How America Cut 100,000 Old-Growth Trees

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[00:00:00]Between November 1,882 and April 1,883, a single logging operation in northern Wisconsin cut 100,000 white pine trees out of a 1 2 mile section of forest. Each tree averaged 200 years old. Some were 350.

[00:00:22]The total volume of timber felled in those five months was 75 million board feet, enough to build 5,000 American houses. The crew that did this work was 280 men. They worked outdoors in temperatures that often dropped to 30 below zero. They lived in four log bunk houses with no insulation, no plumbing, and a single cast iron stove per building. They were fed by two cooks who served three meals a day in a room where talking was forbidden. The man in charge was a foreman who kept his daily production logs in a leather-bound book.

[00:00:52]800 trees a day, 3,000 logs cut every week. A single team of men who did in 5 months, what would take a modern industrial logging operation, a full season with helicopters and chainsaws.

[00:01:05]This is how America cut 100,000 old growth trees in a single winter. And the company behind it was the largest lumber corporation on Earth. To understand why 280 men walked into that frozen forest in November of 1882, you have to understand what northern Wisconsin was sitting on. The white pine belt stretched from Maine through Michigan and into Wisconsin. But it was in the river valleys of northwest Wisconsin where the density reached its peak. The Chippoa River wershed, the Red Cedar, the Black River. These drainages held the tallest, straightest, most commercially valuable softwood timber on the North American continent. White pine was the perfect building material. It was light enough for two men to carry a plank, soft enough to cut cleanly with a handsaw, strong enough to frame a three-story building, and straight grained enough to resist splitting when you drove a nail through it. Every city west of the Appalachins wanted it.

[00:02:01]Chicago, which had burned to the ground in 1871 and was rebuilding itself board by board, consumed white pine lumber at a rate that staggered the imagination.

[00:02:11]Milwaukee Street, Louisie, Kansas City, Omaha, the entire Midwest was being hammered together out of Wisconsin white pine, and the companies that controlled those forests controlled the American housing market. The company that controlled the most forest of all was Nap Stout and Company, headquartered in Menimon, Wisconsin.

[00:02:32]Founded in 1846 when John Holly Knapp and William Wilson bought a small sawmill on the Red Cedar River, the firm grew steadily through the 1850s and 1860s. Henry Stout joined the partnership in 1853.

[00:02:47]Andrew Tainter came aboard later. By 1870, Napstout controlled the entire Red Cedar River Valley. And by 1878, when they officially incorporated, they employed over 2,000 workers across sawmills, logging camps, steamboat fleets, and retail lumber yards stretching from the Wisconsin headarters all the way down the Mississippi River to Street Lewis. Between 1,871 and 1,896, Napstout shipped an average of 85 million board feet of lumber per year down the Red Cedar, the Chipoa, and the Mississippi. That made them, by most accounts, the largest lumber company in the world. And their competition was not small. Frederick Weerhazer, who would go on to build the timber empire that still bears his name, was operating in the same region. Dozens of smaller outfits were racing to cut as much pine as they could before the supply ran out because everyone knew even then that the supply would run out. The only question was how fast. That question brings us back to the winter of 1,882.

[00:03:53]When a crew of 280 men walked into a 1 2 mile section of pine forest along the upper red cedar drainage, they were not going on an adventure. They were going to work. And the work they were about to do was organized with a precision that would rival any military operation. A logging camp of this size was not one crew. It was an army broken into specialized units, each with a specific function. And every man knew exactly what he was paid, what he was responsible for, and what would happen if he failed. At the top was the foreman. He ran the entire operation. He decided which sections to cut, in what order, and how many teams to deploy each day. He tracked production in his log book. He settled disputes. He managed supplies. A good foreman could make or break a season, and the companies knew it. His pay reflected that. A foreman in the 1880s typically earned $50 to $75 per month, sometimes more, plus room and board. That was serious money. A factory worker in Milwaukee at the same time was making $1.50 50 cents a day and paying for his own food. Below the foremen were the sawyers. These were the men who actually felled the trees, working in twoman teams with crosscut saws that were 5 to 7 ft long. A good pair of sawyers could drop 20 to 30 large pine trees in a single day, depending on diameter. They earned $30 to $40 per month plus board. They were skilled workers. They had to read the lean of a tree, judge the wind, cut the notch on the correct side, and saw through 3 to four feet of solid heartwood without binding the blade. One miscalculation, and the tree went the wrong direction, sometimes onto another worker, sometimes onto them. Then came the swampers.

[00:05:40]Swampers were the cleanup crew. They went in after the sawyers and cleared brush, trimmed limbs off the fallen trunks, and cut paths through the underbrush so the logs could be moved.

[00:05:50]It was brutal physical labor with no glamour and no recognition. Swampers were the lowest paid men in camp, earning $20 to $26 per month. Many of them were the youngest. Some were boys of 15 or 16, working their first winter in the woods. The teamsters handled the horses and oxen. Once a tree was felled and limbmed, the logs had to be dragged out of the cut to a central landing where they were stacked and measured.

[00:06:14]The teamsters hitched chains to logs and drove teams of horses down skid roads, which were narrow trails laid with cross logs and greased with water that froze into ice. A loaded logging sleigh could carry 10,000 to 15,000 board feet of timber, and a good teamster could make four or five round trips a day between the cut and the landing. Teamsters earned $30 to $45 per month, and they worked some of the longest hours in camp because the horses had to be fed, watered, curried, and stabled after the day's cutting was done. A teamster's day started before the Sawyers, and ended after theirs. The skid roads themselves were feats of engineering that deserve their own recognition. Weeks before the first tree was felled, a crew of roadbuilders went into the forest and cut narrow trails from the timber stands to the river landings. They laid cross logs every few feet along the path like railroad ties, creating a corduroy surface that the sleigh runners could slide across. Then every night during the cutting season, a man called the road I icer walked the entire length of each skid road with a water tank mounted on a sleigh, spraying the trail with water that froze overnight into a smooth sheet of ice. That ice was the secret to the whole operation. A team of horses that could drag 2,000 board feet of timber on bare ground could drag 15,000 board feet on an iced skid road. Without the ice, you could not move the volume.

[00:07:43]Without the volume, the operation did not pay. The road Ier worked alone in the dark after everyone else had gone to bed. He drove a horsedrawn tank sleigh along miles of trail in temperatures that would kill an exposed man in 2 hours. He was one of the least known workers in camp, and his job was one of the most critical. If the roads were not iced properly, the next day's production fell by half. The scaler stood at the landing. His job was to measure every log that arrived, record its length and diameter, and calculate the board feet it contained.

[00:08:18]Scaling was how the company tracked production. Every number that went into the foreman's log book passed through the scaler's hands first. A scaler earned $35 to $50 per month and had to be literate and good with figures, which many of the other men were not. The blacksmith kept the operation running.

[00:08:36]He sharpened saws, repaired sleigh runners, re-shot horses, forged new chain links, and fixed anything made of metal. A camp blacksmith worked in a low log building near the stable, and his forge burned from dawn until well after dark. He earned $40 to $60 per month, and a camp without a good blacksmith might as well not have saws. And then there were the cooks. In a camp of 280 men, the cooks were arguably the most important people in the entire operation. These men fed the crew three times a day, every day for 5 months straight. Breakfast at 4:00, 30 in the morning. Dinner at noon, often packed in tin pales and carried to the cut because there was no time to walk back to camp.

[00:09:18]Supper at 6:00, 0 in the evening after the men had walked back from the day's work. The food had to be hot, it had to be plentiful, and it had to be ready on time. A camp cook who fell behind schedule could slow down an entire operation. A cook who served bad food could cause a mutiny. The meals were enormous by any standard. Salt pork, beans, bread, potatoes, molasses, dried fruit, and if the cook was good, fresh beef or venison. Some accounts describe a single camp consuming 300 lb of flour per week, 200 lb of pork, and 50 lb of sugar. Coffee was brewed in 5gallon kettles. Pancakes were made on griddles the size of tabletops. The cook and his assistants worked from three 0 in the morning until 9 at night, 7 days a week.

[00:10:06]And a skilled cook could command $40 to $60 per month, the same as a blacksmith, because the companies knew that good food was the only thing standing between a productive crew and a disaster. There was one rule in the cook house that every man obeyed without exception. You did not talk during meals. You sat down.

[00:10:24]You ate. You asked for food to be passed if you needed it, and that was all. The cooks wanted the men through the line and back to work as quickly as possible.

[00:10:34]Every minute spent talking was a minute not spent eating, and every minute not spent eating was a minute the cooks lost for cleanup and the next meal's preparation. The silence in a camp dining hall of 280 men, all chewing, all reaching for bread, all drinking coffee, is something almost impossible to picture today. Now, let me tell you who these men were. The workforce in a Wisconsin pine camp of the 1880s was overwhelmingly immigrant. Scandinavians dominated. Norwegians, Swedes, Fins, and Danes made up the majority of the crews in the Chipoa and Red Cedar valleys.

[00:11:10]Many of them had arrived in America within the previous 5 years. They came from farming and fishing communities in Northern Europe, where the winters were familiar, where the cold was something they understood in their bones. They took logging work because it paid more than farm hand wages, because it provided room and board during the months when outdoor farm work was impossible, and because the lumber companies recruited them aggressively, sending agents to immigrant communities in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Chicago with promises of steady pay and three hot meals a day. Irish and German workers filled out the camps along with some French Canadians who had been working the northern timber since before Wisconsin was a state. A scattering of Native American men from the Monomony and Ojiway nations worked the camps as well, particularly as river drivers, where their knowledge of the waterways was unmatched. The foremen were often Norwegian or Yankee men from New England or New York who had learned the trade in the Maine and Michigan pineries before the frontier moved west. These men had no union. They had no contract beyond a handshake. If a man was injured and could not work, he was sent home with whatever wages he had earned to that point. There was no compensation for lost time, no pension, no disability payment. The company's obligation ended the moment a man could no longer swing an axe. Now, let me tell you what a day looked like. At 4 0 in the morning, the cookie, who was the cook's assistant, lit the fires in the bunk houses and the cookhouse. By 4:30, the triangle outside the cookhouse door was rung, and 280 men rolled out of their bunks. The bunk houses were log structures, roughly 30x 60 ft, with double-tiered wooden bunks lining both walls and a cast iron stove in the center. The men slept on straw ticks, which are mattresses stuffed with hay that went flat within a week and were rarely replaced during the season.

[00:13:03]The air inside was suffocating. Sweat soaked wool, wood smoke, tobacco, unwashed bodies, and the acrid smell of clothes drying on lines strung from the rafters. Lice were constant. Bed bugs were constant. The only relief came from boiling your clothes on Sunday, which was your one day off. And even that did not always work. By 5, the men were fed and walking to the cut. Some sections were a mile or more from camp. In December and January, you walked in total darkness. The temperature at 5 0 in the morning in northern Wisconsin in January was often 20 to 30° below zero Fahrenheit. Your boots froze stiff overnight. Your wool mittens crackled when you bent your fingers. The snot froze on your upper lip before you reached the treeine. And this was before you started swinging an axe or pulling a crosscut saw for 10 hours. The work itself was as physically punishing as any labor that has ever existed in America. A twoman crosscut saw weighs about 15 lb, and pulling it back and forth through 4 ft of solid white pine for 10 hours generates a level of fatigue that is almost impossible to describe. The sawers would notch the felling side of the tree with axes first, then begin the back cut with the cross cut. A large white pine, three to four feet in diameter, might take 20 to 40 minutes to bring down, depending on the wood and the conditions. When it went, it went fast. The crack was like a rifle shot. The ground shook, and every man within 200 f feet had to know which direction it was falling because a white pine coming down carried 10 to 20 tons of wood, and it did not stop for anyone.

[00:14:46]The moment a tree hit the ground, the swampers moved in. They chopped the limbs. They cleared the brush. And then the Sawyers, or sometimes a separate crew called buckers, cut the trunk into logs of specific lengths, usually 12 to 16 ft, which were the standard dimensions for river transport. Each log was measured by the scaler and marked with the company's brand, a stamp hammered into the end grain that identified who owned it. In a river system where a dozen companies might be floating logs at the same time, that brand was everything. It was how you got paid. 800 trees a day. That was the number this crew hit day after day from November through March. Think about that. 800 trees, each one 100 to 150 ft tall. Each one 200 years old, each one taking 20 to 40 minutes to fell. Across dozens of twoman teams working simultaneously in a forest so dense you could barely see 50 yards in front of you. The sound was unending. The crack of axes, the rhythmic rasp of crosscut saws, the explosion of a tree hitting frozen ground, horses snorting, chains clanking, men shouting warnings, and underneath all of it, the deep silence of snow absorbing everything, the quiet that settled between each fall, the few seconds when no one moved and no one spoke, and the only sound was the wind and the canopy of the trees that were still standing. 3,000 logs per week went to the landing. They were stacked in enormous piles, sometimes 20 ft high, on the banks of the nearest river or stream.

[00:16:21]They sat there frozen, waiting.

[00:16:24]Everything waited for the spring. When the men walked back to camp at dusk, the work was not over. Every teamster had to feed, water, and curry his horses before he could eat his own supper. The teamsters took enormous pride in their animals. They argued about whose team was strongest, told lies about how smart their horses were, and treated those animals with a care they rarely extended to themselves. A horse that went lame was a disaster. Horses were expensive, difficult to replace in the middle of a season, and essential to every log that moved from stump to landing. After supper, the men returned to the bunk house to sharpen saws, repair harnesses, men's socks, and mittens, and dry their clothes over the stove. The bunk house at night was a steam room. Wet wool hanging from every rafter, the stove glowing red. Men packed shouldertosh shoulder on their bunks. Those closest to the stove sweated. Those farthest from it froze. All night men got up to open the vents in the ceiling and other men got up to close them. Nobody slept well. Nobody complained. Lights were out by 9. At 4 0 in the morning, the cookie lit the fires again, and it started over. On Sundays, the men boiled their clothes in wooden tubs to kill the lice.

[00:17:41]They mended what needed mending. Some played cribage. Some played fiddle or harmonica, and the music that drifted out of those bunk houses was the music of the old country. Norwegian folk songs, Swedish hymns, Irish ballads brought across the Atlantic and carried into the Wisconsin woods by men who would never go home again. Saturday nights, if the men stayed in camp, there were poker games and sometimes dancing, with the men tying flower sack aprons around their waists to identify who was leading. But the winter held dangers that no amount of skill could eliminate.

[00:18:17]The most feared killer in the Wisconsin pine camps was the widowmaker. A widowmaker was a dead branch, sometimes an entire dead treetop lodged in the canopy above the cut. When a sawyer felled a live tree, the vibration could shake loose a widow maker 80 ft above his head. It came down without warning.

[00:18:35]No crack, no sound, just a 2000B section of dead wood dropping straight down through the branches onto the back of a man's skull. In the 1880s, there were no hard hats. There was no safety equipment of any kind. A man struck by a widowmaker was usually killed instantly.

[00:18:55]If he survived the impact, he lay in the snow while someone ran back to camp for help. And the nearest doctor was often 30 to 50 m away by horse. Kickback was the second killer. When a crosscut saw binds in a cut, the tension in the wood can release violently, snapping the saw blade backward or flipping the butt of the log upward. A log butt swinging up and striking a sawyer in the chest or face could kill a man outright or shatter his ribs, puncture his lungs, and leave him bleeding internally in a forest with no medical care. Crushed limbs were routine. Broken legs were routine. A man who could not walk was loaded onto a sleigh and hauled back to camp, where the cook set the bone if it was simple, and the man waited for someone to take him to town if it was not. Every large camp buried men during the season. Not many, perhaps three or four per winter in a camp of this size.

[00:19:49]The bodies were kept in an outuilding until the ground thawed enough to dig a grave, which was usually not until April or May. The foreman recorded the death in his log book. The man's personal effects were gathered. A letter was written to his family if he had one. And the next morning, the crew went back to work. There was no memorial. There was no ceremony. There was pine to cut. And the river would not wait. Speaking of the Foreman's log book, the daily entries from operations like this are some of the most remarkable documents in American labor history. They survive in archives across Wisconsin and Michigan.

[00:20:24]And when you read them, the scale of what these men accomplished becomes almost unbearable. A typical entry might read, "Tuesday, December 12, 31 below at dawn, 814 trees. Lost a horse on the south skid road. replaced runner on number three sleigh. Cook reports flower supply at 14 days. Need to send a man to Rice Lake for provisions.

[00:20:49]Another might say, "Friday, January 19, 26 below, 792 trees.

[00:20:57]Swamper Linquist broke his leg at the knee. Section 4. Sent to camp on a sleigh. Johnson and Halverson's team pulled 847 logs to the north landing.

[00:21:09]Road Icer reports ice holding well on all routes. That is all. No commentary, no emotion, just numbers and logistics.

[00:21:18]814 trees in a single day. Recorded with the same indifference as a broken sleigh runner. And the next day, another entry.

[00:21:27]And the next and the next. five months of entries, each one a record of labor that modern Americans can barely comprehend. The man who wrote those entries kept the entire operation in his head. He knew how many board feet each section of forest would yield because the timber cruisers had already walked it and estimated the volume before the crew arrived. He knew how many teams he needed on the skid roads and how many sawyers he could deploy before they got in each other's way. He knew exactly how much food was left in the cookhouse stores and how long it would last. He knew which horses were going lame and which sawers were slowing down. He was the executive, the logistics officer, the personnel manager and the field commander, all in one man. And he did it without a telephone, without electricity, and without any communication to the outside world except a man on horseback riding 40 miles to the nearest telegraph office.

[00:22:20]If you ever want to understand what American management looked like before the 20th century, read a foreman's log book from a Wisconsin pine camp. It will change the way you think about competence. By late March, the production numbers were staggering.

[00:22:34]100,000 trees felled. 75 million board feet of white pine cut, limmed, bucked, scaled, branded, and stacked at the landings. 12 square miles of forest reduced to stumps. The canopy that had shielded the forest floor for centuries was gone, and the sunlight now fell directly onto snow-covered ground, littered with brush piles, bark, broken branches, and the massive root systems of overturned stumps. But the timber was not delivered yet. It sat frozen on the river banks, and the most dangerous part of the entire operation was about to begin.

[00:23:11]In April, when the ice broke and the rivers began to rise with snow melt, the log drive started. Every log at every landing along the upper red cedar and its tributaries had to be rolled into the water and floated downstream to the mills at Menimon and beyond. The men who did this work were called river drivers, and they were considered the elite of the logging workforce. They earned $45 to $60 per month, the highest wages in camp, because the job required a combination of physical courage, agility, and judgment that few men possessed. A river driver worked on the water. He stood on floating logs with caulds, which are boots with short metal spikes driven through the soles. And he used a peeve, which is a 5-ft wooden pole with a steel spike and a hinged hook on the end to guide logs through rapids, around bends, and past obstacles. When logs piled up against a rock or a sandbar, which happened constantly, the drivers had to wade into the pile, hook individual logs, and pry them free while standing on a surface that was moving, rolling, and ready to crush them at any moment. The Chippoa and Red Cedar Rivers carried millions of board feet of timber every spring.

[00:24:27]Napstout operated a fleet of steamboats starting with the Anna Girden in 1869 and eventually growing to eight vessels to guide log rafts down the larger stretches of river toward the Mississippi. But in the upper tributaries, it was just men, water, and logs. The drivers lived in temporary camps along the river, moving downstream with the drive, sleeping in canvas shelters, eating meals cooked over open fires on the riverbank. A spring drive could last four to six weeks, and every day of it was spent on or near the water. The most dangerous moment came when logs piled against an obstruction.

[00:25:02]A tangle of logs wedged against a rock or a bridge, a abutment could grow into a mass of timber a 100 yards wide, with the full force of the river pushing against it. Someone had to go in and find the key log, the one log whose removal would release the entire pile.

[00:25:17]That man waited into a wall of grinding timber with nothing but a peeve and the knowledge that if he pulled the wrong log the whole pile could shift and close over him like a fist. Men died this way.

[00:25:29]Crushed between logs in water so cold that if you fell in your muscles locked within minutes. A man who fell in during the spring drive faced water temperatures near freezing. If the current pushed him under a pile of moving logs, he did not come back up.

[00:25:44]River drivers drowned every spring. It was the accepted cost of getting the timber to market. The logs floated south down the Red Cedar to the Chippoa, down the Chippoa to the Mississippi, and from there to sawmills and lumber yards at Deuke, at Reeds Landing, and all the way down to Street Lewis. Nap Stout had lumber yards spanning over 20 acres in Deuke by the 1880s. The pine that left the northern Wisconsin forests in the spring arrived as finished lumber in Missouri and Iowa by summer. And from there it went into houses, into barns, into churches, into railroad ties, into telegraph poles, into the physical infrastructure of a nation that was expanding westward faster than any civilization in human history. The 75 million board feet that came out of that 112 square mile cut in the winter of 1882 to 1883 was not an anomaly. It was the standard. Napstout averaged 85 million board feet per year across all their operations for 25 consecutive years. And they were just one company. Warehouser was operating in the same valleys. So were dozens of others. By 1890, the census counted more than 23,000 men working in Wisconsin's logging camps and another 32,000 at the sawmills. Every winter, those men occupied nearly 450 camps scattered across the northern tier of the state. Every spring, they drove their timber downstream to more than 1,000 mills. The result was the most productive, most efficient, and most total destruction of a forest ecosystem that the modern world had ever seen. To put the scale in perspective, the amount of pine harvested from the Black River Valley alone, just one of several major logging regions in the state, could have built a boardwalk 9 ft wide and 4 in thick around the entire circumference of the earth. That is not a metaphor. That is arithmetic. Logging and lumbering employed a quarter of all working Wisconsinites in the 1890s. It was not an industry. It was the industry. The state's economy, its railroad network, its towns, its tax base, everything was built on the backs of men pulling crosscut saws through white pine. In 1892, Wisconsin hit peak production.

[00:28:02]Over 4 billion board feet of white pine lumber in a single year. That is a number so large it becomes meaningless unless you anchor it in something physical. 40 billion board feet is enough lumber to build roughly 265,000 American houses in one year from one state. But the pine was finite. Everyone knew it. The timber cruisers could see it. The foremen could see it. The companies could see it. And rather than slow down, they accelerated. Between 1,883 and 1,900, Nap Stout sold off nearly 275,000 acres of cut over land and shifted their operations south to Arkansas and Missouri, where the forests were still intact. Other companies did the same.

[00:28:48]Frederick Warehouser moved his capital to the Pacific Northwest, where the Douglas fur forests seemed as inexhaustible as the Wisconsin pine once had. By 1900, the average diameter of white pine trees being harvested in Wisconsin had dropped to 5 in. 5 in.

[00:29:06]These were saplings. The giants, the 20350 year old trees that the two 80 man crew had cut in the winter of 1,882 were gone. All of them, not mostly gone, not nearly gone, gone. By 1920, white pine was effectively wiped out across the state. What was left behind was the cut over. millions of acres of stumps, slash piles, and exposed soil that could not support farming and could not regenerate forest without help. The lumber companies tried to sell the land to immigrant farmers, advertising rich soil beneath the stumps. It was a lie, or close to one. The soil was sandy and acidic, stripped of the organic layer that the old forest had spent centuries building. Families who bought cutover land in northern Wisconsin in the early 1900s faced some of the most difficult farming conditions in the United States.

[00:30:03]Many failed. The stumps alone were a nightmare. A single white pine stump 3 to 4 feet across with roots radiating 20 ft in every direction could take a man and a team of horses an entire day to remove. And there were hundreds of stumps per acre. Families spent years clearing land that once cleared produced mediocre crops on soil that was never meant to grow wheat or corn. Slash fires fed by the enormous piles of dried branches and bark left behind by the loggers swept through the cut over repeatedly destroying whatever regrowth had managed to start. The town of Peshiggo, Wisconsin had already shown what those fires could do. In 1871, the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, a firestorm driven by slash and drought killed an estimated 1,200 to 2,500 people in Pestigo and the surrounding area, making it the deadliest wildfire in American history.

[00:30:58]The cut over created the conditions for fires like that across the entire northern third of the state. If you subscribe to this channel, you already know that the stories we tell here are about the cost of progress. This one is no different. The original forests of Wisconsin covered approximately 30 million acres, about 86% of the state.

[00:31:17]By 1915, after six decades of industrial logging, only 380,000 acres of timberland remained. That is a drop from 86% to roughly 1%. In a single human lifetime, the most magnificent pine forest in the Great Lakes region was converted into lumber and shipped south to build a civilization. The men who did the converting were paid $26 to $60 per month depending on their role. Many of them were not paid in actual money. NAP, Stout, and other companies issued script, which was company printed currency redeemable only at the company store, specifically at their store in Prairie Farm, Wisconsin. The script came in denominations from five cents to $5, printed in blue ink on the face and reddish brown on the back. And it was marked due to the bearer on demand in merchandise or lumber at Prairie Farm only. If you wanted US dollars, you had to wait until the end of the season. If you wanted to buy supplies before then, you bought them from the company at the company's prices. Some men, new settlers who planned to homestead after the season, took their wages in lumber instead of cash, using the boards to build a house or a barn on the cut over land they hoped to farm. It was a closed system. You worked for the company. You lived in the company's buildings. You ate the company's food. You spent the company's money at the company's store.

[00:32:43]The profit from your labor flowed up river to Menimon and down river to street Louie. and what you kept was whatever was left. This was the deal.

[00:32:53]You worked six days a week. You slept in a liceinfested bunk house. You ate in silence. You swung an axe or pulled a saw for 10 hours a day in temperatures that could kill you. And at the end of 5 months, you walked out of the woods with between $100 and $250 in your pocket, assuming you were not one of the men who stayed behind in a shallow grave. Today, you can drive through northern Wisconsin on state highways lined with second growth aspen and birch. The white pine is coming back slowly, more than a century later, in scattered stands managed by the state forestry service.

[00:33:29]If you know where to look, you can still find the stumps of the old growth. They are enormous, 3 and 4t across, gray and weathered and slowly returning to the soil. Each one marks the spot where a 2000year-old tree stood before two men with a crosscut saw brought it down in 20 minutes. And if you look at any city block of houses built before 1,900 in Chicago, in Milwaukee, in Street Lewis, in any city across the Midwest, you are looking at the legacy of those men. The framing is white pine. The floorboards are white pine. The window casings, the door jambs, the stair treads, the attic rafters, all of it came from the forests of Wisconsin and Michigan, cut by men whose names are mostly lost. Hauled by horses that are long dead, floated down rivers that no longer carry timber. The 280 men who walked into that forest in November of 1882 did something that will never be done again. Not because we lack the technology. We have better saws, better trucks, better everything. But because the trees are gone, white pine of that size, that age, that density no longer exists in the lower 48 states. It was a one-time resource built by centuries of undisturbed growth, and it was liquidated in a single human generation. The Knap Stout Company sent out its last shipment of lumber on the 12th of August, 1901.

[00:34:57]By then, the forests that had made them the largest lumber company in the world were exhausted. The men who had cut those forests scattered. Some followed the timber west to Oregon and Washington. Some stayed in Wisconsin and tried to farm the cut over. Some went to work in the paper mills that replaced the sawmills as the forest shifted from old growth pine to second growth pulpwood. Henry Stout's son, James Huff Stout, took his inheritance from the lumber fortune and founded a university.

[00:35:25]It is now called the University of Wisconsin at Stout. And it stands in Menimon, the same town where the sawmills once ran day and night, where the Red Cedar River ran brown with bark and sawdust, where the sound of saws never stopped from April to November.

[00:35:39]The Foreman's log book sits in a Wisconsin archive. The leather is cracked. The pages are brittle. The handwriting is careful and clear. The handwriting of a man who understood that what he was recording mattered. 814 trees. Tuesday 31 below lost a horse. He did not write down the names of the men who died. That was not what the book was for. The book was for production. The book was for board feet. The book was for the company. The men are gone. Their names are gone. Their bunk houses rotted into the forest floor decades ago. But the houses they built are still standing. The cities they framed are still standing. The staircases their timber became are still being walked on by people who have never heard of the Red Cedar River. who have never seen a white pine stump, who have never held a crosscut saw. If you have watched this far, you are the kind of person who understands what this channel is about.

[00:36:32]Subscribe if you have not already. We tell the stories of the men who built this country with their hands, and we do not let those stories disappear. 100,000 trees, 280 men, 5 months, 30 below zero.

[00:36:46]That was the winter of 1,882.

[00:36:50]That was the price of American lumber and almost no one alive remembers it.