Forest for the Trees

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

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Contents

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pp. ix-

Preface and Acknowledgments

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pp. xi-xiii

In September 1991 I began the research for an ecological history of northern Minnesota, but my association with the region began at birth. My great-grandfather was one of the first emigrants to northern Minnesota, a Cornish mining engineer who hiked over the Vermilion Trail to begin the digs at Tower. I remember going for long walks with ...

Introduction

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pp. 3-9

Colonial Americans stood on the eastern rim of a remarkable platter, a cornucopia heaped with riches: minerals ranging from gold to the world’s most valuable iron, wild game for both food and fur, the astounding Atlantic and Great Lakes fisheries, plains with rich topsoil three feet deep, waterways for shipping and power, coal and oil for fuel, ...

1 Rock,Water, Tree

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pp. 11-23

This is the story of the changing of a landscape, the Arrowhead of Minnesota, and how that landscape changed us. It is difficult to study the ecological history of the BWCAW without looking at the human history there, for the two are symbiotic. Karl Marx recognized this in Grundrisse, writing, “As societies try to remake nature, they remake ...

2 Pioneer Lumbering

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pp. 25-39

The summer of 1846 was the second warmest of the nineteenth century. July, August, and September had more than sixty-four days of rain. The Irish sky imposed upon the earth, leaden gray and low hung, the air moist and warm and heavy and diseased. These combined conditions created the perfect habitat for a newly arrived Peruvian potato ...

3 The Cut Increases

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pp. 41-66

Louis Hopkins was a regular at Duluth Land Office auctions, a familiar face at the registrar’s, an astute, affable, and aggressive collector of pine tracts north of Ely, as far west as Lake Vermilion and east almost to Knife Lake. Financier George Swallow was from Wilmette, Illinois, an affluent suburb north of Chicago. These two men would be responsible ...

4 Lumberjack Life

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pp. 67-85

A product of the American frontier, boomtowns rose with the raucous, rowdy, and lawless splendor of new settlements beyond the ken of civilization. Blooming suddenly and with great flourish, they disappeared just as quickly, collapsing beneath the weighty veneer of civilization as the frontier became settled. Winton was one of the last ...

5 Labor in the Northland

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pp. 87-100

American ideals underwent a profound metamorphosis and reorganization as the twentieth century approached. Laissez faire fell from favor. In addition to revised policies regarding disposal of the public domain, lumbermen on the Winton watershed had to contend with a changing labor situation. Despite the largest social aid program ...

6 Conservation Gains Traction

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pp. 101-122

The industrial phase of land use drew to a close as the large timber companies pulled out of the northland, leaving in their wake collapsed tax rolls, shuttered mills, widespread unemployment, and ravaging wildfire. The next phase, conservation, was an attempt to mitigate ...

7 Foresters Under Fire

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pp. 123-140

Midway through Winton’s peak year of production in the border lakes, on February 13, 1909, President Roosevelt established Superior National Forest, almost a million acres of rock, water, and tree scattered along the U.S.–Canada border, from Lake Superior in the east to Rainy Lake in the west. In contrast to the president’s far-sighted gesture, public opinion ...

8 Defining a Wilderness

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pp. 141-154

After the lumber companies abandoned the border lakes in the 1920s, tax rolls collapsed. Denied the revenue and jobs logging had brought, Winton felt the pain of recession years before Black Monday spelled out the impending bust to the rest of the nation. Despite a nearly 1,209 percent increase in the pulp and ...

9 The Big Blow Down

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pp. 155-172

In the end, the greatest ecological damage to the BWCAW came not from the lumberjack but from the well-intentioned fledgling foresters trying to reestablish a timber industry, from their ambitious tree-planting campaign and their remarkably effective fire-suppression programs. ...

Epilogue

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pp. 173-191

September 16, 2002, was a perfect autumn day in the Boundary Waters: the sky clear, relative humidity about 50 percent, winds light at less than ten miles per hour. Quicksilver dewdrops clung to amber leaves and drying grass. Nearly all of the cabin folk had closed up and gone home; the resorts were mostly ...

Notes

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pp. 193-199

Bibliography

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pp. 201-205

Index

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pp. 207-214

CREDITS

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pp. 215-216