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331 chapter thirteen The Final Frontier Since colonial times American lumbermen had moved across the continent, opening one forested area after another to exploitation. Their activity had been marked by an abundance of individual initiative and a minimum of regulation from authorities. Success required finding promising stands, establishingeffectivecontrol,andloggingthemquicklyandefficientlybefore control could pass to others. The others, of course, included government officials, who strove with limited success to restrain illegal cutting. All this resulted in a transitory industry that repeatedly entered new areas, cut out the timber, and then moved on to other forests to repeat the process. By the early twentieth century, circumstances were ripe for change. Vast untapped stands remained in the mountain fastnesses and interior pine country of the Far West—on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, and in the Sierra Nevada, and on ranges east from there through the Rockies—but those, it was clear, would be the last lumberman’s frontier. Alaska, distant and frigid, did not offer the opportunities to which the industry had so long been accustomed. Lumbermen looked to a future lacking in new frontiers to conquer. Much of the forestland in this region was incorporated into the new regime of forest reserves, which in time led to programs of active management. Vast stands had been available for inclusion, for this was a late‑settled, little‑developed area. Moreover, it was remote from major domestic and maritime markets and, until well into the twentieth century, poorly served by transportation facilities. Rivers were few and generally undrivable; railroads, other than through routes, were late in coming. The potential of this vast domain was immense. Included in its reserves were some of the finest stands in North America—sugar, western white, and, above all, Ponderosa pine—interspersed here and there with Douglas fir, western larch, and other less‑valuable species. Extensive tracts of fine timber also lay outside the reserves. Much of the terrain was gentle, the stands open and, once reached, easy to tap—especially after truck logging became practical in the 1920s.1 Here and there echoes of old battles were heard. In Colorado, settlers pushing into farming and grazing lands on the periphery and occasionally even in the midst of forests often refused to report illegal logging, for 332 The Lumberman’s Frontier they sympathized with the activity. Settlers apparently did a good bit of cutting and selling themselves. In 1897 an investigator for the United States Geological Survey was told: “This timber belongs to us settlers and we’re going to get it! The government officials can’t prevent us either, with an army. If they attempt to stop us we’ll burn the whole region up!” Residents there and elsewhere in the Rockies regularly subverted the Free Timber Act (also known as the Timber Cutting Act), passed in 1878 to help settlers meet their domestic needs, to get control of valuable stands they then transferred to lumbermen.2 Farther west, many used the Timber and Stone Act—also passed in 1878 and for similar purposes—to gain control of timberland for commercial operations. In portions of the Blue Mountains and around Bend and Klamath Falls, Oregon, such activities reached a crescendo in the first years of the twentieth century as droves of opportunists arrived to establish claims before forest reserves could be established.3 Some lands near Bend were to be irrigated by well‑publicized projects, but the nearby forestland was ill suited for agriculture;4 with some twenty‑five billion board feet of timber, these lands were especially attractive to those with non‑agrarian interests. When Stephen Puter arranged to take one hundred and eight dummy entrymen to land he had selected, “the concourse of vehicles resembled a Sunday turnout in Golden Gate Park.” Nor was Puter alone; as he later recalled, so many people were preparing to file claims that every “vehicle or animal available was . . . pressed into service. . . . All summer long the dusty roads between [the railhead at] Shaniko and Bend were lined with travelers, and it was soon evident a large portion were under contract to convey the rights they acquired to syndicates of Eastern lumbermen.” Many of the throng were school teachers dispatched by train from Minnesota by Shevlin‑Hixon during the summers to establish claims to be transferred to the company, which planned a large sawmill in Bend when rail connections made it feasible. Like its parent firm, Shevlin‑Hixon skated the thin edge of the law, although it did not wind up...

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