CANADIAN TIMBER
The largest share of the natural wealth of Canada is derived from her
unlimited acres and square miles of wheat-lands. Next in importance to
her wheat is her timber. Considerably more than one-third of the total
area of the Dominion is covered with forests. With the exception of
the province of Prince Edward Island, all the older provinces are rich
in valuable trees. British Columbia is said to have "the greatest
compact reserve of timber in the world." The vast prairies of the
North-West have never, since the white man set foot on the American
continent, been at all well wooded, although to the north of the
settled wheat-lands there is a forest region nearly fifty times as big
as England, stretching from Labrador on the east to Yukon on the west.
Wood is consequently of vast importance to almost every man in Canada.
In one way or another it figures in the daily life of almost every
inhabitant of the Dominion. The strange words, "M^3 Shiplap and
Rustic," are familiar to the eye and ear of every builder of a house;
and who is there in Canada who does not at some time or other build a
house, or help to build one? "M^3" means "cubic feet." "Shiplap" and
"rustic" are special cuts and pieces of timber used in house-building.
Logs and lumber are therefore household words to the Canadian. As Dr.
Fernow, head of the Forestry Department of the University of Toronto,
puts it: "Our civilization is built on wood. From the cradle to the
coffin in some shape or other it surrounds us as a conveyance or a
necessity.... We are rocked in wooden cradles, play with wooden toys,
sit on wooden chairs, ... are entertained by music from wooden
instruments, enlightened by information printed on wooden paper with
black ink made from wood." More than one-half the people of Canada
live in wooden houses; more than two-thirds use wood as fuel.
Thousands of miles of railway rest on wooden ties, or sleepers. The
waters of the Canadian lakes are daily churned by the wooden paddles of
wooden steamboats; fleets of wooden vessels ply up and down the coasts.
More than 300 years ago the French, who were the first settlers in
Canada, began to cut in her forests spars and masts for the royal navy,
and later the practice was followed by the British.
The long droning whine of the saw-mill is to-day one of the most
familiar sounds beside the lakes and rivers of Canada. Down at the
water's edge you may see the woodman "poying" the big logs to the foot
of the upward incline that feeds the saw-tables, skilfully guiding them
so that the iron teeth of the endless gliding chain which runs up and
down the incline may seize hold upon them and carry them up to the edge
of the huge, whizzing, groaning, whining circular saw above. At the
other end of the mill, or somewhere beside it, you will see the sawn
wood stacked up in squares--planks of various widths and thicknesses.
If you turn away from the sawmill and wander alongside the river, you
will see a perfect multitude of logs, thousands of them, held together
inside a boom of logs, chained or ironed together, like a huge flock of
sheep penned within a sheepfold. These immense masses of timber are
floated down the streams in spring, when the snows, melting, flood the
rivers with swift, eddying, and often turbulent freshets. Occasionally
it happens that the stream grows so swift and violent that it causes
the logs to burst the boom or log-linked enclosure within which they
are confined. Then away career the logs down the bosom of the
rebellious torrent, and the owner may esteem himself remarkably lucky
if he recovers even a small proportion of them. The breaking of a boom
in this way may therefore represent a loss of hundreds, and even
thousands, of pounds. In some cases, where these lumber-rafts have to
travel long distances, the men in charge of them live on the raft
throughout the whole of their journey, which may last some weeks. If
you want to read a fascinating story about the men who engage in this
work, read "The Man from Glengarry," by the Canadian novelist, Ralph
Connor.
If you travel up the stream until you reach one of its higher
tributaries, and turn up beside the latter, you may eventually find
yourself at one of the lumber-camps which feed the far-off saw-mill in
the valley below. In a picturesque clearing in the forest you will see
the low but comfortable log cabin and log stable; you will see the
timber-slide, with a rill of water flowing down it to make the logs
slide more easily as they are shot down into the tributary stream; you
will hear the crack of the teamster's whip and his cheery cry as he
urges on his horses--four, six, eight, or ten of them--straining at a
rough sleigh on which rest the ends of one, two, three, four, or five
big logs; you may hear the swish of the big, two-handled cross-cut saw,
as the woodmen cut through the trunk of gigantic fir, cedar, or spruce,
or the slow, resonant crash as the forest giant totters, falls, smashes
prone to the earth; you may hear the ring of the woodmen's axes as they
lop away its branches and strip off its bark.
The men who guide these big timber-booms down the broad, swift rivers
of the Canadian forest-lands, and pilot them over the boiling rapids,
are marvellously clever in keeping their balance on the unsteady,
ever-rolling logs. A favourite pastime with them is log-rolling.
Wearing boots for the purpose--boots shod with sharp steel spikes--they
walk out, each man on a broad log, and set it rolling. Once the log is
started, it begins to roll at an increasing speed. Faster and faster
go the feet of the raftsman; faster and faster spins the log. With
arms outstretched and every muscle tense, the raftsman preserves his
balance long after an ordinary landsman would have gone
over--souse!--into the stream. That is indeed the fate which overtakes
all of the competitors except one, and he--the man who preserves his
balance the longest--is, of course, the winner of the game, the envied
of his companions, the admired of all the lumber-jacks and their
numerous friends. The cleverest men at this sport are the
French-Canadians.
Nevertheless, all is not always peace and contentment in a Canadian
forest. To say nothing of the wild beasts--_e.g._, bear, lynx,
mountain lion--which live in them, the actual trees of the forest are
themselves a source of menace and danger to men. During the hot, dry
days of summer an unheeded spark from a woodman's pipe, a red-hot
cinder from a passing train, a neglected camp-fire--the ashes left
unextinguished--are each enough to ignite the highly inflammable
undergrowths of the forest; and once set alight, the moss which carpets
the floor of the forest, the broken sticks which litter the ground from
many a winter storm, the bushes, the dead trees, all catch up the
flame, and after smouldering, it may be for weeks, the whole forest
suddenly bursts into flame. If this happens when a strong wind is
blowing, nothing hardly can save the town or settlement, the ranch or
saw-mill, that may chance to lie on the side of the fire towards which
the wind is blowing. And it is indeed not only a grand but also a
terrible sight to stand and watch a large "bush"-fire raging over, say,
a square mile or two on a mountain-side. You see the red flames
towering up like so many gigantic pillars of fire, now leaping up, now
sinking down. As the fire appears to die down in one quarter, you see
it break out with great and sudden fury in another, and then ere long
it takes a fresh lease of life in the direction in which it first died
down. A forest fire such as this advances with terrible swiftness, and
woe to the houses which lie in its path! In the summer of 1908 the
town of Fernie, a place of 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, situated in the
Crow's Nest Pass of the Rocky Mountains, was almost completely blotted
out and extinguished in the course of a few hours; and so sudden was
the onset or the fire that the people had literally to flee for their
very lives, leaving everything they possessed behind them, and even in
some cases in their hurry and confusion losing touch with those who
were near and dear to them. A bush-fire is an awful visitation. It
also means a very serious loss of valuable timber, no matter where it
occurs.
The maple, whose leaf in conjunction with the beaver is the national
emblem of Canada, yields in the spring a very sweet sap, which is
boiled down to produce a syrup or sugar of a very delicious flavour.
Doubtless its qualities were learned from the Indians, and the earlier
settlers in the woods depended on it altogether for sugar. Now it is
prepared as a luxury. "Sugar-making weather," bright, clear days, with
frosty nights, come in March. To the great delight of the children the
trees are tapped by boring a small hole in the trunk, and affixing a
small iron spout, which leads the sap to a pail. The rate at which it
drops varies, but as much as two gallons may be collected from a tree
in a day. This is boiled in iron pots, hung over a fire in the woods,
or in the up-to-date way in a large flat pan, till it thickens to syrup.
In the old days sugaring off was a great occasion; all the neighbouring
boys and girls were asked in, and amid much jollification around the
bright fire at night in the forest, the hot sugar was poured off on the
snow, forming a delicious taffy, and all "dug in" at the cost of burnt
fingers and tongue. Songs were sung, ghost-stories told, the girls
were frightened by bears behind the trees, and this unique gathering
broke up in groups of two or three, finding their way home in the
moonlight through the maple wood.
The Canadian youth has many opportunities for a life in the wilds which
all boys enjoy. In order to prevent the occurrence of the destructive
forest-fires, fire-rangers are appointed throughout the whole of
Northern Ontario, whose duty it is to patrol a certain part of the
woods and see that no careless camper has left his fire smouldering
when he strikes camp. The young men appointed for this duty are
usually students from the colleges who are on their holidays; they work
in pairs, and live in a tent pitched at some portage; they see no one
but passing tourists or prospectors, and each day they walk over the
trail and return--a certain stated distance. The rest of their time
they have for fishing and other pleasures of life in the forest. They
return in the autumn brown as Indians, and strong and healthy after the
most enjoyable and useful of holidays.