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ABSTRACT

THE LUMBERMAN'S GAZETTE:
AMERICA'S FIRST LUMBER JOURNAL

BY

David Laurence Rogers

Examines the first lumber trade publication in
the United States, published in Bay City, Michigan, 1872-
1885, and the destruction of the nation's forests, espe-
cially the valuable and irreplaceable white pine of
Michigan and the midwest. The study is a history of the
Gazette and an editorial analysis of the Gazette and the
general press concerning the rape of the forests by
lumbermen. The publishers of the Gazette, who were also
daily newspaper editors, were found to have conflicts in
interest because they also served as secretaries of
lumbermen's associations, Despite these conflicts, how-
ever, the Gazette and the press spoke out sharply against
the destruction of the timber on many occasions. The
comments were muted by a lack of public concern for the
environment and the fact that lumber was needed to build
a growing nation and fuel the economy. Statements by

lumbermen, printed in the Gazette, reveal their greed and

David Laurence Rogers

absence of concern for the future environment. Government,
which had not yet developed a system for regulation of the
use of natural resources, was operated under a theory of

economics in which it was considered unpatriotic to oppose

business interests.

THE LUMBERMAN'S GAZETTE,

AMERICA'S FIRST LUMBER JOURNAL

BY

David Laurence Rogers

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

School of Journalism

1973

Copyright by
DAVID LAURENCE ROGERS

1973

 

 

 

 

 

Journa
Univer.

the Mas

 

Accepted by the faculty of the School of
Journalism, College of Communication Arts, Michigan State
University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the Master of Arts degree.

LU, WW

Director of—Thesifi If

iii

 

 

 

 

State
and ad'
the pr
the au
Blakel
Sagina
Public
0f the
0f Mich
Collect

Permisg

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Professor W. Cameron Meyers, of the Michigan
State University School of Journalism, a longtime friend
and adviser, gave assistance, counsel and criticism in
the preparation of this thesis. Numerous persons assisted
the author in the research, including Miss Gladys
Blakely, former librarian at the Hoyt Public Library,
Saginaw; Alfred Kraig, former librarian of the Bay City
Public Library; and Miss Mary Jo Pugh, reference archivist
of the Michigan Historical Collections of the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The unpublished materials and
collections used in this study were obtained through the

permission of the Michigan Historical Collections.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 1

Chapter

I. JOURNALISM IN THE LUMBER DAYS . . . . . . . . 5

II. FOUNDING AND EARLY YEARS OF THE GAZETTE . . . 16
III. DEVELOPERS OF THE GAZETTE . . . . . . . . . . 35
IV. THE ROLE OF THE GAZETTE . . . . . . . . . . . 44

V. LITERARY AND HISTORICAL ASPECTS . . . . . . . 49

VI. THE LUMBERING ERA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
VII. TIMBER! WHAT THE GAZETTE AND THE PRESS SAID . 69

VIII 0 THE AFTERMATH O O O O O O I O O O O O O O O I 9 2

BIBLIOGRAPHY O O O I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 95

INTRODUCT ION

This study examines the pioneer lumber journal,
the Lumberman's Gazette, which was born and thrived in the
heyday of the Michigan lumber trade, 1872-1885. It is
closely woven with the history of the Saginaw Valley, and
especially Bay City, where the Gazette was published and
which was one of the centers of the lumbering activity.
The press of this area also receives much attention because
of its comments on lumbering and because the early Gazette.
was the product of the part-time work of some of the earl-
iest daily newspapermen of the cities of Bay City and
Saginaw, primarily Henry S. Dow, George W. Hotchkiss, and
Edwin T. Bennett. The Dow name was later to achieve
greater prominence through Dow's distant relative, Herbert
H. Dow, who founded the Dow Chemical Company in nearby
Midland.

This special interest publication is noteworthy
today because of a growing national concern for the
environment and since the Gazette chronicled the era in
which one of our most visible and appreciated natural
resources, the forest, was systematically stripped from
the land. Apparently the Gazette's comments about the

slaughter of timber had little effect on the "cut and get

out" policies of the timber barons, and it will be noted
that the Gazette was somewhat reserved in its approach to
the subject that provided its reason for existence.

The Gazette covered, better than any publication,
the industry chiefly responsible for the settlement of
Michigan, now considered one of the top ten "mega-states"
of the greatest industrial nation in history. Little is
known of this publication, which quickly spread to nation—
wide circulation and which was the forerunner of many
similar journals. The Gazette must be classed as a busi-
ness journal, but it also must be considered a definite
part of the press of that time, since most publications
served special interest groups.

Apparently there is no one repository in which a
complete run of the Gazette exists, but twenty-two of the
twenty-six volumes are located in the Michigan Historical
Collections, fifteen are in the Mid-West Inter-Library
Center at Chicago, and the New York Public Library has
seventeen volumes. The first three volumes are in the
State of Michigan Library, Lansing; the American Antiquar—
ian Society, WOrcester, Massachusetts, has five volumes;
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, has volumes two
and three, and the Library of Congress has volume four,
containing twenty issues.

The papers of George W. Hotchkiss are also in the

Michigan Historical Collections and provide the only

background information available in a partial typescript
of his autobiography, entitled "Fifteen Years in Michigan."
Hotchkiss' personal files of Gazette issues were given to
the John Crerar Library, Chicago, and now are in the Mid-
West Inter-Library Center. The twenty-two volumes in the
Michigan Historical Collections were donated by the Bay
City Public Library.

The few books in the field of business journalism
provide little information about this type of publication,
especially since the most recent book about this field by

1

David P. Forsyth covers only until 1865. Frank Luther

Mott's American Journalism gives short shrift to the busi-

 

ness press and magazines of any kind, although he discusses
mercantile newspapers briefly in a chapter mainly about
political newspapers2 and gives passing mention to what he
calls "class" periodicals such as the Gazette.3
In his history of magazines Mott says: "Apparently

the first periodicals devoted to lumbering were the

Lumberman's Gazette (1871-98), of Chicago, and the Missis-

 

sippi Valley Lumberman (1876-current), of Minneapolis."

 

1David P. Forsyth, The Business Press in America:
1750-1865. (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1964).

2Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A
History: 1690-1969. 3rd ed. revised. (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1962) p. 181.

3

 

 

 

Ibid, PP. 321-322.

Mott also mentions the Lumber Trade Journal, a semi-monthly
established in 1882 at Chicago, which should be noted here

1 He fails to mention

because its founder was Hotchkiss.
other early lumber publications which will be discussed
briefly in this thesis..

The Gazette offers an opportunity to scholars
interested in early journalistic attitudes toward the
environment and conservation of natural resources. It also
provides insights into the history of journalism on the
frontier of the Midwest.. There are valuable items of
information for historians in many areas and for sociolo-
gists and anthropologists and perhaps for those interested
in business history or industrial safety. But foremost,
the Gazette tells the story of the destruction of the pine
forests of the Northwest and how the greed of the lumber
barons combined with the insatiable demand for building
supplies by a growing nation raped the land of its majestic,
primeval woodlands. This study, therefore, examines a
unique and specialized area of journalism that recorded an
era in American history that was both overwhelmingly
productive and destructive--an era that could occur only

once in a millennium.

 

1Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. III:
1865-1885, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1957) p. 130.

CHAPTER I
JOURNALISM IN THE LUMBER DAYS

The first press in the Saginaws sprang into exist-
ence as a result of eastern land speculation in the pine
country.1 And newspapers in the lumbering days of the
Saginaws were dependent upon speculators, government "pap,"2
which was a direct outgrowth of land speculation in the
timber region, or upon partisan political affiliation.3

Mary Elizabeth Hetherington, in one of the few
studies of lumber-era journalism, points out that the
founders of two of the first three newspapers in the Sagi-
naw Valley were promoters of the speculative movement itself
and that the dates of the founding and span of life of the

publications coincided, largely, with the "boom" years of

the speculative era.4

 

1Mary Elizabeth Hetherington, "A Study of the
Development of Journalism During the Lumbering Days of the
Saginaws, 1853-1882," (unpublished master's thesis, North-
western University, 1933.) p. l.

2"Pap" refers to publication of the delinquent tax
list by newspapers.

3Hetherington, "Journalism During the Lumbering
Days," p. l.

41bid.

The speculative movement that marked the 1830
decade brought eastern capitalists to the state in
large numbers as purchasers of government land. The
. . . period of depression that followed left these
lands practically valueless for the time being, their
owners in many cases preferring to abandon them rather
than go to the trouble and cost of keeping track of
them and paying taxes. These lands were returned as
delinquent for taxes each year and were advertised and
sold. The publication of the delinquent tax list . . .
was a bonanza to the press selected for the purpose . .
. . In some counties . . . the job was worth . . .
$1,500 a year. After 1842, this patronage was dispensed
by the state auditor general.

Dr. George N. Fuller, in his Economic and Social
Beginnings of Michigan, also writes that many newspapers of
the state . . . "were started as advertising mediums to
'boom' their localities and were widely circulated in the
east by speculators."

The first newspaper published in the valley was in
1836 by Norman Little, leader of a group of eastern capi-
talists who purchased "the city" of Saginaw.2 Just as
Little's founding of the Saginaw Journal coincided with his
purchase of Saginaw city, so the precarious existence of
the paper must have depended upon his financial condition.

How long the sheet survived in the community has never

 

1S. B. McCracken, "The Press of Michigan; A Fifty
Year's Review," Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections,
XVIII, (Lansing: W. S. George & Co., State Printers, 1891)
p. 384.

2 . . .
Douglas C. McMurtrie, Early Printing in Michigan,
(Chicago: John Calhoun Club, 1931) p. 100.

been determined, but no historian has credited it with an
existence longer than two years.1
It was not until 1843 that Royal W. Jenny founded
the second paper in the valley, the North Star, so named
because at the time of its founding it was the most
northerly newspaper in the United States.2
While eastern speculation had financed the
Journal in the hope of greater expansion of Saginaw, the
Star was subsidized as a result of the same movement but
in a far different manner—-from the publication of tax
lists. Jenny was not only editor and printer of the Star,
he was also town clerk, one of the superintendents of the
poor, and assistant postmaster.3
Newspapers in those days were uncertain ventures
and most published only irregularly. Few copies of the
early weeklies remain in existence, but those that do
reveal little but political editorials, some local social
and news items, articles reprinted from other publica-

tions, and as many legal notices as the publishers could

extract from the local governments.

 

1Thomas S. Applegate, "A History of the Press of
Michigan," Michigan Pioneer +and Historical Collections
(Lansing. W. S. George & Co., State Printers, 1884) VI,
p. 93.

2 . . . . . .
McMurtr1e, Early Pr1nt1ng 1n M1ch1gan, p. 313.

3Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering

Days, p. 12.

In 1861 a directory listed 141 newspapers in
Michigan including three weeklies in Saginaw, the Enter-

prise, Republican, and Spirit of the Times, while East

 

Saginaw had two, the Courier and Enterprise, and Bay City

 

had just one, the Press.1 It took nearly ten years for
journalism in Bay City to grow to two weeklies, the
Journal and the Signal, with another, the Herald, being
published in the nearby village of Wenona.2 Although two
different dailies were issued for brief periods in Bay

City, beginning in 1871, the Banyity Tribune, which began

 

April 5, 1873, was the first daily to sustain continuous
publication. Dow was editor and manager of the Tribune.3
The East Saginaw Enterprise, which began publication in
1853 as a weekly, also printed a daily edition which sus-
pended in 1874. Hotchkiss was employed by the daily
Courier, also of East Saginaw, which was established in
1359.4

Hotchkiss, in his autobiography, tells how a new

reporter got started in those early days of journalism.

 

lAmerican Newspaper Directory, Daniel J. Kenny,
comp. (New York: Watson & Co., 1861) pp. 33-35.

 

21bid, p. 790.

3A History of the Press offiMichigan, Tom S.
Applegate, comp. (Adrian: Times Steam Presses, 1876)
p. 16.

4Ibid, p. 27.

On the 20th of January, 1870, I entered the office
but as it was not advisable that the new arrangement
should be known for a day or two until the legal pro—
ceeding could be commenced, it was expedient that I
should be known to the force as a new acquisition to
the reportorial force and Headley, the city editor,
suggested that I should occupy the day in reporting
the proceedings of the State Baptist Association then
convening. I had never undertaken a reportorial
stunt, but was assured that my shortcomings would be
properly consored, and with much misgiving, I under-
took the assignment. There had been no provision
made for a table for the reporters and evidently it
was not supposed that the local papers would take any
further notice of the meeting than a short paragraph
announcing the fact of the meeting. With a good
supply of paper I took my seat in a front pew of the
church and began my first endeavor in newspaper
reporting. I had been an active church worker and
Bible student for many years and was pretty well
versed in the commonplaces of ministerial speech and
had little difficulty in even anticipating what a
speaker intended and being a rather fast writer in
longhand I returned to the office at the close of the
afternoon session with matter for four printed
columns, supplemented in the evening by a column and
a half digest of the evening sermon, to hear from my
associates in the office the derisive and jocular
assertions of: "Oh no, you can't report! This is a
good joke on our doubts of your ability and as to how
much we can look for to help us out in the morning
issue." My satisfaction was greatly intensified in
the morning by the compliments which came from the
preachers who quickly exhausted the morning's issue.
On the following evening I reported a column in length
of the graduation exercises of the high school, which
led to many compliments as to the author which not
only added greatly to my own satisfaction and self-
confidence, but gave me a most favorable introduction
to the citizens of a community in which my business
relations had been confined to but a small circle.

He also relates how his first connection with a

newspaper came in managing a political weekly with the

 

1George W. Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan,"
(partial typescript of autobiography, Michigan Historical
Collections of the University of Michigan) pp. 113-114.

 

goal of

how that

 

business

Saginaw

10

goal of electing a Democratic candidate to the Congress and
how that successful venture led to his appointment as
business manager and editor of a Democratic daily, the
Saginaw Daily Courier.

His autobiography also gives a good example of the
kind of competition that occurred between rival newspapers
during a time when any printer with a hat full of type and
a hand press could start a newspaper, and often did.

Upon the death in a neighboring city of an ex-
governor of the state, I decided not to send a
reporter but to do my own reporting of the obsequies
having personal acquaintance with some of the leading
men in charge of the funeral, through whom I succeeded
in obtaining the manuscript of some of the speakers
while the reporters on the other paper of our community
obtained others, a combination of both being necessary
to round out a full and complete report. As the feel-
ing between the two offices was not of the most
friendly character, I was much pleased during the ride
home to be approached by my opponent with a proposi-
tion that each should set up the speeches at the
earliest hour and then exchange printed proofs so that
each paper would have complete reports, to which I
gladly assented and when about ten o'clock a messenger
appeared to get my portion, I readily assented upon his
assurance that their galley proofs should reach me
within a half hour. The half hour expired and an hour,
and no proofs came. At eleven o'clock I went over to
the competitor's office where the coolness of my
reception soon convinced me that I had been victimized
and that there was no intention of carrying out the
agreement. I at once called my force to my office and
laid the situation before them with a proposition that
if they would stand by me I would take them to a mid-
night supper at a nearby restaurant where I had made
an arrangement, and would allow them double pay if
they would stand by me to the end, even if our issue
should be late, and I would find some means to obtain
the copy so that our report would be complete. Every
man consented; we had a good supper and waited develop-
ments. The press of the other journal was on the
ground floor and I paced the street watching until with
the first breaking of the morning light I had the

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ll

satisfaction of seeing the forms adjusted upon their
press. Holding myself until I saw a half dozen sheets
thrown off, I unconcernedly slipped into the press
room and before the pressman could open his mouth in
protest, I had seized a sheet and was on my way to

our office a block away, where the needful article was
soon cut into small "takes" and every man in the
office had his portion. Needless to say our issue was
delayed a couple of hours, but when between seven and
eight o'clock the paper appeared upon the street, I
was assured that no portion was scanned by the public
with greater avidity than the editorial roast and
explanation of the cupidity of our contemporary and
the ground work of his assertion of "the only full and
correct report." Such are sometimes the trials which
compass the preparation of the daily press, with which
the casual reader is unacquainted.

Hotchkiss was not only a man who believed in hard
work but was also a teetotaler and was highly religious.
He may have been an exception among the newspapermen and
printers of the times, noting in his autobiography that
"the ranks of newspaper men and especially compositors are
filled with men who learned to work under the inspiration
of strong drink and have suffered the inevitable conse-
quences." He describes an example:

There was, however, one thing about the morning
paper to which I did not take kindly. It is a long
"hike" from supper at six o'clock through long hours
of writing and proof reading until two and three
o'clock in the morning, and the wise compositor or
editor did wisely to carry with him a midnight
luncheon, but where all night saloons are available
it is too much the habit to patronize them with their
attractive luncheon and seductive beer or other
liquors. I fortunately never acquired the habit, but
I have seen many good men succumb to the habit, with
most disastrous consequences. I remember entering an
office to which I was no stranger one evening and

 

1Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years In Michigan," pp.ll7-118.

12

seeing a young man with whom I held a warm friendship,
sitting at his desk, his head resting upon the right
hand of an extended arm. There was no one else in the
room and I thought him asleep at his desk and saluted
him with a: "Wake up Jim," touching him on the shoulder
only to notice a pistol which had fallen to the desk by
the side of a sheet of paper on which he had written:
"Goodby Boys," before he fired the fatal shot. This at
once recalled a conversation I had had with him the
preceding afternoon in which he told me certain things
which I have never related to any one, of his engage-
ment to a young lady of whom he felt himself utterly
unworthy and would kill himself sooner than expose his
condition to her. I, of course, had no thought of it
being more than an idle statement of the moment, until
I realized the full extent of the tragedy. He was one
of the best-hearted fellows I have ever known, and so
fully realized the consequences of a life of dissipa-
tion and his inability to muster a manhood sufficient
to reform, but he was, at the bottom, too noble minded
to permit the woman whom he loved to know or to share
in the depths of the degradation which he had reached.1

The difficulty in reporting news of lumbering was
indicated in a note in 1856 in a Saginaw newspaper, which
stated: "When our lumbermen are desirous of presenting to
the world a statement of the product of their mills and

pineries, they find the Enterprise ready and willing to do
2
I!

 

it . . .
Another problem the newspapers of the valley had to

face was mentioned by an early writer: "Long before

lumber's heyday, the pioneer newspapermen of the Saginaws

recognized that "the valley's leading business . . .

 

lIbid, pp. 126-127.

2Saginaw Enterprise, new series, June 20, 1856,

 

13

. . . lumber . . . required far less of it [advertising]

than the average varieties of business . . . ."1

Newspapers were also in the printing business,
however, and the facts of lumbering were desired by out-
siders.

Nothing, perhaps, was done or said that accom-
plished so much in setting forth the advantages of
the Saginaw Valley to the outside world as the annual
lumber statements published, first through the columns
of the Enterprise, the Courier, and the Saginawian,
and then circulated all over the world in pamphlets
by the compilers, first of whom was Perry Joslin of
the Enterprise; and most famous of whom were George
Frederick Lewis of the Enterprise, the Courier and
the Saginawian; C. B. Headley ofithe Enterprise and
the Courier; and Edward Cowles of the Courier. In the
beginning, the chief object of their publication was
to induce, if possible, the belief among wary out-
siders that the great valley was habitable--that there
were resources here that could be developed profitably.
Time changed. The valley became a power. Her
resources, manufacturers, wealth, commerce, commanded
attention. She had no further need of bringing
legislatures and press excursions to establish her
identity or to correct misrepresentations. How this
change was brought about--with what rapidity or by
what process it was effected is explained in the
fascinating details of these annual lumber statements.
Within the district of which the compilers wrote was
the largest and most valuable body of pine timber upon
the American continent. They had no purpose to
exaggerate or to minimize--but to record a reliable
history of an industry that Bas developed sources of
untold wealth to the nation.

 

 

 

 

 

Even though the compiling of statistics was

started, some lumbermen never co-operated with the

 

1George Frederick Lewis, writing in the Saginawian,
June 13, 1874, p. l.

2Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, p. 59.

14

reporters and the accuracy of the statistics should be
open to question.

Hotchkiss later commented in his book:

It is unfortunately true that during the period

of denudation, a great majority of the operators to
whom has fallen the lot of converting the great bodies
of white pine which were found in Michigan, Wisconsin
and Minnesota, into the dwellings of a treeless
prairie or the more pretentious mansions of a myriad
of cities, should fail to grasp the extent and import-
ance of the work in which they were engaged, and have
left but little or no concerted record for the inform-
ation of those who in future generatiops will feel
interested to know of past conditions.

The Gazette's statistics and information about
regions other than the Saginaw Valley were sketchy and
sporadically published, and reports were probably non-
existent in some areas.

Hetherington noted that extreme pains were taken
by the Saginaw Valley compilers to get an accurate report,
however, although the report was subject to the vagaries

of the lumbermen themselves. The Enterprise commented in

 

1866:

. . . It may be relied upon as complete . . .
every mill of every importance of the valley is
included. We do not hesitate to say that no exhibit
of the lumber business of this valley has ever been
made so near the actual facts as the one below . . . .
It is estimated that it will take over 20 years to
exhaust the pine at the present rate of consumption.2

 

1George W. Hotchkiss, History of the Lumber and
Forest Industry_of the Northwest, (Chicago: George W.
Hotchkiss and Company, 1898) preface.

 

2Daily Enterprise, Dec. 20, 1866, p. l.

 

15

"The declaration was not exaggeration," Hethering-
'ton noted. "C. B. Headley, of the local department of the

ZEnterprise, had been placed in charge of the work. He

 

'visited every mill in the valley personally--some he

'visited many times."1

 

1Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering

Days, p. 65.

CHAPTER II
FOUNDING AND EARLY YEARS OF THE GAZETTE

Frank Luther Mott, historian of the American
iPress, estimates that between 1865 and 1885 almost 9,000
jperiodicals (excluding papers) had publishing starts.1
'The period following the Civil War was a flourishing one
for business and industry and for the business papers that
served those activities. Until the Civil War (1861-1865)
about 160 business papers came into existence, but the
last thirty years of the nineteenth century were the
formative years of the American business press.2

Among the vast number of new business papers
founded in that period one of the earliest was the
Lumberman's Gazette, which came into existence in 1872 in
Bay City, Michigan. Interestingly, the Gazette, according
to George W. Hotchkiss, its first editorial employe, was

intended not to report the activities of lumbering itself,

but to report on inventions in sawmill machinery.

 

1Mott, History of American Magazines, p. 5.

2Julien Elfenfein, Business Journalism, (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 160.

16

17

It as while engaged in the management of the
Courier that I was one day approached by a gentleman
bearing excellent letters from a prominent Chicago
lawyer and other Chicago friends, who opened up to me
the project of the publication of a journal devoted
exclusively to the lumber industry, of which he had no
personal knowledge, but had been urged by friends to
enlist my cooperation as the best man he could find to
assist him in the enterprise.

His proposition was that I take the editorial and
practical side of the enterprise while he would manage
the business end. The Courier was at that time recog-
nized as the only paper in the country which paid any
particular attention to the wants of the lumber
fraternity and then only in the matter of local
statistics of the Saginaw Valley to which its circula-
tion was mainly confined. Mr. Henry S. Dow was the
gentleman who laid before me the fact that while the
country was full of inventors whose attention was
largely devoted to improvements in sawmill machinery
which was greatly needed, they had no means of
communicating except individually with those who stood
the most in need of their inventions, while the whole
country was interested and daily becoming more so, in
the statements of production in all sections, and of
means for the more economical manufacture.

The compact formed by Dow and Hotchkiss united two
of the Saginaw Valley's foremost daily newspapermen, Dow

being managing editor of the Bay City Tribune and Hotchkiss

 

business manager and associate editor of the Saginaw Daily
Courier. It also brought together two divergent political

philosophies, as Dow was a Republican and Hotchkiss a

 

lSaginaw Daily Courier, Saginaw, Michigan.

2The term "lumberjack" is never used in the
Gazette, being of later derivation. Capitalists in the
field were called "lumbermen," a name sometimes applied
to workers, more often called "laborers," "mill opera-
tives,” "men," "shanty boys" or merely, "boys."
3Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," pp. 118-
119.

18

staunch Democrat. Their product, although staid and
extremely business-like, was destined to be maligned by

a later writer, Stewart H. Holbrook, in popularizing the
times with a romantic account of the activities of lumber-
jacks.

Bay City wasn't so large as Saginaw, but it was
far more literary. Here was published the Bay City
Growler, a scandal rag that kept one posted on the
"sporting life" of town and often printed items
revealing the notable sex life of some of Bay City's
lusty timber barons. Another lively paper was the
Lumberman's Gazette, which printed less about lumber
than it did about hell-raising.

Holbrook was far off the mark in his description
of the Gazette, as the publication began and continued to
concentrate on lumbering production notes and statistics,
lumber and salt markets, mill notes, editorials, occasional
literary articles and, of course, advertising. The first
issue was typical of others in the thirteen years the
Gazette was issued in Bay City. On the cover was an
advertisement by Whitman, Townley and Company, wholesale
dealers in lumber, lath and shingles, of wenona, (later
Bay City) Michigan, and one for Beach's Patent steam
lumber seasoning process, of Buffalo, New York. In all

there were twenty-eight pages with advertisements of

sixteen and two-thirds pages for lumber, logs, shingles,

 

lStewart H. Holbrook, Holy Old Mackinaw: A
Natural History of the American Lumberjack (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1943) p. 89.

 

l9

steamships, hardware, machinery, groceries, banks, harn-

eesses and saddles, hotels, the Detroit Tribune, builders,

 

(:lothing, salt, jewelry, insurance, drugs, dry goods, pipe,
flour and feed, boots and shoes, and pile driving.
IHbtchkiss' memory failed him in connection with the first
issue, as he later reported "the first number appeared as

a sixteen page quarto,1

starting with three pages of
advertising which it had taken several weeks of hard can-

'vassing to obtain at anything but remunerative rates."2

Dow gave Hotchkiss no credit in the publication
of the Gazette, listing in the masthead of the first issue
as follows: "The Lumberman's Gazette: published at The

Saginaws3

and Bay City, Mich., July, 1872: A Monthly
Journal: Devoted to the Interests of Lumberman. Pub-
lished by Henry S. Dow, Editor and Proprietor: Office at
Bay City, Michigan." The Gazette was a quarto, measuring
eleven inches by eight inches wide, and was set in agate
type with bold face headlines. Advertisements were
located on every left hand page, with news on facing

pages. Included among the information about lumbering

in the early issues were reviews of current literature

 

1Ten to twelve inches in height.
2Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," p. 119.
3East Saginaw and Saginaw City (on the west bank

of the Saginaw River) were referred to as the Saginaws.
Bay City had earlier been known as Lower Saginaw.

20

from Scribner's, Harper's, the Phrenological Journal, and

 

other popular magazines of the time.

Dow stated in the lead article that the Gazette
"will be independent, but not necessarily neutral," but he
followed with an article entitled "The Strike and Strikers,"
which set the pro-management tone of the journal, obviously
intended to ingratiate those whom he wished to have as
subscribers and advertisers. "The only legitimate result
of the late strike was reached in almost the shortest time
possible. This was largely owing to what we choose to
call the superior intelligence of the saw mill operatives,
for strikes in their worst forms are only experienced
where the strikers are of the most ignorant class." He
went on to state that all those in sympathy with the
strike "are not friends of humanity," continuing: "Wiser
and truer by far are those who have by dint of hard toil
for long years been successful in obtaining wealth and
standing."1

Other publications, even some newspapers from
larger cities, commented on the Gazette, which reprinted
the best of the comments as an early form of in-house
advertising. These comments revealed more than just

praise for the Gazette.

 

lIbid.

21

Detroit Daily Post: "It is rather strange that
no exponent exclusively devoted to the interests it
represents has appeared before in this state.“

East Saginaw Daily Enterprise: ”But we confess
surprise at the unusual excellence of the number before
us."

East Saginaw Dailngourier: "The publication meets
a demand that we wonder has not been supplied long
before."

 

Coal and Iron Record, New York: "We know of no
other paper of its class in the country."

 

BayCityQailyJournal: "In every respect par
excellence. It is a quarto magazine of thirty pages,
three columns on a page and is replete with valuable
and interesting reading matter pertaining to the two
great interests of the Saginaw Valley. It fills a
want among us that has long been felt by every busi-
nessman."

Baltimore, (Md.) Journal: "We welcome to our
exchange list the LumbermanTs Gazette. While prima
facie a "class" journal and devoted to the special
interests of the manufacturers and consumers of lumber
and salt, the Gazette contains a variety of interest-
ing and instructive reading for the million, and a
neater and more attractive monthly we have not seen
and we recomTend it to the masses--lumbermen in
particular."

The issuance of such a journal by no means put Dow
idnto a crowded field, since a newspaper directory issued
trwo years before publication of the Gazette listed just
235 class publications in the nation, including only four
in Michigan. These were described as newspapers and

Periodicals devoted to commerce and finance, insurance,

1Lumberman's Gazette, Feb., 1873, p. 32.

 

22

real estate, science and mechanics, sporting, music and
women's suffrage.1

Dow had chosen his field well, however, and
success was nearly immediate for the world's first lumber
trade journal.

Although it served the lumber interests especially,
the Gazette was considered a part of the general press of
the time and was so included in newspaper directories such
as Alden's2 and in various press histories.

The editors of the Gazette apparently worked

closely with the local newspapers in the Saginaws. "For

numerous favors we are indebted to the East Saginaw Daily

 

Courier and Daily Enterprise, to the Bay City Journal and

Chronicle, to the Saginawian and Republican of Saginaw

 

 

City, and several other papers," the editors wrote in the
initial issue. "As opportunity may present itself we
shall take pleasure in reciprocating to the fullest extent
possible."

Dow stated the purpose of the Gazette in the first
issue as follows:

It is our object to make the Lumberman's Gazette
a periodical devoted especially to the interests of

 

 

 

1George P. Rowell andeompany's American News a er
Directory (New York: Nelson Chesman, 1870) pp. 843-845.
2Edwin Alden and Brothers' American Newspaper

Catalogue (Cincinnati: Edwin Alden andJBrothers1 Advert-
ising Agency, 1882) p. 124.

23

lumbermen. While it will have much valuable matter of
a general character, interesting alike to manufacturer
and dealer, it will be the aim to make it a medium of
communication between lumbermen which will be at once
concise, unique and useful.

At the same time he both boasted and apologized in
advance for his new editorial product:

Owing to the many unforseen obstacles in the way
of making a new publication from the start all that
it is designed to be we have simply to say that the
first number of the Lumberman's Gazette has some
imperfections that will be apparent, and that it is
not up to the standard fixed for future attainment.
And still it possesses so much that is good in the way
of contents and arrangement that we feel a degree of
pride in it, and cannot but think many of our friends
and readers will pardon us for the mention while they
admit its justice.

 

A notation on the flag of the Gazette indicated
that Dow was proud enough of his new publication to enter
it in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washing-
ton, D. C.

He also forecast an immediate growth of the
journal, projecting a subscription of several thousands.

Every publication is influential with the public
and valuable as a medium for reaching the people in
proportion to its circulation, other things being
equal. The three thousand copies of the first number
will be read by more than ten times that number, and
we warrant to our patrons that there shall be fully
three thousand copies of the second edition published.
We expect to have that number of subscribers within
sixty days, and will venture to convince any sensible
person of the reasonableness of our expectations if
they will make the inquiry.

Dow also stated the political philosophy he was
to follow in publication of the Gazette:

Politically, the Lumberman's Gazette will be
independent, but not necessarily neutral. It will

 

24

say whatever it deems wise and for the best interests

of those to whom it is particularly devoted, but will

not meddle with unimportant matters. Every good

citizen should take an interest in politics but he

need not be a politician, according to the modern

meaning of the term.

He also announced his immediate intention to
publish a weekly report of lumber and salt markets, a
service not offered by the daily or weekly press. "The
indications are that such a regular report, in form con-
venient for mailing, would meet with general favor among
manufacturers and dealers, and when convinced that such is
the case, we shall seek to supply the demand," the Gazette
reported.l
At the end of eight months of publication, Dow was

reporting a circulation of almost 4,000 for the Gazette,
at one dollar a year for each subscription. Most were
being circulated in the lumber centers of Michigan, but
others were going in substantial numbers to the cities of
Chicago, New York, Albany, Williamsport, Boston, Toledo,
and Cincinnati, and the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota,
Iowa, Florida, Canada, and Maine.2

Hotchkiss recalled the success of the Gazette:

With the preparation of the first number of the
Gazette I became so greatly interested in the subject

 

lThe Bangitngbserver, on Oct. 25, 1877, was
carrying an item headed "Lumber Markets listed from
Lumberman's Gazette Office," which included a summary of
the past week's pfiCes, a forecast, and salt prices.

2

 

Gazette, February, 1873, p. 33.

25

that the addition to my labors became more of a pastime
than a labor, and my interest increased with the later
development of the fact that the venture was most
timely, for while the expenses of the first year
exceeded the income by fully a thousand dollars, the
constant accretion of our subscription list, and of

the favor shown by advertisers, gave fair promise of
the ultimate results which were very satisfactory, and
have finally culminated in the publicatign of lumber
journals in many sections of the nation.

Advertising rates were not exactly cheap for those
days, running thirty dollars a page, with editorial notices
going at the rate of twenty-five cents a line.2

The enterprising Dow was not hesitant in branching
out in the publishing business he had just entered,
announcing in December, 1872: "In a few days we shall
issue an Annual Review of the Lumber Trade and Manufacture
of Michigan, 10,000 copies in octavo pamphlet form of
about seventy pages each."3 In March, 1873, he announced

publication of a Weekly Market Reporter, to be issued

 

every Saturday morning in season in connection with the

4 The report featured the

Gazette, for two dollars a year.
latest lumber and salt markets. He also published the
History, Commercial Advantages and Future Prospects of Bay

City, Michigan in 1875.

 

 

1Hotchkiss, Fifteen Years in Michigan, p. 119.

2Gazette, June, 1873, p. 173.

3Ibid, December, 1872, p. 1

4161a, March, 1873, p. 67.

26

The Detroit Free Press also noticed the Gazette
and commented:

The Lumberman's Gazette--This is the title of a

handsome monthly published by H. S. Dow at Bay City.
It is specially devoted to the lumber interest, and
contains many original articles upon topics that are
of particular importance to all engaged in the buying,
selling or manufacturing of lumber. Some of these
articles have been widely copied, and the Gazette, by
the ability with which it is edited, and its special
means of obtaining information, is entitled to rank
among the first publications of its kind.

As the second volume of the Gazette began,2 Dow
apparently found that he had sold even the file copies of
some of the early issues for he asked: "Back Numbers
Wanted--Persons having copies of the Gazette for September
or October may exchange them for other numbers or receive
full remuneration for them on presentation at our office
in Bay City."3

He also noted in the same issue: "Those who wish
to buy or sell saw mill property or timber lands in any
part of the country, cannot possibly do better than use

the columns of the Gazette for the purpose of reaching the

parties desired;" and: "we want a reliable correspondent

 

1Gazette, January, 1873, p. 5.

2Each volume was comprised of the issues for six
months, but each issue was numbered consecutively from
one through twelve by the year.

3Gazette, January, 1873, p. l.

27

in every lumbering town or section of the United States

and Canada. Liberal remuneration will be allowed to

suitable parties."1

Typical of the kinds of news published in the
early Gazette were the following:

Messrs. Tiff, Jerome and Company of Saginaw City
will run only two camps during the coming winter.
Last winter they ran eight.

George F. Williams and Brothers had an exhibition
at the Saginaw Central Fair, two pine planks, measur-
ing respectively 197 and 224 feet board measure. Both
were perfectly clear lumber, not a sign of a knot,
shake or sap.

Pond and Sopers planing mill, Chicago, was burned
recently. Loss $22,000. An adjoining mill, belonging
to Hair and Odovine, was also burned. Loss $12,000.
Fully insured.

Not all the content was confined to news of lum-
bering, however, as another early article was entitled:
"University Lands--Sketch of the History of the Granting
of Government Lands to the State University."3

In the early issues, Dow was constantly apologiz-
ing for the lateness of the issue or some other imper-
fection.

It is said that misfortunes never come singly.

This we say by way of premising an apology we owe our
readers for the delay in getting out this issue of the
Gazette. The new dress was received fully two weeks

Iater than we had confidently expected, and portions
of it came more than three weeks late. Then most a

 

lIbid.
2Gazette, October, 1873, p. 171.

3Ibid, July, 1873, p. 11.

28

whole week was lost on account of a failure to get
the press work done promptly. But if our readers
will excuse this tardiness we feel justified in
assuring them that the like shall not occur again.
WOrk on the next issue is already being pushed for-
ward so as not to be be ind the time at which it has
usually been completed.

But two months later he apologized again for the
lateness of the issue, noting that he had taken over the
editorial management of the Bay City Tribune, a daily,
and that an assistant had been hired for the Gazette. He

also noted that subscribers were increasing more than he

had anticipated.2

Hotchkiss noted the addition to the Gazette staff
later in his autobiography and how that later resulted in
the formation of another, competing, lumber journal.

Of course it was but a short time before it became
needful to increase our office force and William B.
Judson who at the time was doing an insurance business
entered our employ as a reporter, but after several
months was so impressed with the breadth of the field
in which we were operating, that he established
another lumber journal at Muskegon, Michigan, which
after one or two issues he removed to Chicago and the
Northwestern Lumberman made its bow to the public . .
“‘1““"““———“‘——'

Dow at first apparently was flattered that his

embryo journal was to be copied, stating:

 

11bid, February, 1873, p. 1
2Gazette, May, 1873, p. 139.

3The Michigan Lumberman was founded in February,

 

1873.

4Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," p. 120.

29

Mr. B. wait and W. B. Judson announce that they
are about to commence the publication of a new
monthly journal at Grand Rapids, to be called the
Michigan Lumberman. For some months past Mr. Wait
has been an occasiOnal contributor to the Gazette,
and Mr. Judson has been employed as an assistant on
the Gazette. In size and style the Lumberman will
imitate the Gazette, but it will be devoted to mis-
cellaneous interests. The new periodical will secure
a liberal local support undoubtedly, and if conducted
with skill and ability, cannot fail of excellent suc-
cess. We take it as decidedly complimentary to the
Lumberman's Gazette that several parties in different
sections have projected publications devoted to the
lumber interests since the Gazette first appeared in
July last. And while always striving to maintain a
foremost rank among class journals, we can greet
cordially all newcomers at the lists.

His comments carried the same tone after the new

publication was issued, but a sarcastic note was included:

We are in receipt of the Michi an Lumberman pub-
lished by Messrs. B. Wait and W. B. Judson, formerly
employed as agents for the Gazette. In almost every
particular the Lumberman is an imitation of the
Gazette, and as such we admire its style. We wish

this newzcandidate for patronage the most substantial
success.

 

Three months later his rancor was growing as the
Gazette stated: "Imitations and perversions have entered
the field, but they have none of them come up to the
standard of the Gazette, and certainly none have attained

a circulation nearly as large."3

 

1Gazette, January, 1873, p. 7.

2Gazette, February, 1873, p. 1

3Ibid, May, 1873, p. 139. Dow was claiming a
circulation of more than 4,500 that year and two years
later claimed 6,000-plus.

30

In the same issue Dow noted another competitor and
chastized its editors for plagiarism:

The Lumber Trade still lives but is surprised that
anything which ever appeared in its columns should
have appeared in the Gazette. We doubt not that the
Trade will continue to tfirive if it feeds on such
healthy diet, as three or four columns per week, from
the Gazette every week the way it did, during the cold
montfis of last winter. It was ungrateful though to
accept so much without saying so much as "thank you."1

Later he mocked the publication of Wait and Jud-
son: "The Michigan Lumberman reviews the business prospect

:iri an.article of such extraordinary English that we cannot

refrain from giving our readers a specimen."2

Later that same year, Dow felt compelled to estab-
lish in print the Gazette's pre-eminence in the field.

As early as June, 1872, the Lumberman's Gazette
prospectus was issued, and in July following the first
issue appeared. Subsequently the Lumber Trade appeared
as a semi-monthly publication. The Gazette was the
first journal ever issued in the interest of the lum-
ber trade and manufacture. The Lumber Trade was
second, and then came the Michigan Lumberman, a close
imitation of the Lumberman's Gazette. The publishers
of the Lumberman had both had some months experience
on the Gazette, and they deserve credit for the zeal
and energy displayed in their enterprise. Recently
the Wisconsin Lumberman made its appearance at Mil-
waukee. The LumbermanTs Gazgtte is therefore the
”pioneer" lumbermafi‘s paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Wait moved on, Dow became even more caustic in

hi 8 comments .

11bid.
21bid, August, 1873, p. 41.

3Gazette, October, 1373, p. 129.

31

That celebrated lumberman, whose only knowledge of
either lumber or journalism was gained during the two
or three months we employed him on the Lumberman's
Gazette, has, to the infinite amusement of those who
know Him best, set himself up in connection with the
Northwestern Lumberman and Railway Journal, as "editor
and manager." He has the assurance to assume to be an
instructor in matters of which he knows as little as
he does about editing any kind of a journal.

 

After ten months as publisher and editor of the
Bay City Tribune in addition to the Gazette, Dow retired
from the daily publication and announced the fact in a
front page ”Editorial Personal" in the Gazette. The

article included an item from the Detroit Daily Post that

 

read: "The Tribune is now the property of an incorporated
company, and is to be published daily as heretofore, under
the editorial supervision, we believe, of Mr. George K.
Shaw, late of Minneapolis."2

He further explained that the management of both

publications was too much of a burden.

During the most of the time for the past twelve
months the publisher of the Lumberman's Gazette has
devoted a large amount of his attention to the work of
editing the Bay City Daily Tribune, and as a conse-
quence the Gazette has been a good deal neglected.
Recently the Tribune editorship has been transferred
to other hands, and we expect to be able to devote
more time to the Gazette.

The battles with his competitors and former em-

ployees continued to be aired in the pages of the Gazette.

 

lIbid, March, 1874, p. 71.
21bid, February, 1874, p. 33.

3Gazette, February, 1874, p. 33.

32

The Ba City Tribune, the Boston Lumber Trade,
the Farwel Register, as well as ourselves, are in
anguish because ofithe displeasure expressed by the
Northwestern Lumberman. WOn't the fledgling public-
ation tell its few readers what it knows about any
particular branch of the lumber trade or manufacture
instead of arrogating to itself knowledge it never
possessed.

The January number of the Lumberman's Gazette
contained an article entitled TIn the Lumber Woods,‘
from the pen of Mr. B. Wait. The article, though
prepared for another publication, was purchased of
Mr. Wait by the publisher of the Gazette. It had not
previously appeared elsewhere as the editor of the
Northwestern Lumberman well knows, his statements to
the contrary notwithstanding. we can conceive of no
other motive than pure malice that induced the North-
western Lumberman to make the incorrec statement it
contains in the last issue (February).

 

 

Dow must have been held in good standing by the
lumbermen of the area because they chose him secretary of
the Michigan Timber Land Association at a meeting
April 15, 1874, in East Saginaw.3 He held several offices
in lumbermen's associations, as did many of the lumber
paper editors.

The following month Dow changed the Gazette to a
weekly in quarto form because of the demand for fresher
news. But he was to enjoy the success of his new public—
ation for less than a year until his death, perhaps hast-
ened by his arduous labors in the newspaper business and

on the pioneer lumber journal.

 

lIbid, March, 1874, p. 71.

2Ibid, p. 66.

31bid, April, 1874, p. 103.

33

Some of the history of the Gazette is told in an
article by the man who was destined to become its pub-
lisher in Bay City until 1885, Edwin T. Bennett.

In February, 1875 the lamented death of its
founder caused the Gazette to pass into the hands of
W. R. Bates and E. T. Bennett, who did all in their
power to maintain the excellent reputation gained for
the paper by its former proprietor.

The Gazette now enters upon its seventh volume
with a larger advertising and subscription patronage,
and with better and brighter prospects than it has
ever enjoyed. Its circulation extends into every
state and territory in the United States and the
provinces of Canada. It is quoted by every journal
of influence in the world, in connection with the
lumber business. It now has but one competitor in
the United States, of the many which have from time
to time sprang up. We have obtained the services of
a man who has had thirty years experience in the manu-
facture and sale of lumber to aid us in the editorial
department of the paper, and we guarantee our readers
that we will spare neither time, labor or expense to
make the Gazette better than it has ever been before.1

Bennett made a few changes, using artwork as a
flag with the name formed from trees, ships, and lumber.
He raised the subscription price from two dollars to
three dollars a year and noted in the masthead that it
was ”devoted to the lumber and industrial interests of
the country." The size was increased from eight and one-
half by eleven inches to ten by thirteen and one-half
inches and from three columns of type to four on each

page, averaging twenty pages an issue.

 

1Gazette, Jan. 6, 1876, p. 1

34

Bennett published the Gazette in Bay City until
the depletion of the pine forests resulted in its demise.
That story and the Gazette's editorial posture during
those crucial times for our environment will be told in

later chapters.

CHAPTER III
DEVELOPERS OF THE GAZETTE

In addition to working long, arduous hours on
daily newspapers, the developers of the Lumberman's Gazette
somehow found time to edit and publish that trade journal
as a sideline. Certainly, these were men of amazing
energy, but their efforts soon took a physical and mental
toll.

Henry S. Dow was a native of New Hampshire, though
a greater portion of his life was spent in what was then
known as the West, now considered the Midwest. He served
nearly four years in the Union Army, and was mustered out
with the rank of captain. At the end of the Civil War,
he came to Michigan and studied law for a time and then

purchased an interest in the Saginaw Advertiser. Six

 

months later he sold out and went to Oil City, Pennsyl-
vania. After remaining there for a short time he again
went West, and was graduated from the law department of
what was then known as Michigan University, now the Univ-
ersity of Michigan at Ann Arbor. From that time until 1871
he was in Chicago, New York, and Plainfield, New Jersey.

In 1871 he went to Bay City and took a position on the

35

36

editorial staff of the Bay City Journal, a Republican
weekly newspaper of about 700 circulation, and subsequently
was publisher and managing editor of the Bay City Daily
Tribune, forerunner of the current Bay City Times. In 1872
he was a candidate on the Republican ticket for clerk of
Bay County, but was defeated. In September, 1874, he was
elected corresponding secretary of the National Lumberman's
Association, which office he held at the time of his death,
February 5, 1875.1

Hotchkiss describes the circumstances of Dow's
death, as he recalled, in his partial autobiography, but
is in error about the date: "In 1873 Mr. Dow, who became
engaged to a young lady in New Hampshire, started to ful-
fill his engagement with her but was taken sick on reaching
Detroit and died suddenly while being shaved in a barber's
chair."2

The Dows of New Hampshire traced their origins to
Henry Dowe (Dow, Doue) a husbandman of Ormsby, England,
and his wife, Margaret, (Cole), who had five sons, Henry,
Joseph, Daniel, Thomas, and Jeromiah; and two daughters,
Mary and Hannah. Listed as taxpayers in Hampton, New

Hampshire in May, 1680, were Henry, Joseph and Daniel Dow.

 

1Portrait and Biographical Record of Saginaw and
Bay Counties, Michigan, (Chicago: Biographical Publishing
Co., 1892) p. 294.

2Hotchkiss, Fifteen Years In Michigan, p. 121.

37

A Henry Dow was mentioned as an assistant to Lieutenant
Governor Partridge and as representative at the General
Court at Boston during the union with Massachusetts.1

Hotchkiss was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in
1831. When he was seventeen he made a boat journey of
154 days around Cape Horn to the California coast, seeking
gold. "Of the thousands of youths who toiled for weary
months panning sand scooped out of the bottoms of mountain
creeks, Hotchkiss was among the few who made a strike,”
his obituary said.

Later, he was involved in the lumber trade in
Canada for ten years, apparently failing in that business,
and then he moved to Buffalo, New York, where he tried his
hand unsuccessfully as a salesman for a patent medicine
house. He went to Bay City in 1862 as manager for a lumber
shipping business operated by John Noyes, of Buffalo.2

By Hotchkiss' own account, his activities and
accomplishments of the next fifteen years were prodigious.
In his partial autobiography, he claims to have been
involved in the first steam shipping of lumber on the
Great Lakes, helped to finance the first bank in Bay City

(1862); to have fitted out a dog train for starving persons

 

1John N. McClintock, History of New Hampshire
(Boston: B. B. Russell Cornhill, 1888) pp. 98, 130.

2Hotchkiss, Fifteen Years In Michigan, p. 99.

38

on the west shore of Lake Huron to Mackinaw (1863); to
have entered the shipping business himself, along with
being a lumber inspector and being engaged in logging
(1864) and in the business of rafting logs; to have served
as senior alderman of the First Ward of Bay City (1865);
to have headed a firm that built a plank road from Bay City
to Midland (1866); to have entered the weekly newspaper
business and helped to elect a Democrat to Congress (1867);
and to have been a candidate for state senate (1869).
After becoming associate editor and business manager of
the Saginaw Daily Courier in 1870, Hotchkiss then writes
that he went into lumbering and mill management; was
editor of the Lumberman's Gazette; worked on the Bay City
Tribune; started the first Sunday newspaper in the Saginaw
Valley at Saginaw; was postmaster; and organized Edwards
Township, Iosco County, Michigan, also serving as super-
visor and a member of the county board; and then went into
the steel boiler business, all from 1872 to 1878, when he
became a member of the editorial staff of the Northwestern
Lumberman in Chicago.1
The strain of these numerous labors had its effect
on Hotchkiss, who describes his newspaper work as follows:
"My connection with the Saginaw Daily Courier continued

for about eighteen months, when with an experience of an

 

1Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years In Michigan," pp. 99-133.

39

average of about eighteen hours a day during the entire
period my health began to fail and it became quite apparent
that I was on the eve of a nervous breakdown such as

afflicted me twice during the past years, with an enforced

idleness of from one to three years . . . ."1

He further described how he left the Courier:

My connection with the Courier being jeopardized
by my mill operations where in the employment of an
average of eighty to 100 men I found that in the care
of the Gazette and of the mill, I resigned from the
management of the Courier, and truth to tell I am some-
what hazy in recalling the events of the period between
1872 and 1875 during which time I was connected not
only with the Courier and the Lumberman's Gazette but
also with the Bay City Tribune, daily evening paperé
in fact there was no apparent limit to my energies.

 

 

The Library of Congress lists R. L. Kimberly as an
editor of the Gazette in 1874, along with Dow, but no
further information on Kimberly can be found.

After Dow's death, Hotchkiss recalled: "Soon after
the Gazette and Tribune passed into the hands of Mr. Amos
Switzer, with whom I collaborated in the editorial manage-
ment of both journals until my physical breakdown in the
winter of 1874-1875."3 Nowhere in the Gazette, or in any
press history, is Switzer mentioned in connection with the

Gazette, although W. H. Gustin, an editor of the Bay City

 

lHotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," p. 114.
2Ibid, p. 121.
31bid.

40

Times, wrote in a history of the press of Bay City that

Switzer, a lumber salesman, was co-publisher of the Bay

City Tribune with Dow shortly after its founding.1 Bennett
stated that he became sole owner after buying out Bates in
October, 1875.2

Hotchkiss later wrote involving his connection

with the Gazette, noting that "during the period 1872 to
1877 [I] was more or less intimately associated with the

editorial management of the journal, combining for a year

or more the charge of the Bay City Journal, an evening

 

daily paper."3 The Journal had been founded in 1864 as a
Republican weekly and became a daily in 1871, lasting for
two years. After suffering his third attack of nervous
prostration in a career of some twenty years at that point,
Hotchkiss moved to the Tawas area of Michigan to attend to
his lumber business and then traveled throughout the Mid-
west selling a machine, designed to remove sediment from
steel boilers, which he wrote led to "a much improved
condition of bodily health." However, his physical and
mental trials in the field of journalism left him with what

he described as a "very pessimistic anxiety as regarded

 

1Bay City Times, Dec. 2, 1923, p. 2.

 

2Tom S. Applegate, A History of the Press of Michi-
gan (Adrian: Adrian Times, 1876) pp. 16-17.

3Hotchkiss, History of the Lumber and Forest
Industry, p. 12.

41

my brain power which did not appear to me as strong and
reliable as before my sickness, so that when my friend
Judson urged me in the spring of 1878 to join his editorial
force, I hesitated from sheer doubt as to my ability to
place my thoughts on paper, and finally consented only
upon condition that for a certain period at least, my
lucubrations should pass under his censorship. As a pre-
liminary experiment, however, I, at his request, undertook
a job for which he thought me eminently qualified, but of
which I felt great doubt."1

Hotchkiss was mentioned as secretary of the Chicago
Lumberman's Exchange, which was started in 1881,2 and in

1888 he was editor of the Lumber Trade Journal, a semi-
3

 

monthly of 4,250 circulation. The Library of Congress
lists Hotchkiss as author of a book, Chicago Yard Grading:
Also Rules of the Lumberman's Exchange of Chicago, pub-

lished in 1888 by the Lumber Trade Journal. His obituary

 

also noted that he was statistician and secretary of the

Illinois Lumber and Material Dealers' Association.4

 

1Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," pp. 132-
133.

2Gazette, June 13, 1883, p. 2.

3N. W. Ayer and Sons American Newspaper Annual
(Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer and Son, 1888) p. 329.

4Chicago Herald and Examiner, March 2, 1926
(unpaged clipping in Michigan Historical Collections).

 

42

Despite the physical and mental problems suffered in his
early life as a result of overwork, Hotchkiss proved
remarkably durable. When he died at his Evanston, Illinois,
home at the age of ninety-five, the Chicago Herald and
Examiner headlined the story: ”Last of the Forty-Niners
is Dead at 95: George W. Hotchkiss, Adventurer, Business
Man, Writer, Sailed Around Horn When 17."1

Another Bay City newspaperman who was associated
with the Gazette was Archibald McMillan, who was mentioned
after 1878 as an editorial writer. McMillan was editor
and publisher of the Bay City Evening Press, established
in 1879, and in 1892 was president of the Bay City Times
Company, after merger of the Tiggg with the E£E§§°

Bennett, who also became editor of the Bay City
Tribune, as Dow had been, bought the Bay Citnyvening
Prggg in 1880 and the Tribune in 1881. He was born in
Clayton, Jefferson County, New York, April 8, 1853. His
boyhood was spent near the St. Lawrence River, where he
lost an eye and his left arm when a marine torpedo exploded
in 1864. Two years later he moved with his parents to Bay
City, where he took an interest in printing and drifted

into newspaper work.2

 

lIbid.

2PortraitLand Biographical Record of Saginaw and
Bay Counties, p. 296.

 

43

Bennett was the sole publisher of the Gazette for

several years, until July, 1878, when Charles B. Headley

retired after eight years as business manager of the Sagi-

naw Daily Courier and became co-publisher of the Gazette.
Bennett states in the Gazette that Headley was one of the
projectors and early contributors to the lumber journal,

"It was through his representations and encourage-

and:
Headley

ment that Mr. Dow started the Gazette in 1872."

and George Frederick Lewis, one of the founders of the
Courier and the Bay City daily Morning Call, compiled and
published the first statistics of the lumber business of

the Saginaw Valley in 1866, "which are regarded as stand-

ard authority by the lumber trade of the northwest," wrote

Bennett.
Separate offices of the Gazette were established

in 1878, with Bennett remaining in Bay City and Headley

running a new Saginaw office. The Gazette was published

for five months from East Saginaw, with that dateline
beginning with the issue of Sept. 3, 1878. The place of

publication, however, was moved back to Bay City with the

February 12, 1879, issue and Headley's name no longer

appeared as co-publisher.

 

CHAPTER IV
THE ROLE OF THE GAZETTE

While the newspapers of the Saginaws gave some
coverage to the activities of the lumbermen and began
compiling statistics of the lumber trade, the role of the
Gazette was to extend and expand those functions.

Hotchkiss recounted how his editorial efforts were
received initially:

The original venture was not at first met with
great cordiality by the lumbermen generally as it had
from the commencement of the trade been held as a com-
petitive business in which a man's success was based
upon keeping his business to himself and finding out
all he could about his neighbor. The collector of
statistics was met with a cold shoulder, "that's pry-
ing into my business," was the non unusual response
for figures of manufacture. One of my brother alder-
men of the city council was a manufacturer who was
greatly annoyed because one whom he esteemed his
friend tried to pry into his private business and
turned a deaf ear to all my questions. One day, how-
ever, he told me of the extensive repairs he was making
to his mill in taking out old machinery and putting in
other and improved and in a friendly way invited me to
visit his mill. As we had not had any discussion for
some months he did not dream of what the invitation
included, but seizing a timely opportunity I visited
him and he courteously and proudly took me through the
mill and explained to me the increased facilities
which he expected to result from the improvements. I
carefully avoided any questions which might make him
suspicious, but noted carefully the changes and his
optimism. Soon after, my statistical report appeared
and his mill and operations received due notice.
Meeting me on the street a short time after he berated
me and wanted to know where I got the figures which he

44

 

45

said he had always refused to give me. “Why," I re-
plied, "you gave them to me yourself," which he denied
until I called his attention to my visit and his
courteous attentions, asking if the figures were not
correct. In reply he said: "It is evident that if I
refuse to give the information you want, you will get
it someway, and hereafter you shall have all the in-
formation you may ask for." I mention this case as
only one evidence of the difficulty we experienced in
obtaining what we thought to be valuable and necessary
information for the guidance of the trade.

It was not long, however, before the value of facts
and figures began to impress investors and they began
to take this new opportunity for laying their practi-
cal thoughts before the manufacturers who on their
part recognized the value of improvements of which
they had never before heard and our clientage both 1
among manufacturers and retailers rapidly increased.

The Gazette not only covered lumbering in the
Saginaw Valley, but it also became a truly national pub-
lication and included news of lumbering in Canada, which
was so closely allied to that occurring in the United
States.

"The Lumberman's Gazette is not local or sectional
in character. It is ever the ready exponent of the true
interests of any section and all sections," the Gazette
said in 1874.

The publication lived up to that statement
throughout the time it was published in Bay City.

Articles printed in 1872 included those with the
following headlines: "Lumbering in Florida," from the

Palatka Herald; "The Season in Minnesota," "Sheboygan,"

 

1Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," p. 119.

 

46

"Curiosities of the Brazilian Forest," from the Anglo-

Brazilian Times, and also included comment from the Lemars,

Iowa, Sentinel.l

In January, 1874, the Gazette printed articles
dealing with: "Wisconsin River Lumbering," "How Lumberman

Live in Camp," and "Patents and Improvements in the Lumber
Trade."2

Other articles in that same issue included: "St.

Louis Lumber Trade for 1873," "Lumber Inspected on White

Lake," "Wisconsin Lumber Notes," "The Lumber Product of
western Michigan," "Indianapolis," "A Ride on a Raft,"
"Ottawa Lumber Region," "Review of the Lumber Trade of
Canada,“ "Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin," "The Trade of
Tonawanda for 1873," "Southern Lumber Regions," "Williams-

port Lumber Exchange," "Cincinnati Lumber," "Minnesota

Lumber Trade," and "In the Lumber WOods: Graphic Descrip-

tion of Logging Operations--The Advance of Civilization
Into Primeval Pine Forests."

An editorial in the January, 1874, issue was con-
cerned with the Michigan lumber inspection law and pointed

out discrepancies because of imperfect knowledge of some

 

lGazette, October, 1872, pp. 1-3.

2Ibid, January, 1874, pp. 1-16, passim.

 

47

inspectors.1 Other items dealt with prices of lumber,
amount of lumber cut, lumber shipments, prices of land,
prices of salt, contracts for lumber work, business news
regarding agents and firms, boom company reports, magazine
reviews and a report on Saginaw Valley lumbering for 1873.

Various issues during 1873 included articles
reprinted from the Philadelphia Ledger, Detroit Free Press,
Chicago Inter Ocean, Boston Globe, Detroit Post, American
Agriculturist, American Builder, American Manufacturer,
Real Estate Record, and Scientific American.

Such diverse subject matter as iron ore statistics
from Marquette and marine operation reviews also were
printed by the Gazette.

The issues of the Gazette were scattered with
miscellaneous news items concerning the mills, the situ-
ation in the lumber camps, patents and improvements in the
lumber trade, accidents and fires, and notes of various
kinds containing information of general interest to lumber-
men.

Typical of these was the following item, printed

on the first page of the first issue:

Messrs. wetmore & English, of St. Charles, have
sold, to Mr. H. J. Bentley, of the firm of Bentley &
Chapman, of Chesaning, a half interest in their saw

 

1Hotchkiss was well acquainted with the subject,
having been a lumber inspector in Canada for ten years.

48

mill. The mill is to be moved to Pine Grove, about
three miles from Chesaning.

.Although the Gazette was serving a specialized
field, and was circulated in a wide area of the country,
:it still retained an editorial attitude that boosted local
development, showing considerable foresight in the follow-
ing statement: "The present and permanent advancement of

Saginaw lies in manufactures. Lumber and salt came to us

‘1 .k-XJHIT

naturally. We must now encourage other enterprises, such

as will further prepare these staples for various uses."1

. .-_.4

 

V

 

1Gazette, March, 1873, p. 69.

CHAPTER V
LITERARY AND HISTORICAL ASPECTS

The editorial content of the Gazette included
numerous articles of literary and historical merit and
items of cultural interest from humorous, ecological, and
other aspects.

The early issues consistently printed reviews of
popular magazines, such as one brief note in the January,
1873, issue which stated: ”Harper's Magazine for Febru-
ary1 comes to hand with a table of rare contents. The
serial stories, editorial departments, and all the short
stories are fully maintained in their excellence."

Poetry was also occasionally published, especially
when it had some connection with the lumber industry such
as verse published in June, 1873, entitled "The Timber
Cutter."

Articles contributed by free-lance writers were
often used, including one in the April, 1873, issue by

Henry David Thoreau, entitled "The Maine WOods."

 

1The Gazette for January, 1873, apparently was
again published late.

49

 

50

.Another article, published in November, 1873, was

entitled: "Pioneer Lumbering: Jeff Davis, the first

Lumberman in Wisconsin--An Interesting Sketch."

.A series of articles was run in the Gazette on
Michigan pioneer lumbermen and was written by one of the

earliest lumbermen, Albert Miller, a probate judge of

Saginaw County. It provides invaluable local history.

General notes on lumbering printed in the Gazette

would be of interest and value to historical researchers,

including one in the January, 1873, issue detailing aspects
of Canadian lumber camps and a note concerning the first

steam sawmill in Michigan, at Detroit.

Mr. B. Wight, father of Messrs. H. A. and G. S.
Wight, of Detroit, bought out in 1836 the original
owners of the first steam sawmill in Michigan. By
remodeling and improving this mill, which was located
at Detroit, Mr. Wight led the way to the present state
of perfection in the manufacture of lumber. In 1854
the sons, under the firm name given above, built the
largest and best mill then in the state. The plan of
it was followed extensively by many builders of saw-
mills. Both father and sons have been among the most
enterprising of that large class of substantial busi-

nessmen who are engaged in the trade and manufacture
of lumber in the West.

Under the column heading "Saw Mill Notes," in the
same issue, the Gazette.published details of the operations
of a typical mill, the Moore, Smith and Co. mill located
in Banks, an area that later became part of Bay City. The
account noted that the mill employed fifty-five men and

boys whose pay averaged $2.50 a day, the highest being four

dollars and the lowest one dollar. The working day was

 

L34

 

51

eleven and one-half hours. Capacity of the mill was
60,000 board feet per day and ten million board feet of
lumber and 200,000 staves for the season. The mill shipped
by water principally to eastern markets. Invested capital
‘was $100,000 and the mill controlled fifty million board
feet of pine on the Cedar and Tobacco rivers and the Sagi-
naw Bay shore. It also manufactured 6,000 barrels of salt
per season.

In the May, 1873, issue of the Gazette was re-
printed an article from the New York werld that summarized
the lumber business of the nation. It noted that ship-
ments of lumber were being made from the United States to
the west Indies, South America, and Europe. It listed
total annual U. S. production at six billion feet and
predicted exhaustion of the white pine forests in fifteen
years. Some 300 to 400 square miles of timber lands were
being cut annually to meet the demands of the Chicago
market alone and $120 million in lumber was consumed in
the country in 1872, according to the article. The total
annual crop in Michigan was listed at two billion feet and
the Canadian crop was half that amount, of which 600 mil-
lion feet was shipped to the United States and the remain-
der to Europe.

In some cases the Gazette picked up lumbering
notes from other newspapers, as in the following: "The

Pontiac Bill Poster says: "We are credibly informed that

 

52

Dr. D. Ward, of this city, has been offered and refused
$5,000,000 for his timber lands in this state.”1 Ward
became one of the most famous, and wealthiest, of the
lumber barons.

In others it made widely ranging statements with-
out quoting a source: "The lumber trade of the northern
Pacific shore is reported growing rapidly and western
Washington and Oregon are looking forward to making large
exportations of timber,"2 and "Entire townships were being
sold in Maine for lumbering for about $50,000."3

Gazette advertising also provided information of
possible historical value, such as the advertisement in
the January, 1873, issue noting that the Flint and Pere
Marquette railway lands, "the entire land grant of this
company, 280,000 acres," were being offered for sale.
Another advertisement informed readers that the Valley
Iron werks of Smalley Brothers and Company, located on
Saginaw between tenth and eleventh streets in Bay City,
manufactured steam engines, gang and circular saw mills,
salt works machinery, and brass and iron castings.

Advertising, in fact, made up the greater part of

one of the early issues of the Gazette, comprising the

 

1Gazette, February, 1873, p. 29.
2Ibid, January, 1873, p. 29.

31bid, p. 23.

 

 

 

53

equivalent of twenty-four pages in the thirty-eight page
issue of February, 1873. Advertisements included those
for a saw gummer and sharpener, from the Tanite Company,
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania; the Empire Saw werks, St. Louis,
Missouri; for dry goods, groceries, boots and shoes, from

the H. w. Sage and Company, of Wenona; for hemlock extract

machinery, from Johnson, Goodell and Company, East Saginaw;

and for lumber, lath and salt, from Albert Miller, of

Portsmouth. Other advertisements in that issue were for .
hardware, livery, land, insurance, ship stores, hoop and 5

 

lath machines, pumps, real estate, wooden ware, edgers,
saws, kerosene oil, emery wheels, steam engines, crockery,
cant hooks, sign painting, steam, gas and water fittings,
tools and machinery, flour, feed and grain, attorneys,
druggists, physicians, banks, engineers and surveyors,
newspapers, carriage works, cistern and tank makers, manu-
facturers of gang, circular and upright mills, jewelry,
hats, caps and furnishing goods, fire extinguishers, boil-
ers, railroad time tables, magazines, boarding stables,
and chemicals. In all the issue contained ninety-two

advertisements.

The same issue also contained several notes on the

history of the local press.

There was occasional mention of blacks in the col-

umns of the Gazette, also, and although there was no"5eemea

 

54

apparent prejudice on the part of the editors, racial
attitudes of the times were revealed.
One article, from Georgia correspondence of the

Rochester Union and Advertiser, described field hands'

 

work in lumbering and their songs, one of which starts:
“Come, oh come an' help we niggars; Here am one we cannot
tote; Massa you must pass de lickers; An' for our dinner
gib us shoat."l

Another mentioned that colored workmen had struck
at Jacksonville, Florida, lumber mills, seeking a ten-hour
day. The article noted that the colored workers were re-
placed with white men "who prove quite as good, if not
better laborers than the negroes who struck." It also
mentioned that the sheriff and a fifteen-man posse broke
up a riot at the mills.2

An article in the January, 1874, issue stated that,
at an industrial exposition in Indianapolis, Indiana, "a
colored man, Hillry Chavans, of Union City, Ind., showed
a working model of a double-acting engine, possessing ele-
ments of novelty and value."

Another item noted: "A handsome young woman is

the captain of a Texas lumber schooner."3

 

1Gazette, April, 1873, p. 115.

2Ibid, June, 1873, p. 197.

3Gazette, August, 1873, p. 49.

 

55

Several examples of lumbermen's humor were printed

in the Gazette.

The editor of the Midland Times was recently jour-
neying by stage along the river near that city, when
observing a rollway where the logs were piled almost
across the stream he remarked to the driver, "The
river there is nearly damned." ”Damned nearly,“ was
his laconic response.

Tom, during his las tour to Niagara, in company
with Smash, saw an Indian hewing a small piece of tim-
ber, with a view to making canes. "Pray, sir," said
Smash, "to what tribe do you belong?“ "The Chip-aeway
tribe," replied the IndiaB, without looking to give
his interrogator a smile.

Another small article noted a unique feature of a
saw mill at Manistee--a six-chime whistle on a new engine
house.

It wakes the men up with "Yankee Doodle," sets
them to work at 6 a.m. with "Pop Goes the Weasel,"
calls them off for dinner with ”Over the water Char-
ley," asks them to commence at 1 p.m. with "Hail
Columbia," and quit for supper with "Rally Round the
Flag Boys.”

An item about an injury in the lumber business,
one of many published by the Gazette, nevertheless con-
tained an element of humor:

A San Francisco man, who was so badly injured by

a pile of lumber falling upon him that he was compelled
to amputate a leg, has sued the owners of the lumber

 

lIbid, February, 1873, p. 33.
2Ibid.

31bid, April, 1873, p. 105.

56

for $50,000 damages. They have offered to give him 1
enough to make a wooden leg, but he won't look at it.

A number of notes in the Gazette revealed the
dangers of the business and the fact that few precautions
were taken in the mills against accidents. There were
reports of fire casualties, drownings, boiler explosions,
.saw mishaps, dismemberments, falls, and of a raftsman who
was "electrified," being struck by lightning but not killed.

But attacks of wild beasts in these great forests
are not the only trial of the hardy loggers. No time
of their stay in the woods is exempt from peril.
WOunds are accidentally received from the axe; limbs
are torn from falling trees, and branches broken by
them from other trees, made brittle by intense frost,
flying in all directions, threaten injury and endanger
life. Their career is all hardship and danger, while
their occupation is of immense importance to the lum-

ber trade.

Another item reported that "since the erection of

Clint's Dam, below Grand Rapids, on the Wisconsin, over

forty men have been drowned."3

The hazards of working in the mills were revealed

in these two notes in the Gazette:

George Rozelle, employed in Peters' saw mill at
Bay City, was literally pierced through and through
with a flying board on the lst inst. The sharp point
entered at one side of his back and protruded at the
other, leaving a hole four inches wide at the entrance

 

lIbid, August, 1873, p. 49.
2Gazette, October, 1873, p. 113.

3Ibid, May, 1873, p. 159.

 

 

57

and two at the exit. Strange to say, the man did not
die, but is now almost entirely recovered.1

A shocking accident occurred at Truckee, Califor-
nia, recently, in a saw mill. One of the men had his
hand caught so that the saw struck the tip of his
fingers. He called to another man to help him, and
in running forward that man slipped, fell across the
saw, and was cut in two in no time. The other one
lost three fingers.2

 

11bid, August, 1873, p. 33.

21bid, April, 1873, p. 131.

CHAPTER VI
THE LUMBERING ERA

Practically the whole of the Lower Peninsula of
Michigan was covered with a dense forest growth in the
early 18003. Hardwoods grew mainly in the southern two
or three tiers of counties. But a large portion of the
Lower Peninsula and practically the whole of the Upper
Peninsula were densely covered with pine, the most valu-
able of all woods for building purposes.1

The Saginaw Valley was the first region in which
large scale exploitation of the pine forests was under-
taken. It comprises the largest drainage basin in Michi-
gan, some 6,260 square miles, or more than 10 per cent of
the total state land area of 56,451 square miles.2 From
its main stream, the Saginaw River, numerous tributaries
flowed into the very heart of the heavily timbered dis-

tricts, providing abundant avenues for the easy

 

1Henry M. Utley and Byron M. Cutcheon, Michigan:
As a Provtnce, Territory and State (Lansing: Publlshlng
Society of Michigan, 1906) pp. 276-277.

2Fred Dustin, "Saginaw County as a Center of Abori-
ginal Population," Michigan Historicaleollections (Lans-
ing: Michigan Historical Society, 1915) Vol. XXXIX,
p. 251.

58

 

59

transportation of logs in rafts and floats to the mills.
One advantage that the Saginaw Valley had over many timber
sections was that shipments of lumber could be made dir-
ectly to all parts of the world through the navigational

system of the Great Lakes. It was an appropriate head-

quarters from which to report the activities of the lumber

trade of the world.

De Tocqueville, who visited the Saginaw region in

1831, predicted what was to occur when the lumbering began

in earnest.

In a few years the impenetrable forests will have
fallen; the sons of civilization will break the silence
of the Saginaw; the banks will be imprisoned by quays;
its current, which now flows on unnoticed and tranquil
through a nameless waste, will be stemmed by the prows
of vessels. We are perhaps the last travelers allowed
to see the primitive grandeur of this solitude.

It was not until about 1848 that the Saginaw Valley
came to be considered a lumbering region and only after
1850 did much lumbering actually begin.2 The value of

lumber was not immediately realized.

The early settlers found the tasks of clearing
this heavy timber from the land to make it ready for
agricultural purposes a difficult and arduous one.
In the beginning they simply slashed the huge trees
and burned them where they fell. This was a

 

1George N. Fuller, Michigan: A Centennial History

of the State and Its People (Chicago: Lewis Publishing
Co., 1939) V01. I, p. 511.

2Indian and Pioneer History of the Sa inaw Valle ,
(East Saginaw, Mich.: Thomas Galatian, 1866) p. 51.

 

 

60

destructive process, but it seemed the only thing to
do, if the land was to be laid bare for cultivation.
Fortunately, most of the pioneers left large timber
tracts, uncovering no more land than essential for
growing crops. Later the farmer foufd the timber land

more valuable than the cleared land.

A great wave of migration was beginning to move
westward, only slightly checked by the Black Hawk War of
1832, and the rapid development of the region around the
southern end of the Great Lakes and as far west as the
Mississippi called for immense quantities of building
material. This was among the factors that stimulated the
first great onset upon the pine resources of Michigan.2

A sawmill was built by Rufus Stevens at the cross-
ing of the Thread River near Flint in Genesee County about
1830. Judge Albert Miller of Bay City mentioned seeing
that mill on his first visit to Saginaw. Although this
was probably the first mill on a Saginaw River tributary,
the first steam sawmill was built in Saginaw in 1834 by
Harvey and Gardner Williams.3 That mill and others built
by Harvey Williams marked the start of the lumbering boom
in the Saginaw Valley.

The first cargo of clear lumber ever shipped from
the Saginaw Valley was loaded at the Emerson mill in
1847. It was the first lot of clear cork pine to

 

1Utley and Cutcheon, p. 276.

2Fuller, Michigan, p. 511.

3Hotchkiss, History of the Lumber and Forest
Industry, pp. 39, 94.

 

61

reach the market at Albany, where it came in competi-
tion with the pine lumber of Maine, which for years
had been judged the standard of excellence. An immed-
iate demand was created for Saginaw pine lumber, and
from that time mills of constantly increasing capacity

were constructed . 1

By 1854 there were twenty-nine mills on the river,

with others being built. The cutting capacity of the

mills was estimated at 100 million board-feet a year.2 ”3
Saginaw became the chief seat of the lumber industry of
eastern Michigan for nearly thirty years.3
In 1861 a quantity of lumber was shipped to Quebec 44
5.?

 

 

and it was of such a quality as to draw this comment from

the Montreal Gazette: "The deals that have reached Quebec

this season from the district of country known as the

Saginaw Valley, in Michigan, are allowed to be the best

quality that has been placed on the market."4

Eastern timbermen, as well as speculators from
Detroit, Saginaw, Muskegon, and Chicago began to buy pine

lands in whole sections, quarter sections or in choice

forties in the 1840's and 1850's. Besides, land grants to

railroads and to canal and road companies by the federal

government tied up vast tracts of pine land for later sale

 

1Fuller, p. 513.

2A board-foot of lumber is a piece of wood one
foot long, one foot wide and one inch thick.

3Fu11er, p. 513.

4Indian and Pioneer History, p. 48.

62

to lumbermen and to settlers. Early prices seldom exceeded
$1.25 an acre. Laws loosely drawn and inadequately en-
forced, together with the utter lack of a timber land pol-
icy, favored the speculator and often invited fraud against
either government or private absentee land owners.1

The profits made in the business were immense,
much depending upon obtaining title to tracts where the
best timber stood.

Timber "cruisers," or "land lookers," spotting a
particularly choice tract, would hurry to the nearest land
office to "enter" the land, often racing their rivals.
Millions of acres of land designated as "swampy” were
donated to the states by the federal government about
1850, and in 1856 the state was given lands to grant to
companies that would build railroads through the undevel-
oped sections.2

Hotchkiss, who moved to the Saginaw Valley about
the time of the end of the Civil War, describes the prin-
cipal towns and the situation with regard to the lumber

industry at the time:

Bay City, at the mouth of the Saginaw River, was
a young town of about 500 inhabitants supported by

 

lLewis Beeson, ed., This is Michigan: A Sketch of
These Times and Times Gone B (Lansing: Michigan Histori-
cal Commission, 1953) p. 5 .

2Willis F. Dunbar, Michigan Through the Centuries,

I (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., Inc., 1955)
p. 293.

 

63

about.a.dozen fair-sized sawmills with a production
(If about one hundred and fifty million feet of lumber
per year and was looked upon more as an adjunct to the
cities of East Saginaw and Saginaw City with popula-
tions of about 3,000 and 2,000 respectively, each the
seat of a large lumber production financed by wealthy
eastern capitalists and former manufacturers of the
retrograding lumber industry of the state of Maine,
attracted hither by the enormous and rich white pine
forests upon the banks and adjacent regions of several
rivers and centering in and finally forming the Sagi-
naw River. The timber of these river sources was of
the highest possible character, unexcelled by the
timber supply of any other section of the nation in
the production of the higher and more valuable quant-
ities, which with the increasing growth of the nation
were yearly becoming of increased demand in the East,
while a rapidly developing western country gave in-
creasing demand for the coarser qualities of manufac-
ture. With the Civil War at this time in its more
acute condition, and business conditions generally
throughout the nation in a most depressed state, yet
notwithstanding the scarcity of transportation facil-
ities and the high rates of freightage, the excellent
quality of Saginaw lumber created a considerable
demand at the seductive prices of $14 to $16 per thou-
sand for the upper grades, $7 for the "fourths" and
$3.50 to $4 for the common, while yielding but small
profit to the manufacturer was a tempting bait for 1
eastern dealers handling the better grades of stock.

Dow later listed the 1865 lumber production of Bay
City at about 154 million board-feet, according to custom
house figures,2 and Hotchkiss noted in his book "it is

safe to add 50 per cent to the given statement of log or

lumber production."3

 

1Hotchkiss, "Fifteen Years in Michigan," pp. 101-
102.

2Dow, The History, Commercial Advantages anguture
Pros ects¢of Bay City, Michigan (Bay City: Henry S. Dow,
8 5 In 13.

3Hotchkiss, History of the Lumber and Forest, p. 29.

 

64

Following the Civil war came the great period of
expansion in the lumbering industry as the nation began

moving westward in greater numbers.

Michigan's logging days and expansion of railroads
in the late 1860's and 1870's brought thousands of

jpeople to the sparsely populated counties of the north-
ern lower peninsula. Most of the newcomers did not
consider themselves residents. Their only thought was
to "cut and get out." Very few lumbermen purchased
the land upon which the timber grew. They purchased
rights to a certain number of acres or entered into a
contract with another company to "get out" a specified
quantity of pine logs or timber, usually several mil-
lion feet. Most of the land was owned by railroad
companies who sold their timber rights much the same
as landowners today sell oil or mineral rights but
retained the land. As each section, township and
county was cleared of its prime timber, the railroad
companies set up offices to sell the land.

After 1863, it was common for a group of men to
take up contiguous tracts of land under the Homestead Law,
with no intention at all of complying with the provisions
of the act making land available under its terms only to
bona fide settlers.2

An advertisement in the Gazette early in 1873
revealed the tremendous extent of the railroad lands and
the opportunities available to lumbermen. It noted that
500,000 acres of pine and farming lands were being offered

for sale by the Jackson, Lansing, and Saginaw railroad.

 

1Roy L. Dodge, Michigan Ghost Towns (Oscoda, Mich.:
Amateur Treasure Hunters Association, Inc., 1971) p. l.

2Dunbar, "Michigan," p. 302.

 

 

65

The lands were situated along the line of the road mainly
north of the Saginaw River and "contains exceedingly large
and valuable tracts of pine on the Tittabawassee, Rifle,

Muskegon, Manistee, Au Sable and Cheboygan Rivers.” The

timber was white pine, Norway pine, beech and maple.
Purchasers could pay one fourth down and the remainder in

three equal annual installments with interest at 7 per

cent. A. S. Gaylord, whose name was to become that of a

northern Michigan resort city, was the assistant land

commissioner offering the sale.1

Early estimates of the amount of pine available in
Michigan were too small, because some areas not on major

streams were thought to be inaccessible. "Railways are

fast changing this and adding every season new and valuable

tracts of pine to the general stock available for harvest,"

said the Gazette in the February, 1873 issue.

Several important rivers in the Saginaw Valley--
the Saginaw, the Tittabawassee, the Flint, the Cass, the
Shiawassee, and several smaller streams--were ready-made
thoroughfares for the transportation of the logs to the

mills, many of which were located on the largest river,

the Saginaw. A vast amount of lumber was produced there.

Hon. Albert Miller, in his address before the first
annual meeting of the Saginaw Valley Pioneer Society,
said that last year there was manufactured in the

 

lGazette, January, 1873, p. 14.

 

 

66

‘valley'over six hundred and nineteen million feet of
lumber, which in order to give some idea of the magni-
'tude of the business, said that if the lumber had all
been.cut into one and one half inch plank, there would
be sufficient to lay a walk three feet wide around the

lcircumference o the earth and have twenty-five mil-
lion feet left.

The Gazette reported in August, 1873, that there

'were seventy-nine sawmills located along the Saginaw River

 

Fe
between Saginaw City and Essexville (downstream from Bay 1
City) and that the mills were employing 1,976 men and cut-
ting about four million feet of lumber daily.

According to a Gazette report in May, 1873, the 5;

largest shipment of lumber from the Saginaw River made up

to that time was made on Saturday, May 10, 1873, from Bay
City. "It went out in 34 vessels, and consisted of
7,000,000 feet of lumber, 156,000 staves, 70,190 feet of
timber, 5,600 barrels of salt, besides lath. The aggre-
gate valuation of the shipment was $139,923."2

Bay City also boasted what the Gazette called the
world's largest sawmill, the John McGraw and Company mill,
built for $430,000 on the ruins of an old mill, which had
burned in August, 1872, and was fired up for the first

time June 12, 1873. The McGraw mill consisted of a slate-

roofed building 181 feet by 163 feet, a boiler house

 

lGazette, Feb., 1874, p. 36.

21bid, May, 1873, p. 159.

67

66 feet by 75 feet, four salt wells with a salt block1
203 feet square and docks more than a mile in length.2

The construction of the immense McGraw mill typi-
fied the growth of the lumber industry and the area.3 Bay
City grew from a village of 700 in 1859 to a population of
27,000 in 1880, when it was the third city in population
in Michigan. It was claimed in an 1884 report that during
the decade from 1870 to 1880 only two cities in the United
States exceeded the rate of increase for Bay City--they
were Minneapolis and Denver.4

In Michigan in 1873, the lumber business amounted
to $50 million yearly, with the Saginaw Valley accounting
for $16 million of that total.5

Bay City and Saginaw firms made many and varied
products besides finished lumber. These included wooden-
ware, barrels, sash, doors, blinds, flooring, moulding,

lath, shingles, siding, pickets, telegraph poles, fence

posts, cord wood, hoops and pails and tubs.

 

1The building in which salt was produced.

2Gazette, May, 1873, p. 143. (This issue must have
been more than a month late since it reported the opening
of the mill in June.

3Later, the H. W. Sage mill in West Bay City was
even larger.

4Michigan State Gazeteer and Business Directory
(Detroit: R. L. Polk and Company, 1884) pp. 185- 186.

5Gazette, April, 1873, p. 125.

 

68

Lumber was shipped principally to Milwaukee, Chi-
cago, and eastern markets, although some went to European

and other countries.

Direct shipments have been made from Saginaw to
nearly every eastern, central and southern state, to
California, Liverpool, London, France, the Sandwich
Islands, Australia, Valparaiso and many other foreign
port? and everywhere it stands unrivaled as to qual- F“
ity. “‘

The American Lumberman was later to comment on the
quantity of timber produced in the Saginaw Valley:

The lumber manufacturing district of the Saginaw L
River, a strip of territory eighteen miles long and a
little over the width of the river it traverses, has g.
produced more pine lumber than any other lumber manu-
facturing district in the United States. The first
sawmill was erected on the river in 1836, but it was
not until about 1850 that the production assumed note-
worthy proportions, and the statistics of the output
extend back only to 1850. From that date to the close
of 1898 there had been produced by the Saginaw River
mills a grand total of 23,247,527,022 feet of lumber.

No other single lumber producing district in the world
can equal this.

 

“a 1.,

 

1Indian and Pioneer History, p. 49.

2American Lumberman, Jan. 21, 1899, p. 45.

CHAPTER VII
TIMBER: --WHAT THE GAZETTE AND THE PRESS SAID

The press has been criticized for not speaking out
when the precious pine resources were so recklessly being
destroyed. This study has found such criticism to be gen-
erally unfounded. The press did speak, and apparently
many readers wagged their heads in assent but were power-
less to act. The lumbermen were in firm control of the
government at the local and state level, there apparently
were no outcries from academic circles and, in almost every
way, the business of America was business.

The country was too busy growing up to be concerned
with trees in the far off forests. Few had even seen their
beauty and those who had quickly tempered their admiration
by the knowledge of the financial rewards the destruction
of those trees would bring. Besides, the trees were needed
to build the country.

The press was not without blame, however, since it
could be charged that the lumber paper editors were in a
situation of conflicting interests. Any moral obligation
they might have seen toward protecting the natural

resources for American society was opposed by personal and

69

 

7O

material interests. They were inextricably bound up with
the lumbermen, for both derived their incomes from the
same source. The lumbermen got theirs from cutting down
the trees and the lumber journalists from reporting about
lumbering.

It was through the compiling of lumbering statis-
tics, which also became an important function of the
Gazette, that the press was able to determine the extent
of the depletion of forest resources and warn against it--
although futilely.

The first lumber report appeared February 22, 1856,
in the Enterprise, and was Joslin's work. It recognized
no limit to the available pine.

The most that has yet been done by way of using up

the pineries has been to cut the best timber from a
portion of the lands within a mile or a mile and a
half from the banks of the rivers. Even within this
distance there is yet much untouched, and beyond it
are vast recesses of the staple timber, which the
lumbermen will continue to penetrate, farther and
farther, for years to come.

No further attempt was made to compile statistics
until January 1, 1863, when Joslin issued a summary of
"The Saginaw Valley--Its Salt, Lumber and other Resources

for 1862." Joslin had explained the hiatus in an editorial

in the Enterprise which blamed uncooperative lumbermen,

 

lEnterprise, Feb. 22, 1856, p. l.

 

71

the lack of much additional business as a result of pub-

1ishing the figures and the failure of public officials to

assist the press.1

The most important information contained in the
report for 1862 was that "most of the lumbering opera-
tions are now carried on up the various rivers from
25 to 100 miles above East Saginaw," and that most of
the pine within 25 miles had been cut away . . . that

pine lands age mostly held by lumbermen and specula-
tors 0 O O 0

By 1866 the Enterprise was publishing actual re-
ports of the business of the mill owners during the season

and was predicting exhaustion of the pine in about twenty

years.3

The local press began to sound the warning early,
but, unfortunately, perhaps not vociferously enough.

As early as Aug. 1, 1861, George Frederick Lewis,
writing in his Courier, suggested, somewhat apologet-
ically, that "it does seem to us that cutting . . .
timber when it will bring no more in market than it
does at this time, is suicidal to all concerned and a
downright waste of the legitimate capital of the soil.
It is to be supposed, however, that lumbermen know
their own business best, and as we don‘t own 'ary a

stick, we shall not make much of a fuss at pre-
sent . . . .

Hetherington points out that no stronger protests

were voiced by any of the newspapers of the Saginaws until

 

lHetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, pp. 62-63.

21bid, p. 64.

3Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, p. 64.

4Courier, Aug. 1, 1861, p. l.

 

 

trict.

72

1868, when the Enterprise began to publish in its annual
report for 1867 not just the amount of timber cut but also

an estimate of the timber still on the ground in the dis-

1

That there was more truth than poetry in this re-
port, the Enter rise, which had gone to great pains to
secure it, knew. That it was the misfortune of the
Saginaw Valley that a large share of the men engaged
in its lumber business could only see the end of a saw
log and never look beyond it, it likewise knew.

It was probably not coincidence that the paper

published, a few weeks later, excerpts from "The Lumber
Regions of America," written for North American Review by

the Reverend C. W. Brigham of Ann Arbor:

There is no reason to think that the consumption
will die off while the facilities for getting lumber
to market are so great, and so many markets are call-
ing for a supply. The waste will go on. The owners
of the land will use their opportunity and will let
the future take care of itself. They would not be
American if they should voluntarily curtail a profit-
able business, in view of spreading it over a longer
succession of years. It is more probable that new

mills will be built, than that those alreagy built will

reduce their production or their capacity.

Although neither overproduction nor the resulting

low prices were curbing the destruction of pine, Saginaw
newspapers hailed two other factors which they believed

would. The first was an act of the state legislature in

 

1Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering

Days, p. 66.

2Ibid, p. 67.

3Enterprise, July 30, 1868, p. 1.

 

 

73

1869,zeising the price of Michigan pine lands from $1.25
to $8.00 an acre. The other was that a greater portion of
the lands were ”going into the hands of capitalists, men
who can afford to buy largely and hang onto the land.

When the pine is so controlled, then it will find its true

value and the lumber becomes profitable."1

But neither factor served to delay the decimation
as the newspapers had so fervently hoped. Lewis and Head-

ley's annual reports showed steady increases in the amount

of pine cut.

 

The nonsense of young forests growing with suffi-
cient rapidity to meet any material fraction the yearly
augmenting demand was incontinently brushed aside, and
the simple question of how best to prolong the supply
of timber then standing, and how it might be worked so
as to yield the greatest revenue, were really the only
issues seriously promoted by the editors. They had
come to recognize that, like every other great manu-
facturing specialty, lumbering was intrinsically sel-
fish and egotistical--§hat it was to a great measure

nomadic and transient.

In some of its early issues, the Gazette apparently
tended to support the point of view of the lumbermen that

there was an adequate supply and that it would be supple-

mented by new growth.

It may strike some people as curious that it
should be called waste when a man brings a valuable
commodity into market and obtains a profit with which
he is satisfied. So it has always appeared to us a

 

lIbid, Sept. 23, 1869, p. l.

2Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, p. 72.

74

mistake to point to our yearly increase of the lumber
product as a waste or a reckless slaughter of other
resources; and constant suggestions of the early end
of the pine certainly fend to belittle our business in
the eyes of strangers.

The article suggested that lumber operators should
look to the young pines for future supplies, noting, how-
ever, that pine is propogated from seed and that stumps
and roots never send up sprouts. It further noted: "The
pine now standing in our forests is by no means the neces-
sary limit of our supply:" and, "The only real waste of
pine is the destruction of the young trees." The article
cautioned: "The owner of the land should scrupulously ab-
stain from the destruction of the young pines, unless he
has determined to clear the land entirely for purposes of
cultivation."

In the same issue the editors commented along the
same lines:

The prophecies of early exhaustion of the pine
supply, which were old in the east a score of years
ago, came to us here in Michigan, and have been re-
peated again and again by editors and publishers of
all kinds of books and papers. Even as soon as the
great lumber regions of the state had fairly entered
upon the development of their resources these prophec-
ies began to be dinned in our ears from almost every
side, and it has come in some sections to be considered
somewhat in the light of a patriotic local duty to
constantly reiterate these warnings of an approaching

end to the vast pine Sorests which are such mines of
wealth to our peOple.

 

1Gazette, February, 1873, p. 39.

21bid.

 

 

75

Another article, "The Waste of Timber," in the same
issue, was reprinted from the Philadelphia Press. It
called for establishment of forest laws, including one to
provide for the planting of a tree where one is felled. In
seventy five years a new crop of timber would be ready.

The article declared that three years stocking of the east- F?-
ern market would completely exhaust the standing timber in i ;
Pennsylvania. A statement to that effect was purportedly ; ‘

signed by the leading lumbermen of Pennsylvania, the arti-

 

cle said. The Gazette noted, however, that the Willigflgr L; (

port Register "proceeds to show that the document is con-

 

cocted for sinister purposes inimical to the best interests
of Williamsport in particular." It stated further that the
lumbermen never authorized their signatures to be used on
the statement and speculated that it was a scheme to create
a rise in the price of timber by declaring its scarcity.
The same tone was followed a few months later, in

an article reprinted from the Buffalo Express:

But the so-called "wood famine," of which we begin
to hear prophecies is not so desperate a matter as an

exhaustion of the coal supply in England, for the
reason thit with care and time the forests will grow

up again.
At the same time as it down-graded the reports of

the decimation of the pine, the Gazette was reprinting an

 

1Gazette, May, 1873, p. 169.

 

76

article from the Leffel Mechanical News, which was outlin-

ing the problem:

There appears to be no effectual check possible to
the steady reduction of that part of our national
‘wealth.which consists of its pine forests, once regard-
ed as well nigh boundless and practically inexhaust-
able. It is extremely difficult to reach by any
legislative enactments a matter so peculiarly under
the control of commercial and industrial requirements
as the cutting of timber; and there has been no satis-
factory scheme as yet devised by government officials
for promoting the production of timber so as to keep
pace with its consumption. It would be deemed arbit-
rary in this country to forbid the cutting down of
forests by their lawful owners: and the encouragement
of planting is, on the other hand, a slow and uncertain
remedy. But to one or the other, or both, of these
alternatives, the problem would seem destined to be
finally brought, if it is ever to be solved.

By June, 1873, some four months later, however,
the Gazette was mentioning "the mistaken idea prevalent in
regard to the inexhaustibility of our timber."

In October, 1873, the change in attitude became
even more apparent, as the Gazette suggested that more
attention should be given to the propagation and preserva-
tion of forests. It noted that there was a great concern
about the decimation of forests in the general press also.

An accompanying article stated:

About 7,000 acres are cleared of timber each week
day in this country. Of the annual crop $75,000,000
worth goes to fuel and twice as much to fencing. The
locomotives in this country consume no less than
700,000 cords, or 500 acres a year.

 

1Gazette, February, 1873, p. 43.

 

77

In November of the same year the Gazette reprinted
an article from the Chicago Inter Ocean, entitled ”The
Approaching Timber Famine," which noted that substitutes

for timber were being sought and asked for congressional

action.

From the Chicago Times a month later came another
similar report, stating: "'WOodmen spare that tree' has
very little effect on the apparently unpoetic souls of the
Michigan lumbermen," and noting that statistics showed
that they annually strip 300,000 acres, or 468 square
miles, of pine timber land to supply the numerous saw

mills of the state.

"It matters little whose guess (regarding the

amount of standing pine left) is correct," George Frederick

Lewis declared.

All must agree on one point, that the present mode
and manner of devastating our pine forests without
sense, sentiment, or system is slaughter . . . wanton
butchery . . . . The average supply of timber in the
hands of lumbermen in the Saginaw Valley is not more
than six year's stock. If the supply of timber be
double what we have estimated it in the Saginaw dis-
trict . . . and the increase in manufacture and the
production of shingles, square and long timber is in
any reasonable ratio proportionate to the increase
since l863--and there never yet has been a season
without a material increase in the manufactured pro-
duct--taking into account the average destruction by
fires, of which there is a yearly increasing ratio of
risk as the territory is encroached upon by woods and

mill operations, it is not adequate to a fifteen year's
stock . . . .

 

1Saginawian, Feb. 14, 1874, p. l.

r—‘n 1. v.11. HI-

 

-. . Y l I
r ,‘ .~
Rpm:

 

78

The Saginawian later lashed out against lumbermen

who met to form a "Michigan Society for the Protection of

Timber" in 1874, but aimed the organization mainly at pro
tecting the pine owners from unjust and unequal taxation.

The men who own and control the pine timber of
Michigan are mainly "well- fixed" millionaires . .
yet they do not all take the world gracefully, joyful
at the prosperous situation into which they have
worked . . . and rather than exercise their brains to
devise means of making the most of their vulgar fract-
ion of God's acres, and making it in a way that shall
also yield the greatest benefit to the localities
where their timber is located, they worry about the
evils to which they are subjected, and, in their recent
gathering, upon mature deliberation for ever so many
hours, bring out this one puny proposition, that the
only bond of sympathy between owners of timber in
Michigan is the necessity for 'protection' against
"barbarious" taxation. It is nothing that by aiding
and deve10ping collateral interests, this, the sponsor
for the leading manufacturing interest, may do the
state much good; . . . it is nothing that it is the
part of prudence to obtain correct statistics that wise
calculations thereon may be made for the future; it is
nothing that by the interchange of facts and opinions,
and a thorough business investigation of this most
beneficent endowment, waste and destruction may be
prevented, its value materially enhanced, and the time
of its continuance largely protracted: nothing that it
is part and parcel of the resources of the commonwealth
of Michigan, and ought, in justice, to be managed when
it can be done so without detriment to the owner's
interests, to promote the interests of the whole peo-
ple; nothing to nobody but a big fifty million dollar
baby that will have some sort of soothing syrup or
fight. Something should be done to preferve and devel-
op as well as merely to protect timber.

"For the moment, a disillusioned Saginaw press lost
sight of the fact that it was this very monopoly of pine

by a few capitalists that it had been advocating for years."

 

lSaginawian, March 14, 1874, p. 1.

u-mlxfl
_"\
~.a , -;.-
, ~. ...._ .-

 

79

The reduction in lumber cut from 619,867,021 feet in 1873
to 574,632,771 feet in 1874 was more a result of the Jay
Cooke crash of 1873 than a reaction to the vigorous pro-
tests of the Saginaw press.1

Whether it was disgust at their ineffectiveness,
or hard times, the compilers did not issue the annual
statement in pamphlet form in 1875.

"Notwithstanding there is a reduction in the number
of mills," the Courier said in part, "there is no reduction
in the number of saws . . . the champion mill, of course,
is McGraw's, it being the largest in the world . . . .2

A mild winter in 1876 caused lumbermen difficulty
in getting the logs out of the woods and the Gazette took
occasion to comment: "The desired curtailment which lum-
bermen plead for, but are unwilling to plan for, kind
nature seems disposed to bring about."3

The Gazette's comments on the waste of timber
began to be more moderate, as the nation was in the midst
of an economic depression that followed the crash of 1873

and its columns indicated that the lumber business was

greatly affected.

 

lHetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, p. 127.

2Daily Courier, March 13, 1875, p. 3.

3cazette, Jan. 13, 1876, p. 37.

 

 

 

 

80

It occasionally reprinted articles, however, such

as one which ran February 10, 1876, from the Scientific

 

American, entitled: "Timber Waste a National Suicide.“
The Gazette noted the problems the compilers of

statistics had encountered in gathering lumber business

information and, somewhat hopefully, forecast better rela-

tions. It was indicated that economic conditions were

causing lumbermen to be more wary.

There used to be a class of mill men, who were
very suspicious of everything and everybody, but now
it is becoming beautifully less. They were not afraid
to have their season's cut and stock on hand put down
in black and white, so far as that is concerned, but
they were skeptical lest someone would be putting up
a job on them, as the saying runs. Visions of the tax
assessors went flitting through their heads like bats
through a mill loft, while the statistician didn't look
altogether lovely in their eyes. But such prejudices
are passing away and such persons are coming to learn
more and more that these lumber journals are issued

only to pfotect and properly represent their great
industry.

For the first time, however, the compilers met
with opposition from the manufacturers in securing inform-
ation. "The objection came principally from three--and
based mainly on the idea that the publication of the de-
tails of their business would be injurious to the trade;

though two subsequently gave the information. There was

 

lIbid, Nov. 16, 1876, p. 355.

 

 

 

81

no protest regarding any of the details except the column
headed 'Stock on Hand'"1

Perhaps it was from this protest that the compilers
conceived of a new idea--the publication of a complete
resume of the year within a week after the final closing

of navigation, to give lumber operators indications of the

 

necessities of the trade for the coming winter, "so that F?
whatever lessons were to be learned from the figures of 3.1
1376 might be availed of by operators in time for the busi- I
ness of the winter's crop cut."2 j~3
And that winter, 640,166,231 feet, a record for E7

the valley, were cut in the Saginaws.3

An angry debate arose among lumbermen when it was
proposed that the federal government give bonuses for im-
portation of Canadian timber, so that the supply of the
United States would be prolonged.

The debate was touched off when Bates had moved at
the convention of the National Association of Lumbermen in
Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that the association secretary be
required to furnish the lumber papers with official

statistics.4 It grew hotter when the Gazette printed an

 

1Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumberipg
Days, p. 75.

 

2Courier, Dec. 9, 1876, p. 2.

3Ibid, Dec. 22, 1877, p. 1.

4Gazette, Nov. 16, 1876, p. 355.

82

open letter from.a lumberman, James Little, of Montreal,

quoting John McGraw, the owner of the world's largest mill,

as saying:

Some mode or manner should be devised to ascertain
how much standing pine there is today. We must not
dream that there is a never-ending quantity of timber
and come to almost the last tree before we know where
we are. Let us see what we have got, and see the wis-
dom of preventing the continuance of the wild deitruc-
tion of timber without profit or results . . . .

Arthur Hill, of Saginaw, one of the most powerful
of the lumbermen, answered for those opposed to the removal

of the tariff on Canadian lumber.

I do not claim that the timber supply is unlimited,
nor seek to excuse the present reckless waste of stand-
ing pine. I am simply striving to show how shadowy is
the domain of facts from which your magic pen summons
forth the gaunt spectre of a timber famine to danse
before the eyes of the authorities at Washington.

Hill advised Little in a stinging series of com-

ments that were sure to haunt him in later years when the

timber ran out:

1. Don't fret about a timber famine within ten
years, for it won't come off.

2. Don't worry about posterity's suffering from a
timber famine, for posterity develops a surprising
capacity for taking care of itself.

3. Lumber a reasonable amount of your Michigan
pine each year, cutting that which is burned or most

exposed to fire.

 

1Ibid.

2lbid, Nov. 30, 1876, p. 389.

 

 

83

4. Sell it where you can get the most money for
it,even if it be in the streets of Montreal.

5. If you wish to 'save' timber, let it be your
Canada pine where the risk and expense of holding are

lighter.
6. Don't agitate the removal of the lumber tariff,

flnrthen, so long as you are the 'only individual who
has mooted' the subject, your Michigan interests will

not be imperiled .

7. Lastly, if you really in your heart believe in
a.timber famine in the next decade, advise all your
Cbnadian friends to hold their timber, showing them
what prices they will soon get from Yankees hungry for
it. Advise the Canadian, instead of thelAmerican gov-

ernment, to put bonuses on importations.

Other lumbermen also wrote letters that were re-
printed in the Gazette in subsequent issues, but Hill had
summed up their obstinate and foolhardy point of view.

An article in the Gazette a year and one-half
later indicated that there was a movement toward conserva-

tion of forest resources, but that the lumbermen were the

biggest roadblock to progress in that area.

The matter of forest tree culture and preservation
.is in rather an anomalous state in this country. At
lone end of the national domain, people are planting
trees and studying every means to turn denuded lands
back into forests, at the other, woods are being felled
and a small war is in progress againsii' the government
on account of its preventive efforts.

The lumbermen were quickly discovering methods to

cut the timber from all sections more quickly and more

 

'lGazette, Nov. 30, 1876, p. 389.

21bid, April 6, 1878, p. 300.

84

efficiently. A notable article in the Gazette, written by

a Farwell newspaperman, described how the onslaught was

hastened by the railroad. It was entitled: "A Visit to

the Largest Pine Forest in Michigan: The First Logging

Railroad in Existence and the Most Extensive Logging

Operations in the World." The article described the work

of twenty lumber camps, fourteen of them owned by W. S.

Gerrish. The camps, all located in a four-square-mile

area, employed from twenty to seventy-five men each. The

writer commented:

What a fearful destruction of pine forest.
part of the world on the same extent of territory, are
such gigantic lumber operations going on. It is esti-
mated that at the close of this season's operations at
least 100,000,000 feet of logs will have been removed
from this section, and this work is expected to con-
tinue for at least ten years, with timber still left.1

In no

In another issue two weeks later the Gazette re-

printed an article from the Eau Claire Free Press, which

carried the headline: "Destruction of Pine Forests in

Wisconsin." That article down-played the effects of the

cutting of timber and cited the commonly believed idea
that the removal of timber caused diminished rainfall and

unfavorable climate changes. "The most extensive pine

timber belt in the United States, that of Michigan,

 

lGazette, July 16, 1878, p. 54.

85

Wisconsin and Minnesota is in danger of destruction, not
so much from the axe of the lumbermen as from other

causes."1

A number of Gazette articles about this time began
to blame destruction of the forests more and more on fire

and on the settlers efforts to clear land than on lumber-

men .

But another noteworthy article, indicating its
continuing concern about the problem, although not propos-
ing any remedies, was published August 6, 1878. It was
entitled: "Saginaw Pine: A Review of the History of Pine
in the Saginaw Valley: And Some Speculations Regarding
its Latter End: Some Facts and Figures that Saginaw Lum-
bermen would do well to ponder over." The article

commented:

The maximum has been reached so far as the quantity
manufactured is concerned, and gaginaw will never make
the showing it has in the past.

The immense amounts of pine tha annually goes to
the mills cannot be a perpetual supply. While we do
not apprehend that it will be necessary to open Cana-
dian markets to protect or perpetuate our own lumber
trade, we do think if our lumbermen had a higher appre-
ciation of the value of their pine lands, and made a
reasonable economical effort in husbanding the supply,
they would make more money a? individuals, and the
country would be better off.

 

lIbid, July 30, 1878, p. 76.
2Gazette, Aug. 6, 1878, p. 83.

3Ibid, p. 87.

86

The article noted that the size of logs being taken
from the woods was being reduced each year. It presented
figures showing a reduction from 243 feet average per log
in 1864 to an average of 180 feet per log in 1877. It
noted further that "nine thousand million feet of pine
timber has been swept from the Saginaw district alone, de-
nuding thousands and thousands of acres."

The Gazette reported further:

In 1853 there were but sixty one mills in all the
territory embraced within Saginaw, Bay, Shiawassee and
Genesee counties, and none north of this point. The
total included twenty three mills on the Saginaw River.

There are now over 300 mills with capacity of manufact-
uring over one billion feet.

 

It noted that the cutting of the pine had reduced
the numbers of mills in the southern part of the state and
that only one or two mills were running in Detroit, one of
eight mills was running in Port Huron and that the number
of mills in Flint had been reduced from seven to three in

the past four years. The Gazette's comments concluded

 

with the following:

. . . if our lumbermen who own large tracts--and
the pine is gradually drifting into the hands of a
few--would realize that the country is just recuperat-
ing from a panic, that the stock of standing pine in
the country is rapidly decreasing, that standing pine
will increase in value more rapidly than money at com-
pound interest, then they would make more haste to go

slow at wiping out the whole business in a year or two.2

 

1Ibid.

2Gazette, Aug. 6, 1878, p. 83.

87

The Gazette later commented that the waste was
much greater than was apparent: "The maker of square tim-
ber in the pine forests has been the most reckless destroy-
er of the trees, cutting down and leaving on the ground
probably two cubic feet for every one that has floated
down the rivers and taken to market."1

That waste was compounded in the manufacturing of
lumber, according to Hotchkiss' son, recalling his father's
experience in the field: "In those days most of the logs
were white pine and my father, in writing for the lumber
journal, showed statistics of 50 per cent waste of white
pine lumber from stump to retailer."2

If those estimates were correct, and we must assume
they were since they were made by those with actual know-
ledge of lumbering, that would mean that only one quarter
of the standing timber that was cut was ever available for
use by the American public.

The Gazette, meanwhile, had become more and more a
trade journal rather than a newspaper in editorial content
and in attitude. Even the advertising was reflecting this

trend, being mainly for sawmill machinery and other equip-

ment. Some pine lands were still being offered for sale,

 

11bid, Aug. 27, 1878, p. 5.

2Everitt S. Hotchkiss, "Reminiscences," unpublished
autobiography, typescript, in Michigan Historical Collect-
ions of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

88

however. Articles in one issue were headlined: "Miller's
Improved Saw Sharpener," "The Railroads of the United
States," "Spark Arresters in Saw Mills," "Fine American
Cutlery," and "Preventing Rust on Iron,"1

Hetherington points out that the situation was be-
coming desperate for the lumbermen, faced more and more
with the reality that the timber of Michigan was disappear-
ing.

And there was no point in the world where the pros-
perity of the individual mill owner depended so direct-
ly on the continuance of the log supply as in the
Saginaws. Owners were now seeking a reserve of timber
to back up their investments; every firm was trying to
buy as much each year as it had cut.

The aggregate transactions in pine land for the
year 1879 reached a figure at least five times greater
than that of any previous year, the change in every
instance tending to concentrage the body of the timber
in the hands of a few owners.

Bennett set the tone the Gazette was to follow in
the future on July 2, 1879, as he remarked on the first
seven years of the publication's history in an editorial
stating:

Having reached a firm foundation, the Gazette pro-
poses to stay by the trade for another seven years, at
least, or until the expiration of the time allowed by
the estimators for the destruction of the pine forests,

and it expects to grow in usefulness as it grows in
years and experience.

 

1Gazette, July 16, 1878, p. 22.

2Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, p. 77.

89

Obviously, Bennett was resigned to the fact that
there was nothing his prattle could do to stop the waste
of the forests and he would ride out the time remaining.
The Gazette's comments turned more toward matter-of-fact
reporting of the dire predictions of others, as this one:

The wanton destruction of the pine forests of Nev-
ada has called forth an energetic protest from Mr.
Charles E. Sargent, in the American Journal of Science.
He says that the forests of Nevada consist chiefly 6?"
a few hardy species, which have reached their present
maturity and extent only after centuries of exceeding
slow growth and a severe struggle with the adverse
conditions of the soil and climate. Once destroyed,
he adds, the want of moisture will forever prevent
their restoration, either by natural or artificial
means: he urges legislative action in the matter.

The lumbermen were beginning to look more and more
toward Canada, and Bennett began to recognize it, despite
his statement of less than a year previous.

"What will the children do for lumber when the
fathers have destroyed the forests?" is often asked.
When the forests of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota
shall have disappeared before the insatiable ax of the
lumberman, there will still stretch away to the north,
toward the regions of perpetual snow, a virgin
forest . . . .2

Inevitably, there had to come the time when jour-
nalists of the valley were not alone in their regard for
the lesson of figures--the hereafter in the lumber busi-

ness," wrote Hetherington. "There was general assent when

the Saginawian, in its annual review of 1880, announced

 

 

lGazette, July 23, 1879, p. 6.

2Gazette, June 11, 1879, p. 6.

 

90

that the 'Lapeer pinery and the Flint River supply is ex-
hausted, and three years will close out all the Bad River
and Beaver stock.”l

Bennett turned to rationalizing about the situa-
tion, stating: " . . . so that by the time lumbering
shall cease to be a great industry, agricultural and manu-
facturing will take its place."2

In the Courier's review of 1882, issued under the
auspices of the Saginaw Board of Trade, but compiled by
Cowles, it was announced that the quantity of lumber manu-
factured was 971,320,317 feet, exceeding in magnitude the
product of any previous year. The "boom" in all branches
of industry throughout the country, coupled with an easy
money market, stimulated manufacturers to their utmost.3

Buyers were in the market to purchase at least a
thousand million feet, the annual cut. But it was believed
there was not enough pine for sale in the Saginaw region
to total five hundred million feet. The craze for pine
lands became phenomenal: never before was there such a

speculative mania in the business. In the latter part of

1881, a Saginaw speculator purchased a tract of land for

 

1Hetherington, Journalism During the Lumbering
Days, p. 77.

2Gazette, June 15, 1881, p. 2

3Courier, Jan. 14, 1882, p. l

 

91

$10,900. Six weeks later he sold it for $25,500. Another
sale of 200 acres of pine land brought $2,400.1

The Gazette noted that there had been four and one
half billion feet cut in Michigan in 1881 and that the cut
of 1882 was estimated to be six billion feet. It called
the cutting of a billion feet of lumber from forests tri-
butary to the Saginaw "a drain on our resources."2 It was
the industry's all-time peak in the Saginaw Valley.

The following year Bennett was weekly advising:

”With the rapid consumption of timber now going on, tree

 

w, _ . --.'.' ur - ._T__‘m'-‘lr'l-
flap
1

production is sure to prove profitable, and nobody can
start too soon in that line."3

For a few desperate years the shortage of pine
drove the Saginaw lumbermen to Canadian markets. Huge
rafts of logs were towed to the mills of the Saginaw River
from Georgian Bay, about 250 miles across Lake Huron.

Soon there was no more pine to be purchased in the
Saginaws.

The half-hearted crusade of the press to curb the

reckless destruction of precious pine had failed.

 

1Courier, March 2, 1882, p. 1.

2Gazette, August 6, 1882, p. 2.

31bid, June 20, 1883, p. 1.

CHAPTER VIII
THE AFTERMATH

As the pine forests began to disappear, the Lumber-
man's Gazette also faded, as Bennett had so accurately
predicted about ten years previously. While it had been
reporting a circulation of about 4,000 for years, press
directories in the mid-18803 began listing the Gazette's
circulation at about 2,000 copies. After 1885 no record
of the Gazette can be found in Bay City, although there
are indications that it was published as late as May, 1887.

Gustin wrote concerning the fate of the Gazette:

"In the summer of 1887 it was sold the Timberman of Chi-

 

cago, and it moved to that city and strangled. The Gazette
was the oldest lumber journal in the world, and had an
international circulation, but as the lumber industry of
the Saginaw Valley began to wane, Mr. Bennett concluded it

wise to get from under."1

 

1BayCityTimes Tribune, Dec. 2, 1923, p. 2.

92

93

The Gazette was merged into the Timberman, which
later was united with the Northwestern Lumberman to form
American Lumberman.1

As the lumbermen moved westward with the available
timber, so the lumber publications followed them. Perhaps
the lessons of Michigan and the midwest regarding timber
were not lost, for steps were taken in the west to pre-
serve and prolong the use of the forests.

But it was too late for Michigan. The industry
that built a state died quickly when Ontario decreed in
1898 that "all logs cut on crown lands must be manufactured
within Canada," in retaliation for the 1897 import duty
that the United States had restored on white pine lumber.
The log rafting stopped, almost over night.2

The forests were gone, and now the industry fol-
lowed into oblivion. A Bay City newspaper writer recalled
in 1935:

The crash of the majestic pine tree, felled by the
rhythmic blows of the woodsman's axe, the whine of the
gang saw as it sped through the heart of the great
pine timber, rivers choked with logs, lumber piles,

sawdust piless peavies, and dock wollopers--gone, just
memories now.

 

1Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United
States and Canada, Winifred Gregory, ed. (New York: H. W.
Wilson, 1943) p. 329.

 

2Harold M. Foehl and Irene M. Hargreaves, L0 in
the White Pine in‘the Saginaw Valley (Bay City: Red Keg
Press, 1964) p. 53.

38ay,CityTimes, Feb. 23, 1935, sec. 5, p. 1.

 

94

“The Michigan lumbering boom netted four billion
dollars, one billion dollars more than all the gold taken
out of California during the same years, 1848-1898."1

There are only a few remaining stands of the orig-
inal white pine growth that once covered most of the state.
One is Hartwick Pines, near Grayling, perhaps the best
known and now a state park. Other stands are in Gogebic
and Ontanagon counties and near Copper Harbor, in Keweenaw l

County. The rest of the remaining forest is mainly good

for little else but pulpwood. The state owns vast quanti-

 

ties of scrub timber on “cut-over land," acquired because b,
the former owners, fat from the wealth of the trees, aban-
doned them for the delinquent taxes.

DeTocqueville was right. He was one of the last

"to see the primitive grandeur of this solitude."

 

1Detroit News, April 9, 1972, p. l-B.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Elfenbein, Julien. Business Journalism. New York: Harper
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Holbrook, Stewart H. Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History
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98

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nIWIIIHGIITIWIIINI‘IWI\IililllllllhllllillllllilIIHIiES

 

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