I am in the heart of one of the great timber producing districts of Canada. Every year millions of feet of logs are floated down the Ottawa River. This stream is eight hundred miles long, and, with its tributaries, taps a vast area of forests that feed the maws of the paper and the saw mills of the city of Ottawa. I have watched the latter at their greedy work, which they carry on at such a pace that the cry is being raised that the woodlands of the Dominion are being denuded, and that conservation measures must be adopted.
I have seen great tree trunks squared into timbers so fast that it was only a matter of seconds from the moment they came wet out of the river until they were ready for market. My neck aches from looking up at log piles as high as a six-story apartment, waiting to be converted into matches in one of the world’s greatest match factories. You can imagine the size of its output when I tell you that in one year it paid the government nearly two million dollars in sales taxes. At other mills piles of pulpwood, nearly as big, are soon to become paper, and in one I watched huge rolls of news-print taken off the machines and marked for shipment to the United States.
Canada is cutting down her forests at the rate of about three thousand millions of feet a year. Still this is only a fraction of one per cent. of the estimated timber resources of Canada, and the cutting can go on for a century before the supply is consumed. In the area of her forests the Dominion is exceeded only by Russia and the United States and she is second to us in the amount of lumber produced. The British Empire reaches around the globe, but half of all its forest wealth is in Canada. Not only the United Kingdom, but South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, and New Zealand depend on this country for a good part of their lumber supply.
The Canadians are now getting from their trees a per capita revenue of about seventy-five dollars a year, and this income their government is trying to safeguard. They see in us a terrible example of the extravagant use of natural resources. Of our eight hundred and twenty-two million acres of virgin forest, only one sixth is left, which we are cutting at a rate that will exhaust it in twenty-five years. This does not allow for new growth, which we are eating up four times faster than Nature produces it.
More than nine tenths of all the forest lands of Canada are owned by the government, so that she is in better position than we to control the cutting and provide for the future. In practically every province, lands good only for trees are no longer sold, and one fourth of the forest areas have been permanently dedicated to timber production. Each province administers its own forests, and there is much similarity in their conservation measures and other restrictions. The usual practice is to sell cutting rights to the highest bidders, under conditions that yield substantial revenues to the government and make it possible to supervise operations.
It is estimated that two thirds of the original stands of timber have been destroyed by forest fires, which are still causing enormous losses. Large sums collected monthly from the timber users are being spent for fire protection. Every railroad is compelled by law to maintain extensive patrols on account of the sparks from locomotives. Several of the provinces use airplanes equipped with wireless telephones or radios to enable their observers to report instantly any blaze they discover. Some of these planes are large enough to carry crews of eight or ten men, who swoop down upon a burning area as soon as it is sighted. In Manitoba an airplane recently carried firefighters in thirty-two minutes to a forest that was three days’ canoe journey from the nearest station.
Suppose we go up in one of these patrol planes, and take a look at the forests of Canada. We shall have to travel over one million square miles, for that is their area. One fourth of the land of the Dominion is wooded. The forests begin with the spruces of the Maritime Provinces and the south shore of the St. Lawrence and extend across the continent to the Pacific slope, and northward to the sub-arctic regions. There is still much hardwood left, especially north of the Great Lakes, but the conifers, or evergreens, make up about eighty per cent. of the standing timber, and furnish ninety-five per cent. of the lumber and the pulpwood. In passing over southern Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, we shall see a vast area of prairies, the lands which now form the great wheat belt. The foresters say this land once had forests but that they were destroyed by fire in ages past.
We see the finest trees near the end of our air journey. This is in British Columbia, a province that contains the largest, most compact, and most readily accessible stand of merchantable timber in all the world. It has more than half the saw timber of Canada. In this area, which includes the Rocky Mountains, the Douglas fir is the predominant type. The trees are sometimes forty, fifty, and sixty feet thick, and a single log will make a load for a car. A whole tree may fill a train when cut into boards. Here sixty-foot timbers that will square two or three feet are nicknamed “toothpicks.”
Twenty years ago the chief commercial wood of Canada was white pine. It was then the aristocrat of the north woods, and was cut from trees between one hundred and fifty and three hundred years old. Its place has now been taken by the spruces, of which there are five varieties. The spruces form about one third of all the standing timber of Canada. The annual cut amounts to something like two thousand million feet, or enough to build a board walk sixteen feet wide all the way around the world. Notwithstanding this the government foresters estimate that within the last twenty years insects and fires have destroyed twice as much spruce as the lumberjacks have cut down.
Canada’s supply of spruce is of enormous interest to us, for it feeds a great many of our printing presses. In one single year Canada has cut as much as four million cords of pulpwood, and four fifths of this goes to the United States in the form of logs, pulp, and finished paper. We Americans are the greatest readers on earth. We consume about one third of the total world output of news-print paper. Our presses use more than two million tons in a year, or nearly twice as much as Europe, which has five times our population.
A generation ago Canada had not a dozen pulp mills, and only ten years ago its product was but one sixth that of the United States. Since then our production has hardly increased, but the Canadian output has so grown that it will soon exceed that of the States. Indeed, the industry now ranks second in the Dominion. I have before me estimates showing that machines already ordered for new mills and additions will add to the Canadian capacity something like four hundred thousand tons a year. Canada now has more than one hundred paper mills, and if all were run full time at full speed, they would turn out nearly two and one half million tons of paper in a year. The world’s largest ground pulp mill is at Three Rivers, in Quebec, the great paper-making centre I have mentioned in another chapter. That province has also the largest single news-print mill, with machines that are turning out a continuous sheet of paper more than nineteen feet wide, at the rate of about eleven miles an hour, or eighty thousand miles a year. Not long ago one hundred tons of paper a day was the largest capacity of any mill. Now this is almost the standard unit in the industry. A four-hundred-ton mill is operating at Abitibi, and plants of five-hundred-ton daily capacity are already planned for.
It takes about a cord of wood to make a ton of news-print, or enough, if rolled out like a carpet, to paper the pavement of a city street from curb to curb for a distance of three and one half miles. A year’s output of a hundred-ton mill would make a paper belt six feet wide reaching four times around the waist of old Mother Earth. Take a big Sunday newspaper and spread its sheets out on the floor. You will be surprised at the area they cover. Now if you will keep in mind that it sometimes takes more than a hundred tons of paper to print a single issue you will realize how fast the forests of Canada are being converted into paper sufficient to blanket the earth.
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It remained, however, for our age, and especially North America, to make these tree tongues speak. The world never had enough paper until the process of making it from wood was discovered, and even now it can hardly cut down its forests fast enough to satisfy the insatiable demand of the printing press. I have visited paper mills in both the United States and Canada, and have watched the miracle of transforming a log into the medium of paper that carries the messages of our presidents, the doings of Congress, the news sensations of the times, or the strips of comic pictures we see every morning. Let me tell you how it is done.
Most of the Canadian paper mills are located on rivers. The trees are cut during the winter, and hauled on sledges over ice and snow to the banks of the nearest stream. In the spring the logs float down with the freshets, and the only transportation expense is the crews of men who follow the “drive” and keep the mass of logs moving. Sometimes jams or blocks occur that can be loosened only by dynamite. As the logs move down stream the mills catch them with booms strung across the river. Each mill picks out its own logs and releases the rest to continue their journey.
Labour agents in Montreal, Quebec, and other cities are now recruiting gangs of lumberjacks for this season’s operations. A single firm of this city employs six thousand men and has two thousand at work in the woods every winter. The lumberjacks live in camps, which each year are pushed farther north as the forests diminish. The work is hard, but the men are well fed and have no expenses, so that they can, if they choose, come out of the woods in the spring with a good sum in cash.
At a mill, the logs are fed into the machinery by means of conveyors, and they hardly stop moving until they come out as paper. The first step is to cut them into two-foot lengths and strip off the bark. Then they are ready for grinding. This is done in batteries of mills, each containing a large grindstone making two hundred revolutions a minute. Several of these two-foot lengths are put into a mill at a time, and pressed against the grindstone in such a way that they are rapidly torn into fine splinters. As the wood is ground up it falls into the water in the lower part of the mill and flows off. I asked a workman to open a mill I was watching to-day. As he did so I reached in and drew out a handful of the dry pulp. It was hot, and I asked if hot water was used. He replied that the water went into the mill almost ice cold, but that the friction of grinding was so great that it soon boiled and steamed.
The wet pulp passes through various mixing and bleaching processes, until it becomes a gray-white mush that looks like chewed paper. It is then ready for the paper machines. It flows first on to a broad belt of woven copper wire screening, many times finer than anything you use in your windows. As it passes over this moving belt, some of the water is sucked out, and a thin coating of pulp remains. This passes on to a cloth belting that carries it over and under a series of huge cylinders, heated by steam. These take out the rest of the water, and the pulp has become a sheet of hot, moist paper. Shiny steel rollers give the paper a smooth, dry finish. It is then wound on great spindles, and made into the huge rolls that every one has seen unloaded at newspaper offices.
In making paper, it is necessary to mix with the ground pulp a certain proportion of sulphite pulp, made by a chemical instead of a grinding process. For the sulphite the logs are cut into chips and put into great vats, where they are steam cooked with sulphurous acid. The acid disintegrates the wood, just as the stomach digests food, but it does not destroy the fibre. The result is that sulphite pulp has a longer, tougher fibre than the pulp obtained by grinding, and for this reason it is mixed with the ground pulp to give the paper greater toughness and strength.
Though it has not been very long since Canada discovered that her pulpwood forests are worth more than her gold mines, she is far from satisfied with the present situation. There is a growing movement in favour of stopping the export of pulpwood to the United States and insisting that it shall be manufactured into paper within the Dominion. It is claimed that this will not only check depletion of the forests, but will bring more paper mills to Canada. Those who support the plan have calculated that Canada now gets ten dollars out of every cord of pulpwood exported, half of which goes to the railroads. If all the wood were milled before leaving the country, they say, Canada would get five times as much, or fifty dollars instead of ten out of each cord. The government has authority to enforce the prohibition demanded, but the proposal meets with considerable opposition. The small farmers especially say that they can now get better prices for the spruce cut on their wood lots than if their market was confined to Canada only.
At the present time the total investment in Canadian paper and pulp mills is about four hundred million dollars, and the wages and salaries paid amount to over forty millions a year. To manufacture all the pulpwood now cut every twelve months would require one hundred and fifty million dollars additional capital, the erection of more than thirty new mills with a capacity of one hundred tons a day each, and eight thousand employees earning in excess of eleven million dollars a year.
As a matter of fact, our own paper business has already moved to Canada to a far greater extent than is commonly realized. Many of our largest newspapers have not only their own mills in Canada, but they own also the timber on thousands of square miles of forest lands. One estimate says sixty per cent. of the timber resources of Canada are now owned or controlled by Americans. The other day, while I was in Halifax, a group of Americans bought the timber on a seven-thousand-acre tract in Nova Scotia. There are many similar American holdings.
Canada’s water-power and her paper and pulp industry have been developed together, and each is essential to the other. It takes practically one hundred horse-power to produce a ton of paper a day, and this means that the mills must locate near available water-power or pay big bills for fuel. One of the water-power experts at Ottawa tells me that on a recent date the paper and pulp mills were using more than six hundred and thirty-seven thousand hydro-electric horse-power every twenty-four hours, in contrast with only sixty-two thousand horse-power in the form of steam. Some of the mills get their power for only one tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour or one one-hundredth of what residents of Washington, D. C, pay for their electric light.