Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West

Liquidating the Pines

Liquidating the Pines W hile the young Forest Service was trying to introduce scientific forestry and transform riotous old growth into a regulated crop, the timber industry was going through its own turmoil. Ultimately, the dreams of the Forest Service depended on markets for timber; they could hardly liquidate old growth if nobody wanted to buy it. Before we can understand the logging that went on in the Blues under the new Forest Service, we need to consider the position of the timber industry. During the years that the government was trying to gain control of the forests, federal inspectors such as H. D. Langille had accused the timber industry of savaging the western forests in its greed for ever-larger profits. But from the perspective of lumber companies, they were barely breaking even. Between 1890 and 1910, the industry had loaded itself with a fiftyyear supply of raw material, much of it on borrowed money. Weyerhaeuser's purchases of timberlands from the Northern Pacific Railroad increased the prices lumbermen had to pay for both land and standing timber, but overproduction drove down the price of manufactured lumber. The industry could not afford to harvest and sell the timber because of low sales receipts; nor could they afford to hold onto the uncut trees since they had to pay taxes and interest on their investments. In 1906 timber taxes rose, largely because northwesterners were angry about the perceived profits of timber speculators. Many people wanted to force immediate harvests rather than institute scientific forestry, because they felt that by holding onto growing trees instead of cutting them, timber speculators were forcing up prices. As taxes on standing timber increased , the industry was forced to cut more heavily to make the same profits, which in turn drove lumber prices even lower.! 157 158 LIQUIDATING THE PINES At this point, government foresters-eastern elites trained in eastern forestry schools-told lumbermen that they ought to institute scientific forestry and forgo some of their short-term profits for the good of the nation. Lumbermen thought this was absurd. An industry spokesman said in 1905 that "forestry advocates were of two classes, either sentimenalists or technicists; the latter being trained in the forest methods of the old European countries where conditions were entirely different from those that obtained in the United States. [They] proposed the impossible." 2 Gifford Pinchot was impatient with this characterization, and he set out to prove to the industry that good forestry could make a profit. Pinchot's three principles of forestry were clearly economic rather than ecological : "First. The forest is treated as.a working capital whose purpose is to produce successive crops. Second. With that purpose in view, a working plan is prepared and followed in harvesting the forest crops. Third. The work in the woods is carried on in such a way as to leave the standing trees and the young growth as nearly unharmed by the lumbering as possible.II 3 When the Forest Service gained control over the reserves in 1905, it was in an odd position. Pinchot and fellow forest conservationists had based their calls for reserves on the threat of imminent depletion by the industry. But now that the Forest Service had control of the reserves, it wanted to show that scientific forestry was profitable. That meant increasing sales to the big out-of-state lumber companies they had demonized several years earlier. The lumber companies, however, refused to cooperate, at least until the First World War. From 1905 to 1916, the Forest Service's emphasis on redesigning the forest had little effect on timber sales. As Henry Graves, second Chief of the Forest Service, noted in his annual reports, sales were slow for two reasons: the inaccessibility of National Forest timber, and the fact that timber from private holdings had glutted the market.4 Graves neglected to mention a third problem, one he might have been able to alleviate if he had not been so stubborn: the Forest Service valued its timber too highly, setting stumpage prices so high that few lumber companies were willing to invest in the timber.5 Nobody wanted government timber, and even if someone had, it was too inaccessible to reach cheaply. As R. M. Evans glumly noted in 1912, "Owing to the inac- LIQUIDATING THE PINES 159 cessibility of the Government timber and to the large amount of privately owned timber surrounding it, there...