Trees Woodland Forests

I am not at all sentimental--much less mawkish--regarding the

destruction of trees. Descended from several generations of

timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to America in 1640), and

myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, I realize that trees

exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to

cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. Utility

is the reason nd end of all vegetable growth--of a hickory's no less

than a corn-stalk's. I have always considered "Woodman, spare that

tree," just about the most mawkish bit of badly versified prose in our

language, and never could guess how it should touch the sensibilities of

any one. Understand, then, that I urge the planting of trees mainly

because I believe it will pay, and the preservation, improvement, and

extension, of forests, for precisely that reason.



Yet I am not insensible to the beauty and grace lent by woods, and

groves, and clumps or rows of trees, to the landscape they diversify. I

feel the force of Emerson's averment, that "Beauty is its own excuse

for being," and know that a homestead embowered in, belted by, stately,

graceful elms, maples, and evergreens, is really worth more, and will

sell for more, than if it were naked field and meadow. I consider it one

positive advantage (to balance many disadvantages) of our rocky, hilly,

rugged Eastern country, that it will never, in all probability, be so

denuded of forests as the rich, facile prairies and swales of the Great

Valley may be. Our winds are less piercing, our tornadoes less

destructive, than those of the Great West. I doubt whether there is

another equal area of the earth's surface whereon so many kinds of

valuable trees grow spontaneously and rapidly, defying eradication, as

throughout New England and on either slope of the Alleghenies; and this

profusion of timber and foliage may well atone for, or may be fairly

weighed against, many deficiencies and drawbacks. The Yankee, who has

been accustomed to see trees spring up spontaneously wherever they were

not kept down by ax, or plow, or scythe, and to cross running water

every half mile of a Summer day's journey, may well be made homesick, by

two thousand miles of naked, dusty, wind-swept Plains, whereon he finds

no water for fifty to a hundred miles, and knows it impossible to cut an

ax-helve, much more an axle-tree, in the course of a wearying journey.

No Eastern farmer ever realized the blessedness of abundant and

excellent wood and water until he had wandered far from his boyhood's

home.



No one may yet be able fully to explain the inter-dependence of these

two blessings; but the fact remains. All over "the Plains," there is

evidence that trees grew and flourished where none are now found, and

that springs and streams were then frequent and abiding where none now

exist. A prominent citizen of Nevada, who explored southward from Austin

to the Colorado, assured me that his party traveled for days in the bed

of what had once been a considerable river, but in which it was evident

that no water had flowed for years. And I have heard that since the

Mormons have planted trees over considerable sections of Utah, rains in

Summer are no longer rare, and Salt Lake evinces, by a constant though

moderate increase of her volume of waters, that the equilibrium of

rain-fall with evaporation in the Great Basin has been fully

restored--or rather, that the rain-fall is now taking the lead.



I have a firm faith that all the great deserts of the Temperate and

Torrid Zones will yet be reclaimed by irrigation and tree-planting. The

bill which Congress did not pass, nor really consider, whereby it was

proposed, some years since, to give a section of the woodless Public

Lands remote from settlement to every one who, in a separate township,

would plant and cherish a quarter-section of choice forest-trees, ought

to have been passed--with modifications, perhaps, but preserving the

central idea. Had ten thousand quarter-sections, in so many different

townships of the Plains, been thus planted to timber ten to twenty

years ago, and protected from fire and devastation till now, the value

of those Plains for settlement would have been nearly or quite doubled.



A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy

farmers of our own State. One who has a hundred acres of good soil,

whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely,

calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will

pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain

of the time he has hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling

wood. He does not consider how much his soil will lose in Summer

moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the

sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and

ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliberate judgment, a farm

of one hundred acres will yield more feed, with far greater uniformity

of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests,

ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if

it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist

that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal

for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes

a sad miscalculation.



Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suffering from the

improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take

care of itself. I presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from

the same folly, though to a much greater extent. The remains of now

extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of

this continent, and especially the Territory of Arizona, probably bear

witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers'

and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of White Pine

which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of

our Northern States. Vermont sold White Pine abundantly to England

through Canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from

Canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and

she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century.

I entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or

indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands--but, outside

of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut

away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to plant and

rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut

down. How this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, I will

try to indicate in the succeeding chapter.