National Forests in Michigan

THE DRAMA of the forests of Michigan has been written in several acts each with its colorful pageantry. The action has concerned the magnificent woodlands of the redman, the rapid depletion of those forests in the last century, and their slow but sure rebuilding in the present.

The elusive "northwest passage" to China, Indian furs and Indian souls, iron and land and copper brought the white men to Michigan. In 1621, only 1 year after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, young Etienne Brulé, protégé of Champlain, reached Lake Superior and was disappointed to find its waters fresh. Thirteen years later, Jean Nicolet, another protégé of the French governor of Canada, entered the unknown Lake Michigan through the Straits of Mackinac. Though he never found the longed-for route to the Orient, Nicolet did initiate the French fur trade with the Indians in this territory.

AU TRAIN FALLS ON THE HIAWATHA NATIONAL FOREST. F—243243

Heroic followers of Brulé and Nicolet were the Jesuit fathers Jogues and Raymbault, who preached to the Ojibwas in 1641 at Sault Ste. Marie, where the first permanent settlement in Michigan was made 27 years later by Marquette and Dablon.

Frenchmen all, explorers, trappers, and missionaries traced the rivers and lakes of this territory—Radisson and Groseillers, Marquette and Joliet, Hennepin and La Salle, but it was not to France that the rich prize of Michigan fell when the ambitions of two great empires clashed. By the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Michigan passed to English dominion. Twenty years later it was ceded to the United States by the treaty closing the War of the Revolution, but not until 1796 did the British garrison withdraw from Detroit.

The Northwest was growing, and in 1805 the Territory of Indiana was separated into the two Territories of Indiana and Michigan (the Lower Peninsula). In 1837 Michigan was admitted to the Union as a State and, in compensation for land lost to Ohio, received grudgingly the little known Upper Peninsula which was to prove one of the richest ore basins in the country.

White sails replaced the bark canoes on the Great Lakes and in turn gave way to steamboats; the war whoops of Chippewas, Ottawas, and Hurons faded to historical echoes; and in Michigan conquest of the Indian tribes was followed by a new struggle—conquest of great natural resources. None of these was more important than the forests, the pines in the north, and the hardwoods in the south.

IN THE BEGINNING NEARLY ALL MICHIGAN WAS CLOTHED WITH MAGNIFICENT FORESTS, OF WHICH THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL REMNANT. F—400764

The logging era is one of the most colorful periods in the history of the State. Magnificent stands of white and red pine fell before the hungry axes of the lumberjacks. The lumbering industry had exceptional advantages in Michigan because the timber was massed in vast stands, making large-scale operations possible, and was located mainly on sizable streams, down which the logs could be floated to mills. The first great surge in pine lumbering came with the exhaustion of eastern forests and the development of railroads. The growth of Chicago and the settlement of the Prairie States furnished a stimulus from the West. In 1890 pine lumbering reached its peak, when Michigan produced 4,245,717,000 feet of lumber and held undisputed first place in lumber production among all the States. Out of the lumber industry grew most of the Michigan cities above the latitude of the Saginaw Valley, the first great pine-lumbering center.

The white-pine forests of this country reached their greatest glory in the Lake States, and for 20 years preceding the turn of the century Chicago and the Middle West cried for the durable, light, and easily worked white pine of Michigan. Michigan woods echoed with the bite of axes and the swish of saws, interrupted by the cry of "Timberrrr ..." as the great trees creaked a little, listed, and crashed.

Lumberjacks moved 40 by 40 into the forest primeval of Michigan, and the banks of the Manistee, Au Sable, Muskegon, and Saginaw were stripped. Log upon log left the woods for the sawmills to be manufactured into lumber and shipped south. Long timbers were even floated in rafts to mills in New York, and it is said that half the houses in Buffalo were built from lumber cut in the vicinity of the present Huron National Forest. Finally there was "daylight in the swamps" on the Upper Peninsula and all over the once heavily wooded areas of the State. Even those who once believed there would always be an abundant supply of Michigan pines were disillusioned. And so the stage was set for another scene in the Michigan forest tableau wherein rebuilding of the resources is the dominant theme.