Wherever possible, the lumberman makes use of kinds of transporta tion where he has no expense for power. A vast amount of lumber is floated down the rivers, especially in snowy and glaciated regions. The snow helps by creating spring floods which make many small streams temporarily large enough to float logs. Glaciation has helped by making the topography irregular and thereby increasing the num ber of streams and also lakes. The lakes of glaciated regions like Sweden, New England, and Minnesota, likewise assist in lumbering, for they form collecting basins in which the trees from the surrounding areas can be gathered either for a saw mill, or preparatory to being floated farther toward the sea. In a rugged region the logs are slid down over the snowy hillsides, or else chutes are used. These are merely steep troughs down which the logs slide to the foot of the slope. Flumes are also common and are much better than chutes. These are troughs into which a mountain stream is turned so that the logs float down to a lake, river, or mill.
In the South and West where there is little snow and where the trees are often of great size, transportation is more expensive than in New England and Minnesota. Huge pairs of wheels are used and the logs are fastened beneath the axle. Sometimes only one pair of wheels is employed and one end of the log is allowed to drag behind, but often the log is suspended from two pairs of wheels. In the bigger camps these methods of hauling by means of animals have almost wholly given way to steam power or tractors. Donkey engines, for example, snake the logs through the forest as already described, and then by means of a skidder, which is something like an electric crane, dump them onto flat cars or into chutes or flumes.
In places where rivers are not available, it is necessary to construct logging railroads. These are generally of flimsy construction, for the owners do not expect to use them long. As forest conservation becomes more general the roads and railways in the forested areas improve. In fact the greatest hope of making lumbering a permanent and hence a wholly valuable occupation, seems to lie in having such transportation facilities that the logs from any part of a forest can easily be trans ported to market, while the lumbermen can get to any desired region so quickly that they can live at:home and carry on farming much of the time. The old-time isolated lumber camp, with its abuses, is dis
appearing. Its place is taken by a much more permanent and useful type of community.
Effect of Transportation on Ownership of Lumber Industry.— Transportation is in many respects the key to the lumber industry. For instance, the lumberman who wants to use a river must not oply own the rugged region where his trees grow, but must own or rent an area beside the river as far down as possible in order to set up his saw mill. This gives the big company with much capital a great advantage over the small one. Again, the big company has an overwhelming advantage over the small one if railroads are needed, for the initial • investment is so high that much land must be owned in order to make it pay. If the investment in railroads is heavy, it does not pay to move the tracks oftener than once in about twenty years. Hence, large companies seek to protect their railroad investments by buying up the timber for many miles around their mills. This is one reason why much of the timber of the United States is in large holdings. In fact about 11 per cent of all the privately owned trees in the country belong to three such companies. Small lumber firms who bargain every two or three years for a supply of standing timber cannot cu cheaply enough to compete with large companies. Often the best they can do is to invest in portable saw mills, buy the cutover lands at low prices, and make their profits from the second and third growths. The worst feature of the lumber industry, so far as ownership is con corned, is that vast holdings have been acquired by private interest which have paid little or even nothing for them. Such people care onl for the profits and are not concerned that the crash of their trees mean the wasteful destruction of what ought to be conserved for the future In the United States the government forest reserves, established to counteract this difficulty and prevent its continuance, now numbe 16S and include over 290,000 square miles or nearly 10 per cent of thi country.