THE LUMBER YARD OF AN EMPIRE
I am in the heart of one of the great timber producing districts of
Canada. Every year millions of feet of logs are floated down the
Ottawa River. This stream is eight hundred miles long, and, with its
tributaries, taps a vast area of forests that feed the maws of the
paper and the saw mills of the city of Ottawa. I have watched the
latter at their greedy work, which they carry on at such a pace that
the cry is being raised that the woodlands of the Dominion are being
denuded, and that conservation measures must be adopted.
I have seen great tree trunks squared into timbers so fast that it was
only a matter of seconds from the moment they came wet out of the river
until they were ready for market. My neck aches from looking up at log
piles as high as a six-story apartment, waiting to be converted into
matches in one of the world’s greatest match factories. You can imagine
the size of its output when I tell you that in one year it paid the
government nearly two million dollars in sales taxes. At other mills
piles of pulpwood, nearly as big, are soon to become paper, and in one
I watched huge rolls of news-print taken off the machines and marked
for shipment to the United States.
Canada is cutting down her forests at the rate of about three thousand
millions of feet a year. Still this is only a fraction of one per cent.
of the estimated timber resources of Canada, and the cutting can go on
for a century before the supply is consumed. In the area of her forests
the Dominion is exceeded only by Russia and the United States and she
is second to us in the amount of lumber produced. The British Empire
reaches around the globe, but half of all its forest wealth is in
Canada. Not only the United Kingdom, but South Africa, the West Indies,
Australia, and New Zealand depend on this country for a good part of
their lumber supply.
The Canadians are now getting from their trees a per capita revenue of
about seventy-five dollars a year, and this income their government
is trying to safeguard. They see in us a terrible example of the
extravagant use of natural resources. Of our eight hundred and
twenty-two million acres of virgin forest, only one sixth is left,
which we are cutting at a rate that will exhaust it in twenty-five
years. This does not allow for new growth, which we are eating up four
times faster than Nature produces it.
More than nine tenths of all the forest lands of Canada are owned by
the government, so that she is in better position than we to control
the cutting and provide for the future. In practically every province,
lands good only for trees are no longer sold, and one fourth of the
forest areas have been permanently dedicated to timber production. Each
province administers its own forests, and there is much similarity in
their conservation measures and other restrictions. The usual practice
is to sell cutting rights to the highest bidders, under conditions that
yield substantial revenues to the government and make it possible to
supervise operations.
It is estimated that two thirds of the original stands of timber have
been destroyed by forest fires, which are still causing enormous
losses. Large sums collected monthly from the timber users are being
spent for fire protection. Every railroad is compelled by law to
maintain extensive patrols on account of the sparks from locomotives.
Several of the provinces use airplanes equipped with wireless
telephones or radios to enable their observers to report instantly any
blaze they discover. Some of these planes are large enough to carry
crews of eight or ten men, who swoop down upon a burning area as soon
as it is sighted. In Manitoba an airplane recently carried firefighters
in thirty-two minutes to a forest that was three days’ canoe journey
from the nearest station.
Suppose we go up in one of these patrol planes, and take a look at the
forests of Canada. We shall have to travel over one million square
miles, for that is their area. One fourth of the land of the Dominion
is wooded. The forests begin with the spruces of the Maritime Provinces
and the south shore of the St. Lawrence and extend across the continent
to the Pacific slope, and northward to the sub-arctic regions. There
is still much hardwood left, especially north of the Great Lakes, but
the conifers, or evergreens, make up about eighty per cent. of the
standing timber, and furnish ninety-five per cent. of the lumber and
the pulpwood. In passing over southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and
Alberta, we shall see a vast area of prairies, the lands which now form
the great wheat belt. The foresters say this land once had forests but
that they were destroyed by fire in ages past.
We see the finest trees near the end of our air journey. This is in
British Columbia, a province that contains the largest, most compact,
and most readily accessible stand of merchantable timber in all the
world. It has more than half the saw timber of Canada. In this area,
which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Douglas fir is the predominant
type. The trees are sometimes forty, fifty, and sixty feet thick, and
a single log will make a load for a car. A whole tree may fill a train
when cut into boards. Here sixty-foot timbers that will square two or
three feet are nicknamed “toothpicks.”
Twenty years ago the chief commercial wood of Canada was white pine.
It was then the aristocrat of the north woods, and was cut from trees
between one hundred and fifty and three hundred years old. Its place
has now been taken by the spruces, of which there are five varieties.
The spruces form about one third of all the standing timber of Canada.
The annual cut amounts to something like two thousand million feet,
or enough to build a board walk sixteen feet wide all the way around
the world. Notwithstanding this the government foresters estimate that
within the last twenty years insects and fires have destroyed twice as
much spruce as the lumberjacks have cut down.
Canada’s supply of spruce is of enormous interest to us, for it feeds a
great many of our printing presses. In one single year Canada has cut
as much as four million cords of pulpwood, and four fifths of this goes
to the United States in the form of logs, pulp, and finished paper. We
Americans are the greatest readers on earth. We consume about one third
of the total world output of news-print paper. Our presses use more
than two million tons in a year, or nearly twice as much as Europe,
which has five times our population.
A generation ago Canada had not a dozen pulp mills, and only ten years
ago its product was but one sixth that of the United States. Since
then our production has hardly increased, but the Canadian output has
so grown that it will soon exceed that of the States. Indeed, the
industry now ranks second in the Dominion. I have before me estimates
showing that machines already ordered for new mills and additions will
add to the Canadian capacity something like four hundred thousand tons
a year. Canada now has more than one hundred paper mills, and if all
were run full time at full speed, they would turn out nearly two and
one half million tons of paper in a year. The world’s largest ground
pulp mill is at Three Rivers, in Quebec, the great paper-making centre
I have mentioned in another chapter. That province has also the largest
single news-print mill, with machines that are turning out a continuous
sheet of paper more than nineteen feet wide, at the rate of about
eleven miles an hour, or eighty thousand miles a year. Not long ago one
hundred tons of paper a day was the largest capacity of any mill. Now
this is almost the standard unit in the industry. A four-hundred-ton
mill is operating at Abitibi, and plants of five-hundred-ton daily
capacity are already planned for.
It takes about a cord of wood to make a ton of news-print, or enough,
if rolled out like a carpet, to paper the pavement of a city street
from curb to curb for a distance of three and one half miles. A year’s
output of a hundred-ton mill would make a paper belt six feet wide
reaching four times around the waist of old Mother Earth. Take a big
Sunday newspaper and spread its sheets out on the floor. You will be
surprised at the area they cover. Now if you will keep in mind that it
sometimes takes more than a hundred tons of paper to print a single
issue you will realize how fast the forests of Canada are being
converted into paper sufficient to blanket the earth.
It is several centuries since Shakespeare found
Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything.
It remained, however, for our age, and especially North America, to
make these tree tongues speak. The world never had enough paper until
the process of making it from wood was discovered, and even now it
can hardly cut down its forests fast enough to satisfy the insatiable
demand of the printing press. I have visited paper mills in both the
United States and Canada, and have watched the miracle of transforming
a log into the medium of paper that carries the messages of our
presidents, the doings of Congress, the news sensations of the times,
or the strips of comic pictures we see every morning. Let me tell you
how it is done.
Most of the Canadian paper mills are located on rivers. The trees are
cut during the winter, and hauled on sledges over ice and snow to the
banks of the nearest stream. In the spring the logs float down with the
freshets, and the only transportation expense is the crews of men who
follow the “drive” and keep the mass of logs moving. Sometimes jams or
blocks occur that can be loosened only by dynamite. As the logs move
down stream the mills catch them with booms strung across the river.
Each mill picks out its own logs and releases the rest to continue
their journey.
Labour agents in Montreal, Quebec, and other cities are now recruiting
gangs of lumberjacks for this season’s operations. A single firm of
this city employs six thousand men and has two thousand at work in the
woods every winter. The lumberjacks live in camps, which each year are
pushed farther north as the forests diminish. The work is hard, but
the men are well fed and have no expenses, so that they can, if they
choose, come out of the woods in the spring with a good sum in cash.
At a mill, the logs are fed into the machinery by means of conveyors,
and they hardly stop moving until they come out as paper. The first
step is to cut them into two-foot lengths and strip off the bark. Then
they are ready for grinding. This is done in batteries of mills, each
containing a large grindstone making two hundred revolutions a minute.
Several of these two-foot lengths are put into a mill at a time, and
pressed against the grindstone in such a way that they are rapidly torn
into fine splinters. As the wood is ground up it falls into the water
in the lower part of the mill and flows off. I asked a workman to open
a mill I was watching to-day. As he did so I reached in and drew out a
handful of the dry pulp. It was hot, and I asked if hot water was used.
He replied that the water went into the mill almost ice cold, but that
the friction of grinding was so great that it soon boiled and steamed.
[Illustration: The increasing demands of our printing presses are
pushing Canada’s lumberjacks farther and farther into the forests to
cut the spruce logs with which the paper mills are fed.]
[Illustration: Some of the money voted the Toronto Harbour Commission
to prepare the port for the shipping of the future has been spent in
providing the people with a great beach playground at Sunnyside.]
[Illustration: Although Ontario leads all other provinces in its
industries, it is essentially an agricultural region, well adapted to
mixed farming. The farmers have many coöperative organizations that
also go in for politics.]
The wet pulp passes through various mixing and bleaching processes,
until it becomes a gray-white mush that looks like chewed paper. It is
then ready for the paper machines. It flows first on to a broad belt
of woven copper wire screening, many times finer than anything you
use in your windows. As it passes over this moving belt, some of the
water is sucked out, and a thin coating of pulp remains. This passes
on to a cloth belting that carries it over and under a series of huge
cylinders, heated by steam. These take out the rest of the water, and
the pulp has become a sheet of hot, moist paper. Shiny steel rollers
give the paper a smooth, dry finish. It is then wound on great
spindles, and made into the huge rolls that every one has seen unloaded
at newspaper offices.
In making paper, it is necessary to mix with the ground pulp a certain
proportion of sulphite pulp, made by a chemical instead of a grinding
process. For the sulphite the logs are cut into chips and put into
great vats, where they are steam cooked with sulphurous acid. The acid
disintegrates the wood, just as the stomach digests food, but it does
not destroy the fibre. The result is that sulphite pulp has a longer,
tougher fibre than the pulp obtained by grinding, and for this reason
it is mixed with the ground pulp to give the paper greater toughness
and strength.
Though it has not been very long since Canada discovered that her
pulpwood forests are worth more than her gold mines, she is far from
satisfied with the present situation. There is a growing movement in
favour of stopping the export of pulpwood to the United States and
insisting that it shall be manufactured into paper within the Dominion.
It is claimed that this will not only check depletion of the forests,
but will bring more paper mills to Canada. Those who support the plan
have calculated that Canada now gets ten dollars out of every cord of
pulpwood exported, half of which goes to the railroads. If all the wood
were milled before leaving the country, they say, Canada would get
five times as much, or fifty dollars instead of ten out of each cord.
The government has authority to enforce the prohibition demanded, but
the proposal meets with considerable opposition. The small farmers
especially say that they can now get better prices for the spruce cut
on their wood lots than if their market was confined to Canada only.
At the present time the total investment in Canadian paper and pulp
mills is about four hundred million dollars, and the wages and salaries
paid amount to over forty millions a year. To manufacture all the
pulpwood now cut every twelve months would require one hundred and
fifty million dollars additional capital, the erection of more than
thirty new mills with a capacity of one hundred tons a day each, and
eight thousand employees earning in excess of eleven million dollars a
year.
As a matter of fact, our own paper business has already moved to Canada
to a far greater extent than is commonly realized. Many of our largest
newspapers have not only their own mills in Canada, but they own also
the timber on thousands of square miles of forest lands. One estimate
says sixty per cent. of the timber resources of Canada are now owned or
controlled by Americans. The other day, while I was in Halifax, a group
of Americans bought the timber on a seven-thousand-acre tract in Nova
Scotia. There are many similar American holdings.
Canada’s water-power and her paper and pulp industry have been
developed together, and each is essential to the other. It takes
practically one hundred horse-power to produce a ton of paper a day,
and this means that the mills must locate near available water-power
or pay big bills for fuel. One of the water-power experts at Ottawa
tells me that on a recent date the paper and pulp mills were using more
than six hundred and thirty-seven thousand hydro-electric horse-power
every twenty-four hours, in contrast with only sixty-two thousand
horse-power in the form of steam. Some of the mills get their power for
only one tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour or one one-hundredth of what
residents of Washington, D. C, pay for their electric light.