one and a half to four inches long. The cones are from ten to eighteen
inches long. The seeds ripen the second year. Reproduction is vigorous
and the forest stands are holding their own. Trees about one hundred and
seventy-five feet high and eight feet in diameter are met with, but the
average size is one hundred feet high and from two to three feet in
diameter, or about the size of eastern white pine.
The wood is useful and has been giving service since the settlement of
the country began, fifty or more years ago. Choice trunks were split for
shakes or shingles, but the wood is inferior in splitting qualities to
either eastern white pine or California sugar pine, because of more
knots. The western white pine does not prime itself early or well. Dead
limbs adhere to the trunk long after the sugar pine would shed them. In
split products, the western white pine’s principal rival has been the
western red cedar. The pine has been much employed for mine timbers in
the region where it is abundant. Miners generally take the most
convenient wood for props, stulls, and lagging. A little higher use for
pine is found among the mines, where is it made into tanks, flumes,
sluice boxes, water pipes, riffle blocks, rockers, and guides for stamp
mills. However, the total quantity used by miners is comparatively
small. Much more goes to ranches for fences and buildings. It is
serviceable, and is shipped outside the immediate region of production
and is marketed in the plains states east of the Rocky Mountains, where
it is excellent fence material.
A larger market is found in manufacturing centers farther east. Western
white pine is shipped to Chicago where it is manufactured into doors,
sash, and interior finish, in competition with all other woods in that
market. It is said to be of frequent occurrence that the very pine which
is shipped in its rough form out of the Rocky Mountain region goes back
finished as doors and sash. When the mountain regions shall have better
manufacturing facilities, this will not occur. In the manufacture of
window and hothouse sash, glass is more important than wood, although
each is useless without the other. The principal glass factories are in
the East, and it is sometimes desirable to ship the wood to the glass
factory, have the sash made there, and the glazing done; and the
finished sash, ready for use, may go back to the source of the timber.
The same operation is sometimes repeated for doors; but in recent years
the mountain region where this pine grows has been supplied with
factories and there is now less shipping of raw material out and of
finished products back than formerly. The development of the fruit
industry in the elevated valleys of Idaho, Montana, Washington, and
Oregon has called for shipping boxes in large numbers, and western white
pine has been found an ideal wood for that use. It is light in weight
and in color, strong enough to satisfy all ordinary requirements, and
cheap enough to bring it within reach of orchardists. It meets with
lively competition from a number of other woods which grow abundantly in
the region, but it holds its ground and takes its share of the business.
Estimates of the total stand of western white pine among its native
mountains have not been published, but the quantity is known to be
large. It is a difficult species to estimate because it is scattered
widely, large, pure stands being scarce. Some large mills make a
specialty of sawing this species. The annual output is believed to reach
150,000,000 feet, most of which is in Idaho and Montana.
MEXICAN WHITE PINE (_Pinus strobiformis_) is not sufficiently abundant
to be of much importance in the United States. The best of it is south
of the international boundary in Mexico, but the species extends into
New Mexico and Arizona where it is most abundant at altitudes of from
6,000 to 8,000 feet. The growth is generally scattering, and the trunks
are often deformed through fire injury, and are inclined to be limby and
of poor form. The best trees are from eighty to one hundred feet high,
and two in diameter; but many are scarcely half that size. The lumbermen
of the region, who cut Mexican white pine, are inclined to place low
value on it, not because the wood is of poor quality, but because it is
scarce. It is generally sent to market with western yellow pine.
Excellent grades and quality of this wood are shipped into the United
States from Mexico, but not in large amounts. An occasional carload
reaches door and sash factories in Texas, and woodworkers as far east as
Michigan are acquainted with it, through trials and experiments which
they have made. It is highly recommended by those who have tried it.
Some consider it as soft, as easy to work, and as free from warping and
checking as the eastern white pine. In Arizona and New Mexico the tree
is known as ayacahuite pine, white pine, and Arizona white pine. The
wood is moderately light, fairly strong, rather stiff, of slow growth,
and the bands of summerwood are comparatively broad. The resin passages
are few and large. The wood is light red, the sapwood whiter. The leaves
occur in clusters of five, are three or four inches long, and fall
during the third and fourth years. The seeds are large and have small
wings which cannot carry them far from the parent tree.
PINON (_Pinus edulis_). This is one of the nut pines abounding among the
western mountains, and it is called pinon in Texas, nut pine in Texas
and Colorado, pinon pine and New Mexican pinon in other parts of its
range, extending from Colorado through New Mexico to western Texas. It
has two and three leaves to the cluster. They begin to fall the third
year and continue through six or seven years following. The cones are
quite small, the largest not exceeding one and one-half inches in
length. Trees are from thirty to forty feet high, and large trunks may
be two and one-half feet in diameter. The tree runs up mountain sides to
altitudes of 8,000 or 9,000 feet. It exists in rather large bodies, but
is not an important timber tree, because the trunks are short and are
generally of poor form. It often branches near the ground and assumes
the appearance of a large shrub. Ties of pinon have been used with
various results. Some have proved satisfactory, others have proved weak
by breaking, and the ties occasionally split when spikes are driven. The
wood’s service as posts varies also. Some posts will last only three or
four years, while others remain sound a long time. The difference in
lasting properties is due to the difference in resinous contents of the
wood. Few softwoods rank above it in fuel value, and much is cut in some
localities. Large areas have been totally stripped for fuel. Charcoal
for local smithies is burned from this pine. The wood is widely used for
ranch purposes, but not in large quantities. The edible nuts are sought
by birds, rodents, and Indians. Some stores keep the nuts for sale. The
tree is handicapped in its effort at reproduction by weight, and the
small wing power of the seeds. They fall near the base of the parent
tree, and most of them are speedily devoured.
[Illustration]
SUGAR PINE
[Illustration: SUGAR PINE]
SUGAR PINE
(_Pinus Lambertiana_)
This is the largest pine of the United States, and probably is the
largest true pine in the world. Its rival, the Kauri pine of New
Zealand, is not a pine according to the classification of botanists; and
that leaves the sugar pine supreme, as far as the world has been
explored. David Douglas, the first to describe the species, reported a
tree eighteen feet in diameter and 245 feet high, in southern Oregon. No
tree of similar size has been reported since; but trunks six, ten, and
even twelve feet through, and more than 200 high are not rare.
The range of sugar pine extends from southern Oregon to lower
California. Through California it follows the Sierra Nevada mountains in
a comparatively narrow belt. In Oregon it descends within 1,000 feet of
sea level, but the lower limit of its range gradually rises as it
follows the mountains southward, until in southern California it is
8,000 or 10,000 feet above the sea. Its choice of situation is in the
mountain belt where the annual precipitation is forty inches or more.
The deep winter snows of the Sierras do not hurt it. The young trees
bear abundant limbs covering the trunks nearly or quite to the ground,
and are of perfect conical shape. When they are ten or fifteen feet tall
they may be entirely covered in snow which accumulates to a depth of a
dozen feet or more. The little pines are seldom injured by the load, but
their limbs shed the snow until it covers the highest twig. The
consequence is that a crooked sugar pine trunk is seldom seen, though a
considerable part of the tree’s youth may have been spent under tons of
snow. Later in life the lower limbs die and drop, leaving clean boles
which assure abundance of clear lumber in the years to come.
The tree is nearly always known as sugar pine, though it may be called
big pine or great pine to distinguish it from firs, cedars, and other
softwoods with which it is associated. The name is due to a product
resembling sugar which exudes from the heartwood when the tree has been
injured by fires, and which dries in white, brittle excrescences on the
surface. Its taste is sweet, with a suggestion of pitch which is not
unpleasant. The principle has been named “pinite.”
The needles of sugar pine are in clusters of five and are about four
inches long. They are deciduous the second and third years. The cones
are longer than cones of any other pine of this country but those of the
Coulter pine are a little heavier. Extreme length of 22 inches for the
sugar pine cone has been recorded, but the average is from 12 to 15
inches. Cones open, shed their seeds the second year, and fall the
third. The seeds resemble lentils, and are provided with wings which
carry them several hundred feet, if wind is favorable. This affords
excellent opportunities for reproduction; but there is an offset in the
sweetness of the seeds which are prized for food by birds, beasts and
creeping things from the Piute Indian down to the Douglas squirrel and
the jumping mouse.
Sugar pine occupies a high place as a timber tree. It has been in use
for half a century. The cut in 1900 was 52,000,000 feet, in 1904 it was
120,000,000; in 1907, 115,000,000, and the next year about 100,000,000.
Ninety-three per cent of the cut is in California, the rest in Oregon.
Its stand in California has been estimated at 25,000,000,000 feet.
The wood of sugar pine is a little lighter than eastern white pine, is a
little weaker, and has less stiffness. It is soft, the rings of growth
are wide, the bands of summerwood thin and resinous; the resin passages
are numerous and very large, the medullary rays numerous and obscure.
The heart is light brown, the sapwood nearly white.
Sugar pine and redwood were the two early roofing woods in California,
and both are still much used for that purpose. Sugar pine was made into
sawed shingles and split shakes. The shingle is a mill product; but the
shake was rived with mallet and frow, and in the years when it was the
great roofing material in central and eastern California, the shake
makers camped by twos in the forest, lived principally on bacon and red
beans, and split out from 200,000 to 400,000 shakes as a summer’s work.
The winter snows drove the workers from the mountains, with from eight
to twelve hundred dollars in their pockets for the season’s work.
The increase in stumpage price has practically killed the shake maker’s
business. In the palmy days when most everything went, he procured his
timber for little or nothing. He sometimes failed to find the surveyor’s
lines, particularly if there happened to be a fine sugar pine just
across on a government quarter section. His method of operation was
wasteful. He used only the best of the tree. If the grain happened to
twist the fraction of an inch, he abandoned the fallen trunk, and cut
another. The shakes were split very thin, for sugar pine is among the
most cleavable woods of this country. Four or five good trees provided
the shake maker’s camp with material for a year’s work.
Some of the earliest sawmills in California cut sugar pine for sheds,
shacks, sluiceboxes, flumes among the mines; and almost immediately a
demand came from the agricultural and stock districts for lumber. From
that day until the present time the sugar pine mills have been busy. As
the demand has grown, the facilities for meeting it have increased. The
prevailing size of the timber forbade the use of small mills. A saw
large enough for most eastern and southern timbers would not slab a
sugar pine log. From four to six feet were common sizes, and the
lumberman despised anything small.
In late years sugar pine operators have looked beyond the local markets,
and have been sending their lumber to practically every state in the
Union, except probably the extreme South. It comes in direct competition
with the white pine of New England and the Lake States. The two woods
have many points of resemblance. The white pine would probably have lost
no markets to the California wood if the best grades could still be had
at moderate prices; but most of the white pine region has been stripped
of its best timber, and the resulting scarcity in the high grades has
been, in part, made good by sugar pine. Some manufacturers of doors and
frames claim that sugar pine is more satisfactory than white pine,
because of better behavior under climatic changes. It is said to shrink,
swell, and warp less than the eastern wood.
Sugar pine has displaced white pine to a very small extent only, in
comparison with the field still held by the eastern wood, whose annual
output is about thirty times that of the California species. Their uses
are practically the same except that only the good grades of sugar pine
go east, and the corresponding grades of white pine west, and therefore
there is no competition between the poor grades of the two woods. The
annual demand for sugar and white pine east of the Rocky Mountains is
probably represented as an average in Illinois, where 2,000,000 feet of
the former and 175,000,000 of the latter are used yearly.
While there is a large amount of mature sugar pine ready for lumbermen,
the prospect of future supplies from new growth is not entirely
satisfactory. The western yellow pine is mixed with it throughout most
of its range, and is more than a match for it in taking possession of
vacant ground. It is inferred from this fact that the relative positions
of the two species in future forests will change at the expense of sugar
pine. It endures shade when small, and this enables it to obtain a start
among other species; but as it increases in size it becomes intolerant
of shade, and if it does not receive abundance of light it will not
grow. A forest fire is nearly certain to kill the small sugar pines, but
old trunks are protected by their thick bark. Few species have fewer
natural enemies. Very small trees are occasionally attacked by mistletoe
(_Arceuthobium occidentale_) and succumb or else are stunted in their
growth.
MEXICAN PINON (_Pinus cembroides_) is known also as nut pine, pinon
pine and stone-seed Mexican pinon. It is one of the smallest of the
native pines of this country. The tree is fifteen or twenty feet
high and a few inches in diameter, but in sheltered canyons in
Arizona it sometimes attains a height of fifty or sixty feet with a
corresponding diameter. It reaches its best development in northern
Mexico and what is found of it in the United States is the species’
extreme northern extension, in Arizona and New Mexico at altitudes
usually above 6,000 feet. It supplies fuel in districts where
firewood is otherwise scarce, and it has a small place as ranch
timber. The wood is heavy, of slow growth, the summerwood thin and
dense. The resin passages are few and small; color, light, clear
yellow, the sapwood nearly white. If the tree stood in regions
well-forested with commercial species, it would possess little or no
value; but where wood is scarce, it has considerable value. The
hardshell nuts resemble those of the gray pine, but are considered
more valuable for food. They are not of much importance in the
United States, but in Mexico where the trees are more abundant and
the population denser, the nuts are bought and sold in large
quantities. Its leaves are in clusters of three, sometimes two. They
are one inch or more in length, and fall the third and fourth years.
Cones are seldom over two inches in length. The species is not
extending its range, but seems to be holding the ground it already
has. It bears abundance of seeds, but not one in ten thousand
germinates and becomes a mature tree.
[Illustration]
WHITEBARK PINE
[Illustration: WHITEBARK PINE]
WHITEBARK PINE
(_Pinus Albicaulis_)
This interesting and peculiar pine has a number of names, most of which
are descriptive. The whiteness of the bark and the stunted and recumbent
position which the tree assumes on bleak mountains are referred to in
the names whitestem pine in California and Montana, scrub pine in
Montana, whitebark in Oregon, white in California, and elsewhere it is
creeping pine, whitebark pine, and alpine whitebark pine. It is a
mountain tree. There are few heights within its range which it cannot
reach. Its tough, prostrate branches, in its loftiest situations, may
whip snow banks nine or ten months of the year, and for the two or three
months of summer every starry night deposits its sprinkle of frost upon
the flowers or cones of this persistent tree. It stands the storms of
centuries, and lives on, though the whole period of its existence is a
battle for life under adverse circumstances. At lower altitudes it fares
better but does not live longer than on the most sterile peak. Its range
covers 500,000 square miles, but only in scattered groups. It touches
the high places only, creeping down to altitudes of 5,000 or 6,000 feet
in the northern Rocky Mountains. It grows from British Columbia to
southern California, and is found in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon,
Nevada, Arizona, and California. Its associates are the mountain
climbers of the tree kingdom, Engelmann spruce, Lyall larch, limber
pine, alpine fir, foxtail pine, Rocky Mountain juniper, knobcone pine,
and western juniper. Its dark green needles, stout and rigid, are from
one and one-half to two and one-half inches long. They hang on the twigs
from five to eight years. In July the scarlet flowers appear, forming a
beautiful contrast with the white bark and the green needles. In August
the seeds are ripe. The cones are from one and one-half to three inches
long. The seeds are nearly half an inch long, sweet to the taste. The
few squirrels and birds which inhabit the inhospitable region where the
whitebark pine grows, get busy the moment the cones open, and few
escape. Nature seems to have played a prank on this pine by giving wings
to the seeds and rendering their use impossible. The wing is stuck fast
with resin to the cone scales, and the seed can escape only by tearing
its wing off. The heavy nut then falls plumb to the ground beneath the
branches of its parent. It might be supposed that a tree situated as the
whitebark pine is would be provided with ample means of seedflight in
order to afford wide distribution, and give opportunity to survive the
hardships which are imposed by surroundings; but such is not the case.
The willow and the cottonwood which grow in fertile valleys have the
means of scattering their seeds miles away; but this bleak mountain tree
must drop its seeds on the rocks beneath. In this instance, nature seems
more interested in depositing the pine nuts where the hungry squirrels
can get them, than in furnishing a planting place for the nuts
themselves--therefore, tears off their wings before they leave the cone.
The battle for existence begins before the seeds germinate, and the
struggle never ceases. The tree, in parts of its range, survives a
temperature sixty degrees below zero. Its seedlings frequently perish,
not from cold and drought, but because the wind thrashes them against
the rocks which wear them to pieces. Trees which survive on the great
heights are apt to assume strange and fantastic forms, with less
resemblance to trees than to great, green spiders sprawling over the
rocks. Trees 500 years old may not be five feet high. Deep snows hold
them flat to the rocks so much of the time that the limbs cannot lift
themselves during the few summer days, but grow like vines. The growth
is so exceedingly slow that the new wood on the tips of twigs at the end
of summer is a mere point of yellow. John Muir, with a magnifying glass,
counted seventy-five annual rings in a twig one-eighth of an inch in
diameter. Trunks three and one-half inches in diameter may be 225 years
old; one of six inches had 426 rings; while a seventeen-inch trunk was
800 years old, and less than six feet high. Such a tree has a spread of
branches thirty or forty feet across. They lie flat on the ground. Wild
sheep, deer, bear, and other wild animals know how to shelter themselves
beneath the prostrate branches by creeping under; and travelers,
overtaken by storms, sometimes do the same; or in good weather the
sheepherder or the hunter may spread his blankets on the mass of limbs,
boughs, and needles, and spend a comfortable night on a springy
couch--actually sleeping in a tree top within two feet of the ground. In
regions lower down, the whitebark pine reaches respectable tree form.
Fence posts are sometimes cut from it in the Mono basin, east of the
Sierra Nevada mountains. In the Nez Perce National Forest trees forty
feet high have merchantable lengths of twenty-four feet. Similar growth
is found in other regions. In its best growth, the wood of whitebark
pine resembles that of white pine. It is light, of about the same
strength as white pine, but more brittle. The annual rings are very
narrow; the small resin passages are numerous. The sapwood is very thin
and is nearly white. Men can never greatly assist or hinder this tree.
It will continue to occupy heights and elevated valleys.