
eyes around the horizon. This was on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks
ago.

The season was far enough advanced to have brought on the early
fire period in the forests. Spring is the worst time of the year; for
then the green growth has not started and on the ground lies dead and
dry as tinder the leaf fall of the year just past. Michigan's most ex-
pensive forest fires have occurred in May. It is true that the fires one
hears most about often have raged in summer and fall. They were the
spectacular fires occurring where tourists go and where newspaper
correspondents have an eye trained for news. The fires that cost Michi-
gan the most money have burned without publicity.

The youth in the red sweater knew all about this, as does every
watchman, ranger and day laborer on the Michigan forest reserves. He
was watching fires burn at this moment, but still he lounged, impassive.
There was smoke all around the horizon to the southwest and the
wind was coming from that direction. It was a breeze that barely
stirred one's coat tails, down on the ground, but aloft it was whistling
through the wire netting of the watch tower guard rail. It was bringing

—39—

\ip from the windward areas beyond the confines of the Forest reserva-
tion a thin pall of smoke. Higgins Lake, two miles behind the watch-
man, but looking very near from the height of the hill, was dimly ob-
scured.

GUARDED STATE PROPERTY.

The watchman worried not about the fires beyond the state forest
limits, only watched to see if he could trace progression dangerously
near to state property. So the afternoon hours drifted along. Sud-
denly from the foot of the tower the red sweater was seen coming
down one steel leg of the structure, where loops of iron rod give a
foot and hand hold. He went into a booth on the ground inside the
tower, a shanty like the ones housing the telephones along an inter-
urban railway line. He got headquarters on the phone and reported
smoke inside the reservation. He gave" an approximate location, using
a jargon that sounded like a surveyor's statement.

What next happened could not be seen by the visitor, even by
climbing up the tower, for it went on beneath the screen of inter-
vening forests. This, however, was what was happening:

An automobile loaded with men and tools was putting out from
headquarters several miles away and tearing through the sand roads
toward the smudge which the watchman had reported. After going
two or three miles over the twisting trails it struck into a straight
strip of clearing that looked like a road but was not — a road only for
forest fire fighters going at top speed to a fire. This was a fire line.

Sixteen feet wide, with a plowed and harrowed strip 10*^ feet
wide through the center of them, these fire lines stretch for many
miles through the state forest, criss-crossing in geometrical precision.
They are run on section, quarter-section and eighth-of-a-section lines.

It is told of a Russian Czar that, asked what route he would be
pleased to have the then projected railway from St. Petersburg to
Moscow follow, he laid a ruler on the map between the two cities,
drew a line along the ruler and said: "Put it there."

TRACTOR DOES THE WORK. /

That is how the state forester runs his fire lines. Over hill and
down dale they go, skipping the swamps, never rounding them. On
the Higgins Lake and nearby reserves a -huge caterpillar tractor does
the work, tearing out small trees and stumps, plowing the middle
strip and keeping it harrowed. Elsewhere the work is done by
horse-drawn equipment.

The automobile with the men and tools came upon the tiny fire in
the grass near a point where a fire line crossed a highway. Perhaps
somebody going past in an automobile had emptied a pipe or thrown
out a cigar butt as he jogged past this spot. From the fire line the
"smoke chasers" brought shovelsful of sand and smothered out the
fire. It had gotten into the base of a dry old stump. They filled the
crevices of the stump with fine sand; and the fire, out, had to stay out.

That is the forest fire fighter's material for fighting— dirt. That is
the explanation of the 16-foot fire lines and the lO^-foot plowed strip
along their centers.

When the forest fire fighter has to plunge into an unbroken
wilderness of brush to cope with an incipient blaze by blanketing it
out or by starting controllable backfires to starve it out, he works
under a terrific handicap. By the time he gets ground broken and
earth available the small blaze may have gotten beyond control. When

—40-

there is a plowed fire line near he can at once get busy on the main job.

Some people of eminent position still carry the notion that fire lines
are run with the idea that they stop the spread of fires by interposing
an area from which combustible material has been removed. They do
stop grass fires, but woods fires leap a 16-foot barrier with awesome
ease.

The theory of the fire line is that it serves as a ready-made base
of operations for the fire fighter — and the theory works out, as one
can see for himself by looking at burnt-over tracts. Only a few weeks
ago a 10-acre fire that started in one of the oldest plantations on the
Higgins Lake Reserve burned up to a fire line for a long stretch
along the line, and there the ground was black and tree trunks charred.
Sixteen feet away, on the other side of the line, stretched the forest
without a trace of having been scorched.

ONLY ONE FOREST EQUIPPED.

A complete fire line system for the state's forests, in the plans of
the Public Domain Commission, comprehends a line along the'
boundaries of "every 40-acre tract within the reserve. But one forest
has been thus completely equipped to date, but it is the only forest
reserve in the United States that is. This is the Fyfe Lake Reserve
of 7,182 acres area, 1,202 acres planted. The fire line mileage criss-
crossing this forest totals 105 miles.

It costs from $100 to $150 a mile to run fire lines in the state's
forests. It would cost about the same were it conceivable to run fire
lines through the vast areas of fire country outside the reserves. The
total would run into many millions, even were the section lines only
followed. Nobody thinks of such a thing. Slash disposal and running
of fire lines "to break up the most dangerous areas of slash," as
Filibert Roth has put it, is the most in contemplation. When forests
actually are set on the barrens, in the years to come, they doubtless
will be protected by section and quarter-section lines.

The regulation forest fire fighting organization contemplates
watchmen, patrolmen and smoke chasers. Watchmen in towers or
stationed on hilltops spot smoke clouds and report. Patrolmen go
about looking for fires, educating people on fire prevention and
enforcing the fire laws. Smoke chasers go after the fires and put
them out, calling in help when needed. The tools of the fire fighters
are watch towers, telephone lines, grubhooks and shovels, and fire
lines.

There is at least one watch-tower in each of the opened state
forests, in three of them two towers each. These last are Houghton
Lake, Lake Superior and Presque Isle. Phone lines from each com-
municate with the custodian's office in that particular forest, and
thence to the outer world. It costs $100 a mile to put up these
telephone equipments, where poles have to be erected. In some of
the forests the lines hook up with other systems — as on Lake Superior
Reserve, where there are arrangements wit'h the United States Life-
Saving Station on the Lake Superior shore within the limits of the
state reservation.

STATE HAS DIFFICULTIES.

How much of the system in practice on the state reservations is
applicable for the protection of natural growth and the propagation
©f replaced growth on the millions of state-owned and private-owned
outside the reserves, the reader can easily figure out for himself, with

—41—

one or two hints to guide his calculations. Matters of legality came
into the reckoning. The status of state-owned and private-owned
lands, in respect to protection costs, naturally differ. So does the
fire line question, for it is one thing for the state to go out for a
day's work on its own land, ripping things up, and quite another
thing when the ripping is^to be done on private land.

The state has its self-imposed handicaps. The Public Domain
Commission has to get money from the Legislature to carry out a
comprehensive, forward-looking scheme; but it is easy to 'perceive,
on examination, that existing laws put upon private persons sortie
handicaps in the way of restoration of barren acres to wealth
production that the state has not set up in its own pathway. ,

One of these is the Timber Tax Law. This matter is important
when the effort to get private interests into this great enterprise pf
restoring the bankrupt acres to wealth production is in mind. It will
be given first consideration in the following articles, which will then
point out a plan at this moment running through the minds of many
people, whereby, if it desired to do so, the state could take the most
threatening and neglected of privately-owned lands into its own hands
and incorporate them in the development area it has laid out for its
own activities.

ARTICLE X.

Restoration to Michigan's 10,000,000 bankrupt and near-bankrupt
acres of cut-over pine lands of a permanent forest industry that will
make these lands once more productive of wealth, rebuild decaying
North Michigan towns and furnish auxiliary support for agricultural
industry in a region where markets are scattered wide and labor too
often can not find the winter employment with which to eke out the
scanty livelihood which pioneer farms in the sand country afford —
all this is involved as a prospect in the activities reflected in the
beginnings that are being made by the Public Domain Commission
on the state's reserved forest lands.

Private owners of large tracts have begun to show interest in the
scheme, but they have not gone very far. Nothing is known in
Michigan comparable to the organized -activities of one of the big
paper-making corporations over in Quebec, on the St. Maurice River.
There a combination of pulp mill interests that controls 15,000 square
miles of timber land has a nursery for production of white spruce
seedlings. Planting is going on, it is claimed, at the rate of more
than 1,000,000 trees a year. Michigan's forestry department plants
about 3,000,000 each year. The only Michigan corporation heard of
as interested in this work on a comparable scale is a mining corpora-
tion in the Upper Peninsula which has been lately inquiring for prices
on seedling trees in million lots.

SEEDLINGS AT COSTS.

"We can furnish 1,000,000 seedlings a year," said A. K. Chittenden,
head of the forestry department of the Michigan Agricultural College.
"We gave this company a quotation a year ago, but have heard
nothing from them since."

M. A. C, like the state nursery at Higgins Lake, sells seedlings
at cost. The college nursery of 29 acres supplies seedlings for sand

-42-

land owned by the college up north and does a big businesss in
promoting propagation o'f trees in farmers' wood lots and along
public highways all over the state.

"The trouble, when you come to consider private interests in
relation to the problem of re-clothing idle lands with forests," said
Orlando F. Barnes, of the State Tax Commission, "is that timber
yields no income to the owner until separated from the soil. The
owners are under constant pressure to cut and market. There is a
constantly increasing tax burden, with no similar annual income to
* meet it. Michigan forests are taxed as real estate. The increase in
value of the trees is taxed each year, while the harvest waits. It must
wait for many years.

TIMBER HARVEST WAITS.

"The premise is a false one. The supposition is that the forest has
but one year's life, like the ordinary crop of a farmer. Farm crops
aren't even taxed, direct. The land is taxed according to its crop rais-
ing capabilities as proved by the yields from year to year. We don't
tax the corn and the wheat as it stands on the land, but we 4° tax
'the timber. While the harvest with which to pay the tax bills waits,
from 30 to 75 years as the case may be, the owner must pay from year
to year. He must get the money from some other source. Not only
that, but interest on the outlay compounds at a staggering rate.

"Land and timber should be exempted from the annual ad valorem
property tax, and there should be substituted for it a percentage tax
payable whenever any part of the timber crop is harvested. This
should be modified by an annual land tax at a fixed rate upon the land
valued as stump land, along with a yield tax when the timber is cut.
There must be a fixed land tax collected annually, for the counties in
which these lands are located must have their revenue."

CAN'T AFFORD TREE-PLANTING.

This explains, in outline, statements which have been made to the
inquirer among owners of large, unused areas in the bankrupt lancf
area. The question was asked: "Why don't you re-establish the
forests on these lands?"

The answer always is: "Because we can't afford to do it when the
state taxes us to death"— a statement never made clear by them, but
~ow explained by the, state tax commissioner.

Among residents of the North country there is to this day a fixed
antagonism to any scheme that contemplates easement of the tax bur-
den on these lands. The counties need the money. The fact that
3,00 acres a month revert to the state for non-payment of taxes doesn't
tend to loosen the local grip. There is, however, now evident and be-
coming yearly more evident, a conviction that fire damage wrought by
conflagrations starting in slash lands can not be brought into bounds
without some action that will give the state and its fire-fighting and
tree-planting organizations more direct control over private lands than
they now have. It is useless to expect owners of charred and devas-
tated sand plains to do anything effective. That is the conviction
among thinking men in the northern counties.

GETTING TOGETHER.

A proposal has bobbed up in agricultural circles. It is there, indeed,
that something might have been expected to occur. The fact that ag-

—43—

f<

-•

riculturists have a plan for control of the forest fire menace at the same
time serves to point out an important fact — which is that interests
which hitherto have been at variance are at last coming together.
Farmers are beginning to get in on the foresters' problem, in a helpful
way, at least hereabouts, that is, in the area of the Lake States.

The Northwest Michigan Development Bureau, with headquarters
at Traverse City, in the general location where have occurred the
worst of the Lower Peninsula forest fires of recent date, adopted at
one of its meetings not long ago a set of resolutions calling for state
control and administration of the worst of the slash lands.

"Thousands of acres of cut-over land lying idle in Michigan are a
menace to surrounding lands. They are a breeding place for grass-
hoppers and are fire traps," say these agriculturists; and when they
speak of fire they have the full accord of Upper Peninsula men on
grazing lands, whose flocks and herds have been driven many miles at
times by fire, often perishing.

PASTURAGE SUGGESTED.

Say the Northwestern Michigan agriculturists: "It is possible to
handle these lands in such a manner that all lands suitable to.
reforestation could be planted and cared for; and all lands suitable
for pasturage could be used for that purpose.

"Cut-over pine lands not owned by the state could be condemned,
a just value placed by a competent board of appraisers and the owners
reimbursed. This should be done only when a majority of the free-
holders of a township or a county request it. The township or county
requesting such action by 4;he state could agree to keep the fire lines
open, the initial cost to be borne by the state. The township or
county could also agree to maintain a fire warden.

The shrewd policy dictating this proposal mayliot at first appear to
the general reader. Here is a proposition, not for the state to step on
to private lands, perhaps at the behest of a state forestry department
which wants acres allotted to it for free planting, but for communities
themselves to put the first stigma of non-agricultural availability and
existing menace upon private property — the state to accede to the
proposition only on proofs arising among the people who know the
lands as neighbors and naturally would be interested in seeing the land
exploited for agriculture, if there were any hope of that outcome.

PRIVILEGE TO COUNTY.

"In order to furnish an incentive for a township or county to make
such a request (for condemnation)," the north country men continue,
"the state could agree to reforest such land as would be suitable for
reforestation and give the township or county the privilege of
pasturing cattle on the land. This would be a great boon for the live
stock industry, as the live stock men would be reasonably sure that
fires would not destroy their pastures in the middle of the season."

North Michigan live stock men are taking a leaf from the book of
the western herdsmen. First fighting forest conservation, these latter
finally became reconciled to grazing fees on Federal forest lands,
finally finding, by all accounts, that the forest conservation "cranks"
were actually working to the stockmen's advantage. Grazing fees pay
a large part of the forest activities on Government lands in the West.

"Making the township or county a co-operator would insure a
greater measure of success than would be possible in a state under-
taking," conclude the North Michigan men. "It might be made
compulsory for a township or county having a certain percentage of

—44—

its land either wild or cut-over to take such action."

As a mere unofficial, voluntary proposal for state legislation
calculating to cope with phases of an enormous problem, here is a
suggestion concrete and plausible enough for anybody, on the face
of it. It seems to make suggestively practicable Prof. Roth's demand
that "the worst and most threatening area of slash lands be broken
up" as a fire protection measure.

"CUT SLASH TO GROUND/'

The state's laws regarding slash disposal need to be worked out to
more definite and practical conclusions than now provided for. This
needs to be done if farmers and ranchmen are to be properly protected
and if the state's forests are to be protected without disproportionate
cost. Two years ago fires coming up out of the slash lands burned
over farms and waste places in the area of Higgins Laks reserve until
they had come up to a line 22 miles long, which is within two miles of
the total of the line bounding t'he forest. Some of them got into the
forest and were there controlled.

''Slash shouldn't be disposed of by being burned," said State Forest-
er Schaaf. "I don't believe in destroying anything. Slash should be
cut down to the ground. There it is far less liable to spread fire, and
soon it rots away, going back into the soil which needs it."

What has been said earlier in these articles on matters of required
appropriations for work will have to suffice, as suggesting legislation.
This includes what Mr. Lovejoy has so clearly expounded regarding
the necessities of a land survey, to go hand in hand with reclamation
activities and to give direction to replanting effort and the expenditure
of funds for. fire protection.

A large subject remains — the explanation of what reforestation of
these barren lands will mean to industrial Michigan and the life of
dwellers in North Michigan towns, as also t'he lives of people who only
occasionally visit the north country. Those things "will have to await
treatment at another time.

—45—

THE

AMERICAN FORESTRY
ASSOCIATION

presents this series pf articles from
the DETROIT NEWS as a fine exam-
ple of one paper's campaign for keep-
ing the importance of forestry before
the public. Will you not take up the
question, one big phase of which,

THE COST OF PRINT PAPER

is so important to you? We thank
you for your co-operation with us and
hope you will find, in this little book,
subject matter for continuing that co-
operation. We must save our forests.

The
American Forestry Association

1 214 Sixteenth St. N. W. Washington, D. C.