Especially after the Civil War, the settlements of the West grew as if by magic; the railroad mileage more than doubled in the decade from 1865 to 1875, and with it, the lumber industry developed by rapid strides into its modern methods and volume. How rapidly the changes took place may be judged from the fact that, in 1865, the State of New York still furnished more lumber than any other State; now it supplies only insignificant amounts, a little over two per cent. of the total lumber cut. In 1868, the golden age of lumbering had arrived in Michigan; in 1871, rafts filled the Wisconsin; in 1875, Eau Claire had 30, Marathon 30, and Fond du Lac 20 sawmills, now all gone; and mills at La Crosse, which were cutting millions of feet annually, are now closed. By 1882, the Saginaw Valley had reached the climax of its production, and the lumber industry of the great Northwest, with a cut of 8 billion feet of White Pine alone, was in full blast. The White Pine production reached its maximum in 1890, with 8.5 billion feet, then to decrease gradually but steadily to less than half that cut in 1908. Southern development began to assume large proportions much later; at the present time, the lumber product of the Southern States has grown to amounts nearly double that of all the Northern States combined. But not only the unparalleled and ever increasing wood consumption, which now has reached 260 cubic feet per capita, five times that of Germany and ten times that of France, threatened the exhaustion of the natural supplies. Reckless conflagrations almost invariably followed the lumberman and destroyed generally the remaining stand, and surely the young growth. So common did these conflagrations become, that they were considered unavoidable, and though laws intended to protect forest property against fires were found on the statute books of every State, no attempt to enforce them was made. No wonder that those observing this rapid decimation of our forest supplies and the incredible wastefulness and additional destruction by fire with no attention to the aftergrowth, began again to sound the note of alarm. Besides the writings in the daily press and other non-official publications, we find the reports of the Department of Agriculture more and more frequently calling attention to the subject. In a report issued by the Patent Office as early as 1849, we find the following significant language in a discussion on the rapid destruction of forests and their influence on water flow: “The waste of valuable timber in the United States, to say nothing of firewood, will hardly begin to be appreciated until our population reaches 50,000,000. Then the folly and shortsightedness of this age will meet with a degree of censure and reproach not pleasant to contemplate.” In 1865, the Rev. Frederic Starr discussed fully and forcibly the American forests, their destruction and preservation, in a lengthy article in which, with truly prophetic vision, he says: