The western white pine’s needles grow in clusters of five and are from one and a half to four inches long. The cones are from ten to eighteen inches long. The seeds ripen the second year. Reproduction is vigorous and the forest stands are holding their own. Trees about one hundred and seventy-five feet high and eight feet in diameter are met with, but the average size is one hundred feet high and from two to three feet in diameter, or about the size of eastern white pine. The wood is useful and has been giving service since the settlement of the country began, fifty or more years ago. Choice trunks were split for shakes or shingles, but the wood is inferior in splitting qualities to either eastern white pine or California sugar pine, because of more knots. The western white pine does not prime itself early or well. Dead limbs adhere to the trunk long after the sugar pine would shed them. In split products, the western white pine’s principal rival has been the western red cedar. The pine has been much employed for mine timbers in the region where it is abundant. Miners generally take the most convenient wood for props, stulls, and lagging. A little higher use for pine is found among the mines, where is it made into tanks, flumes, sluice boxes, water pipes, riffle blocks, rockers, and guides for stamp mills. However, the total quantity used by miners is comparatively small. Much more goes to ranches for fences and buildings. It is serviceable, and is shipped outside the immediate region of production and is marketed in the plains states east of the Rocky Mountains, where it is excellent fence material. A larger market is found in manufacturing centers farther east. Western white pine is shipped to Chicago where it is manufactured into doors, sash, and interior finish, in competition with all other woods in that market. It is said to be of frequent occurrence that the very pine which is shipped in its rough form out of the Rocky Mountain region goes back finished as doors and sash. When the mountain regions shall have better manufacturing facilities, this will not occur. In the manufacture of window and hothouse sash, glass is more important than wood, although each is useless without the other. The principal glass factories are in the East, and it is sometimes desirable to ship the wood to the glass factory, have the sash made there, and the glazing done; and the finished sash, ready for use, may go back to the source of the timber.