The Inexhaustible Forests Are Running Out
A look at the rapid expansion of logging in the Puget Sound region, where the arrival of railroads and new machinery is accelerating the harvest of timber once thought to be endless.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The area of timbered land embraced in that section of Washington territory known as the Puget Sound country is about 21,000,000 acres. This timbered land will average 20,000 feet of good saw timber to the acre, thus making some 80,000,000,000 feet, which amount is considered by some as a quantity inexhaustible. But if such a person were to be living 50 years hence, he would see our great forests had so fast disappeared as to cause lumber to be very high and the supply very much limited. Mill men who came here 20 years ago, when loggers cut their timber on the banks of the Sound and rafted it by hand, little thought at this early day there would be railroads built for logging purposes thirty miles inland. While there is considerable timber close to the waters of the Sound, 10 years hence, at the present rate at which it is being cut, manufactured, burnt and cleared off by the settlers, most of it will be consumed and gone.
“This amount is considered by some as a quantity inexhaustible. But if such a person were to be living 50 years hence, he would see our great forests had so fast disappeared.”
Henry Bucey’s 1889 assessment of Washington’s 'inexhaustible' timber supply proved remarkably prophetic. Today, the tension between industrial extraction and long-term ecological sustainability remains a primary driver of land-use debates in Mason County.
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