The White Pine Era

Frederick Weyerhaeuser, a lumberman based in Rock Island, Illinois, moved into Minnesota's pine country with money he had already made cutting the white pine along the upper Mississippi and a clear intention to do the same thing here. He was not alone. The great white pines of Minnesota's north woods were, at the time, the largest remaining stand of virgin timber east of the Rockies, and the men who organized to cut them did so with industrial scale and industrial speed.

The white pine of northern Minnesota was not simply a resource. It was a building material that the nation could not get anywhere else in the quantities it needed. The cities of the Great Plains, Chicago, Omaha, Kansas City, and a thousand towns spreading across the treeless prairie, were being built from Minnesota white pine. Every farmhouse frame, every grain elevator, every railroad tie bed on the westward-expanding rail network represented board-feet of timber cut in the north woods, floated down the St. Croix or the Mississippi, milled at Stillwater or Minneapolis or Winona, and shipped south and west.

The lumberjacks who did the cutting lived in camps that moved seasonally, following the timber north as the forests closer to the rivers were exhausted. The work was genuinely dangerous. Men fell from trees, were crushed by logs in the river drives, and lost fingers and hands to the saws in the mill towns. The industry recruited heavily from Canada, from the immigrant communities of the Great Lakes states, and eventually from Scandinavia, because Scandinavian men were already experienced in the techniques of forest harvest.

In roughly fifty years, from about eighteen sixty to nineteen ten, the logging industry cut through most of Minnesota's old-growth white pine. The cutover land left behind was promoted to immigrant settlers as farmland, which much of it was not. Large sections of the former forest reverted to scrubland and eventually to second-growth. The Superior National Forest and the state forests that cover the northern third of Minnesota today are growing on land that was clear-cut within living memory at the time of the nineteen thirties.