"An Inexhaustible Lumber Source"

We continue our journey through the human history of Algonquin, starting from where we left off here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-land-is-beautiful-but-also-savage.html

As early as the 1820's, the United States was starting to expand into the lands of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to seek out potential new timber areas to feed the growing appetite for wood.  By the 1860's, the need was accelerated by the Civil War, settlement on the treeless Great Plains and other prairie regions (that took off with the immigration surge of the 19th century), railroad construction, and the rise of the timber barons.  By the 1880's, these areas started getting clear cut to fuel both industry and construction demands in the growing cities of the Great Lakes and Mississippi and Ohio valleys.  The American conservation movement, which had been born of a desire to preserve bird populations, now started becoming concerned with the preservation of bird habitats; the eastern forests had already been decimated and were tokens of their former glory, and conservationists were afraid that the largely unspoiled western forests would be next.  They might well have been eradicated with efficiency had a new market not opened up with cheaper imports from Canada.

Though the threat of invasion by the United States in the 1860's concerned many Canadians (and was indeed the prime cause for Confederation in 1867), relations between the two sides had warmed considerably since the War of 1812.  Commerce between the nations kept increasing as the United States required more and more raw resources to feed its industrial and human needs, and Canadian timber interests were among the many commercial ventures that found business with the neighboring United States to be a bit more lucrative than with distant Britain.  At first, Canadian industry had little to offer the Americans that they were not producing manically themselves, but attention quickly turned to raw materials.

Well over half of Canada was covered in forest.  Much of her eastern boreal forests remained untouched, and the southern portions still contained towering virgin Red and Eastern White Pines.  Algonquin, a pristine wilderness less than 100 miles from major water and rail connections was full of these trees and open for business.

These were both taken in the last 2 years by, you guessed it, Bob and Diana McElroy.  They can be found on their picasa site here.  The top picture is along the Barron River, a tributary of the Petawawa River, while the second picture is from the Petawawa River as it exits Lake Travers.  These forests were among the first to be harvested in the 19th century timber rush, as they were easily accessible from the two major waterways.  They have made a lovely comeback, but are still just reflections of what they once were.

Timber barons such as J. R. Booth thus saw opportunity beyond the dreams of avarice.

Booth at a survey of his squared White Pine timber on his Canada Atlantic Railway.  Source: Library and Archives of Canada, C-046480.  

By the 1890's, Booth was the wealthiest and most influential lumber producer in the entire world, made so by harvesting the 150' + White Pines of Algonquin.  The problem was, he was not the only one harvesting every last inch of what remained of wilderness in northern Ontario and eastern Quebec.  By the time Algonquin had made him a very wealthy man, little was left of her virgin forests, and in the early 1890's, Canadian conservationists started looking at their own country as turning into the same sort of environmental war-zone that the United States had become.  In only a few dozen years Algonquin, the principal battleground of the war to save the wilderness of Canada, had been transformed from an earthly paradise that survived thousands of years of human contact into a stubby forest of eroding mountains.

Fortunately, there were men, including Booth himself, who saw what was being done to Algonquin.  Booth was not your typical tycoon; even as late as his forties he worked alongside his men felling trees and lived in the backwoods camp conditions with them.  Even as he was bringing down the giants and transforming the landscape, he was surrounded by it, and like so many others before him, changed by Algonquin.  When the call came to do something about what was happening to her forests and lands, he joined others in trying to save them.  Come by tomorrow to see this unfold.