In the early years of settlement, farmers grew a variety of crops, including wheat, corn, oats, rye, and barley. Increasingly, however, farmers became more specialized, as commercial agriculture, aided by improved railroad transportation, proceeded apace. Much of the grain ended up in the Northeast, where, by the 1840s, population growth had outstripped the local farm economy’s ability to provide. In effect, the West’s surplus of soil wealth underwrote industrial development further east.
The railroads not only delivered the products of the rich soils of the prairie into the bellies of easterners. They also changed the meaning of the crops themselves. With water-borne transportation, farmers put their grain into sacks so they could be easily loaded into the irregularly shaped holds of steamboats. The advent of the railroads and steam-powered grain elevators (first developed in 1842) spurred farmers to eliminate the sack altogether. Now grain would move like a stream of water, making its journey to market with the aid of a mechanical device that loaded all the wheat from a particular area into one large grain car. Sacks had preserved the identity of each load of grain. With the new technology, however, grain from different farms was mixed together and sorted by grade. The Chicago Board of Trade (established in 1848) divided wheat into three categories—spring, white winter, and red winter—applying quality standards to each type. Wheat was turned into an abstract commodity, with ownership over the grain diverging from the physical product itself. By the 1860s, a futures market in grain had even emerged in Chicago. Traders could still buy and sell grain in the city as they had long done. But it was now possible to enter into a contract to purchase or sell grain at a particular price. What was being marketed here was not the physical grain itself so much as an abstraction, the right to trade something that may not have even been grown as yet.7
The grid helped draw the land into the world of exchange. Then the railroads and the advent of grain-grading systems turned the products of the soil itself into something that could be packaged and sold. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of commodities in nineteenth-century America. They played a key part in mediating the relationship between people and the natural world.
THE BUSINESS OF TREES
Although the farmers who settled the prairie found a surplus of soil wealth, there was one natural resource missing from the landscape, and it was a critical one: wood. Wood played a role in nineteenth-century America akin to that of plastic and steel in our own time. Just about everything that was built, from homes to roads and bridges, involved wood. Its greatest use was in homes for heat. But it also served as fuel for powering railroads and steamboats and to make charcoal for the iron industry. In 1839, Americans consumed some 1.6 billion board feet of lumber. Thirty years later that figure had risen steeply to 12.8 billion board feet. After 1860, much of that wood came not from New England and New York but from the vast forest reserves of the Great Lakes states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Yet another major reallocation of the nation’s natural resources was under way.8
The explosive growth in the population of the central United States, almost a fivefold increase between 1850 and 1890, spawned much of the demand for wood. As one early observer put it, the Illinois prairie, “which strikes the eye so delightfully, and where millions of acres invite the plough, wants timber for building, fencing, and fuel.” Urban and industrial change in the Northeast also brought about an equally significant demand for wood. New York City alone, which rose to become what one British newspaper called “the London of the New World” after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, required huge amounts of lumber. At first the city drew on the Adirondack Mountains to supply its building and energy needs. But rapid economic growth stimulated the need for more distant sources. Canals such as the Erie and others that linked eastern rivers with the Great Lakes opened up the pine forests of the central states to consumers in New York City.9
Pine is a durable and strong wood that is soft enough to be easily worked with even the simplest of hand tools, making it especially attractive for building purposes. It also floats nicely on water, which allowed it to be transported to distant markets across the nation. The central and northern reaches of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all contained extensive pine forests as well as many large rivers for floating logs into the Great Lakes. What the Erie Canal did for opening the pine forests to markets in the East, the Illinois-Michigan Canal (opened in 1847, connecting the Chicago and Illinois rivers) did for markets in the West. The canal put an end to the log cabins that dotted the plains. Balloon-frame houses replaced them, structures whose lightweight, milled lumber drew down the forest reserves of the Great Lakes states.10
The Illinois-Michigan Canal further solidified Chicago’s position as the dominant wholesale lumber center in the country. In 1847, some 32 million board feet of lumber passed through the city; in 1851, after the opening of the canal, the figure rose to 125 million, reaching more than one billion in 1869. Chicago was well positioned to mediate exchange between the forested regions north of the city and the largely treeless prairie to the south and west. The city acted like a huge magnet for timber originating along rivers such as the Peshtigo and Menominee in eastern Wisconsin and the Muskegon, Grand, and Manistee in western Michigan. These rivers carried lumber directly into Lake Michigan. From there the wood made its way to Chicago, where wholesalers sorted it and sent it west as far as Colorado and south as far as Texas.11
By 1860, the settlement of the West along with timber shortages in the East converged with ever widening impact on the pine forests of the Great Lakes states. Over the next 30 years, lumbering became a full-fledged industrial enterprise in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Instead of simply cutting down individual trees and sending them to market, something the colonists had done as far back as the seventeenth century, newly formed lumbering corporations bought up huge tracts of pineland and set about systematically cutting the trees. Both the colonists and the later industrialists saw timber as a commodity, but the latter group adopted a far more thorough and calculating approach to removing trees. In this sense, what happened between 1860 and 1890 represented a significant break with the past. No longer were farmers in search of extra income the main source for shingles, firewood, and other wood products. By the 1870s, farmers and city dwellers alike purchased forest products from large manufacturing concerns located in the Great Lakes states rather than chopping wood themselves or buying it locally.12
The commercialization of lumbering was in part the product of technological change. The early, thick saw blades tended to waste a large quantity of wood, with perhaps as much as a third of the log left behind on the floor as sawdust or scrap. In the 1870s, however, the British-invented band saw, with its thinner blade, became standard issue in the Great Lakes states’ lumber factories. Meanwhile, the rise of steam-powered mills streamlined production by allowing for the more efficient, centralized, and continuous cutting of lumber. Steam helped to automate a variety of tasks, from cutting to the carrying away of waste. Friction feeds, for instance, automatically sent the logs directly past the saws. Mills also employed steam to heat log ponds, preventing them from freezing and making possible year-round lumber production.13
For industrial lumbering to succeed, a way had to be found to neutralize the effects of the seasons on production. Traditionally, cutting took place in the winter, when snow and ice made it easier to drag logs to the banks of streams. Once the streams and lakes thawed, workers rafted the logs to mills, where they were cut into lumber in the summer. If nature did not cooperate—if the winter proved dry and warm, if the spring thaw was delayed—production would suffer. To counter the effects of climate on lumber production, loggers experimented with a variety of techniques for transporting trees out of the woods. In the 1870s, loggers in the Great Lakes states began sprinkling water on sleigh roads, giving them an artificial ice coating to facilitate travel. The ice reduced the friction and allowed workers to move larger and heavier loads, with some sleighs capable of carryi
ng over 100 tons worth of timber.14
But all the sprinkling in the world would not save a logger from the threat of a warm winter. Without snow the sleigh roads turned to mud. In the 1870s, a set of snowless winters left lumber companies to ponder ways of liberating themselves from the seasons. Railroads were one possibility. At first, the remoteness of the pine forests discouraged common carriers from laying track. But increasing lumber prices in the late 1870s combined with periodic warm, dry winters compelled loggers to turn to iron rails. By 1887, 89 logging railroads crisscrossed Michigan, transforming logging from a winter activity into a year-round one.15
Once the logs arrived at a river, the trip downstream to a mill could be a long and tortuous one. Logjams were common—at times stretching for 10 miles—and became even more frequent as pressure on the northern Midwest pinelands increased in the 1860s. To help keep the logs moving efficiently, barriers called booms (essentially a chain of floating logs) were constructed to control the direction of the timber. By the 1870s, booming companies existed in all the major logging areas of the northern Midwest.
LOGJAM
Logjams often developed in the spring as workers floated logs downstream to mills. Men risked their lives trying to dislodge what sometimes amounted to tens of thousands of logs stacked as much as 10 feet high. The jam pictured here occurred on Wisconsin’s Chippewa River in 1869. (Library of Congress)
Frederick Weyerhaeuser of Rock Island, Illinois, epitomized the new industrial approach to lumber. Weyerhaeuser had a stake in some 18 lumber manufacturers and oversaw the cutting of timber throughout a large part of the Chippewa, St. Croix, and Upper Mississippi watersheds. By buying up other milling companies and controlling all the processes of production from the felling of the tree to the making of mass-produced lumber, Weyerhaeuser and his associates achieved a large degree of both horizontal and vertical economic integration. “In his way,” writes geographer Michael Williams, “Weyerhaeuser was the counterpart of Rockefeller in oil or Carnegie in steel.”16
Lumber barons like Weyerhaeuser could not have succeeded to the degree that they did were it not for the help of the federal government. The government subsidized large-scale lumber production mainly through the sale, at bargain prices, of federal timberland. By allowing lumber companies to amass huge quantities of inexpensive land, it underwrote the industry’s growth. Even land granted to railroad and canal companies eventually came under the control of large lumber interests. Perhaps most surprising of all, this enormous giveaway of what one commissioner of the General Land Office in 1876 called our “national heritage” took place without any deliberate decision on the part of Congress.17
Of course the lumber companies really had no interest in the land per se. What they wanted was the right to cut the timber. Once the trees were gone, the companies were quite willing to relinquish their land claim, often defaulting on their taxes or selling it cheaply to anyone wishing to farm it. What the lumber barons sought was simply the ability to cut wood. They received, in effect, unconditional licenses to fell timber.18 The forest and the soil parted ways, as the objectification of trees brought them even more squarely into line with the abstract world of prices and markets.
This calculating and systematic approach to the removal of trees went on with little if any regard for future yields. The end result was predictable: the eventual destruction of the forest. By 1900, the pinelands of the northern Midwest had been logged out. With the consuming public more reliant on pine than ever before, it would not be long before the timber capitalists of the Great Lakes states set off in search of new woods to cut. By the 1890s, they fixed their eyes on the American South, and a decade later the far West, where the name Weyerhaeuser would soon become synonymous with timber.
As the lumber barons headed south, they gave over their abandoned stumplands to settlement companies, which tried to entice immigrants into farming the cutover land. But the land, so full of stones and stumps, proved difficult if not impossible to plow. And in any case, the climate was too cold for agriculture to be successful. But none of this gave speculators such as the infamous James Leslie “Stump Land” Gates reason for pause as they misled prospective settlers into thinking that financial success lay just around the corner.19
The wholesale logging of the northern woods created the perfect setting for fires. The loggers, in their haste to remove those trees with commercial value, produced an incredible amount of slash, the branches and other debris left behind in the cutting. In 1871, a Port Huron, Michigan, man reportedly walked for an entire mile stepping from one branch to the next without ever setting foot on the ground. When the farmers moved into the region they set fire to the slash to remove it. Only the fires burned out of control. In the 50 years after 1870, massive conflagrations swept across the landscape. In 1871, referred to as the Black Year, fires scorched Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. Indeed the word “firestorm” was actually coined in response to these disasters, only to be rediscovered during World War II. Fifteen hundred people may have died in a fire around Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Many were asphyxiated in their cellars, where they fled to escape the smoke and heat. Other major fires singed Michigan in 1881 and Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan in 1894.20
PESHTIGO FIRE, 1871
The late nineteenth century witnessed some of the worst wildland fires in American history, as steam locomotives, throwing sparks, wound through logged-out landscapes littered with downed branches. (Harper’s Weekly, December 2, 1871; Western Reserve Historical Society)
One survivor of the 1871 Peshtigo fire recalled that many people saw the event as proof that judgment day had come, falling to the ground and prostrating themselves before God. “Indeed this apprehension, that the last day was at hand, pervaded even the strongest and most mature minds.”21 But far from being acts of God, the fires were, in fact, a testament to the unintended ecological consequences that derived from the systematic attempt by timber capitalists to bring the natural wealth of the northern forests into the economic mainstream.
PIGEON FEVER
The transformation of the northern woods into stumpland was rivaled by another equally impressive vanishing act: the sudden extermination of the most prolific bird on the face of the earth. In early America, flocks of passenger pigeons—a 16-inch-long, slate-colored bird with violet, gold, and green about the neck and a wedged-shaped tail—literally darkened the sky. “It extended from mountain to mountain in one solid blue mass,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in his 1823 novel The Pioneers about a swarm of pigeons passing near Cooperstown, New York, “and the eye looked in vain over the southern hills to find its termination.” A decade later, ornithologist Alexander Wilson from a site near the Ohio River wrote of being “suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness.” He likened the pigeons passing overhead to a tornado and calculated the entire flock to be about two billion birds.22
Periodically, the birds made a nuisance of themselves, feasting on the colonists’ grain fields. But sometimes the pigeons arrived during a period of scarcity and the colonists managed to kill enough of them to stave off famine, as happened in 1769 during a Vermont crop failure. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the birds were being pushed to extinction. A number of factors contributed to their decline. The growth of cities played a role. Farmers, who had long been in the habit of killing the birds for food, took to packing them up in barrels and shipping them off to urban areas. Meanwhile, deforestation destroyed habitat and nesting areas. Even the pigeons themselves played a part in their own demise. The birds produced only one egg, limiting their reproductive potential. They also tended to roost in such great numbers that they caused tree branches to snap off, killing their young. The last significant nesting in New England happened in 1851, near the town of Lunenburg, Massachusetts. The following year, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Saw pigeons in the woods, with their inquisitive necks and long tails, but few representatives of the great flocks that once broke down our fo
rests.”23
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the northern Midwest had become the pigeon’s last refuge. In 1871, south central Wisconsin witnessed an immense nesting; perhaps as many as 136 million pigeons fanned out over a 750-square-mile area. Seven years later, another huge nesting took place, this time near Petoskey, Michigan. Then, quite suddenly, over the course of just a single generation, the great flocks disappeared completely. In 1890, one observer wrote: “I have often stood in the farm-yard, gazing in rapt admiration, as the setting sun was darkened by the traveling flocks. We miss them more than any other birds.”24
HUNTING PARTY
Sportsmen took special trains, like the one pictured here in Minnesota in 1880, to wetlands and other environments, where they hunted various kinds of birds. (Minnesota Historical Society)
Why the end came so rapidly remains something of a puzzle. Certainly the rise of market hunting aided by the spread of the railroad and the telegraph played an important part. Where colonial farmers had relied on the pigeon to supplement their own diets, shipping the occasional barrel to the city, the market hunters reduced the pigeons to a pure commodity, with little meaning beyond the price it would bring. Alerted by the telegraph to the start of a major passenger pigeon nesting, market hunters piled into railroads, which by the 1850s expanded throughout the northern Midwest. The trains also allowed the hunters to ship the pigeons back to consumers in various cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.25
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