American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  Although Man and Nature addressed many different facets of this natural environment, the book placed deforestation squarely at the center of its analysis. Substantively, the writing was expanding on the ideas Marsh first put forth in his 1847 address, only now, instead of speaking in generalities, Marsh included scores of specific historical examples, which filled hundreds of pages and lengthy footnotes. And all of this evidence pointed Marsh toward one inevitable conclusion: “With the disappearance of the forest, all is changed . . . and thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man.”

  Though severe in tone, Man and Nature did not suggest that humanity’s presence led to an inevitable conclusion for the environment. Rather, the future of any given environment rested in the hands of its inhabitants, which was especially important for America. Marsh wrote of his countrymen: “[W]e have not yet bared all the sources of our streams, not yet overthrown all the barriers which nature has erected to restrain her own destructive energies. Let us be wise in time, and profit by the errors of our older brethren!” Earlier reformers had looked to economic consequences as the sole reason to preserve the forests, but Marsh was providing environmental rationales, culled from the annals of history. His book nourished an entirely new line of argument against deforestation, that of environmental degradation.

  After months of editing and revising, Marsh’s book finally appeared in May 1864. Charles Scribner, the publisher, sold very few copies at the start, and Marsh considered the book’s prospects so bleak that he relinquished the copyright (though it was later repurchased for him). However, demand for Man and Nature soon increased, and within a few months Scribner had exhausted his initial run.

  While the full impact of Man and Nature was not felt for several generations, Marsh’s ideas quickly began to influence other thinkers. In 1865, the Reverend Frederick Starr of St. Louis, who had read Marsh, wrote an influential article titled “American Forests: Their Destruction and Preservation.” The thrust of the piece considered the economic consequences of deforestation, and Starr included a “Warnings from History” section that drew heavily on Marsh. Two years later, Increase Allen Lapham of Wisconsin published a report for his state’s legislature that combined both the economic and environmental arguments against deforestation. On the cover of the report, Lapham quoted Marsh’s line that “the earth was given to [man] for usufruct alone.” The following year, Calvin Chamberlain delivered a lecture to the Maine Board of Agriculture titled “Man a Destructive Power” that quoted extensively from Marsh’s prose.

  Marsh, meanwhile, spent the remaining years of his life in Italy. He held the post of ambassador until his death in 1882, the longest continuing tenure for a diplomat in American history to that point. He devoted much of his time to revising Man and Nature. In 1874, an expanded copy was published, retitled The Earth as Modified by Human Action. He was working on another revision when he died.

  Man and Nature—together with transcendentalism, the parks movement, and the fight to save the big trees—had sown the seeds for a conservation movement that would flourish at the turn of the century. These early stirrings, however, could not hold back the approaching tide of industrialization, an ethos America pursued with relentless vigor as the country emerged from the ravages of the Civil War and remade the landscape once more.

  4

  Forests of Commerce

  An Iron Horse Built of Wood

  ON THE MORNING of May 10, 1869, a crowd one thousand strong gathered at Promontory Summit in the Utah Territory to witness a feat once thought unachievable. The midwestern-based Union Pacific Railroad and the western-based Central Pacific Railroad, separated five years earlier by almost two thousand miles, now stood one hundred feet apart, about to unite a continent. As noon approached, Irish and Chinese immigrants, working for the two lines, respectively, set down the final tracks. Soon the locomotives from each company were almost touching, their exhaust merging into a black cloud that slowly dissipated into an otherwise splendid blue sky.

  As the last rails were laid in place, the crowd closed in to hear the decorated speakers who had come to mark the occasion. One of the most distinguished, Leland Stanford, was both governor of California and president of the Central Pacific Railroad—such was the political power of railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century. He took the orator’s platform and presented a final golden spike to become “a part of the great highway which is about to unite [California] in close fellowship with her sisters of the Atlantic.” A team of honorees then took turns driving this ultimate spike into the transcontinental railway. Once the final blow was issued, the crowd burst into cheers and the two locomotives cried out with their steam whistles.

  Telegraphs relayed the news to cities around the nation, setting off a sequence of spectacular, often spontaneous, celebrations. In San Francisco, business was suspended as people joined in the longest procession the city ever hosted. In Chicago, a parade stretched out four miles long. In New York, the mayor ordered a one-hundred-gun salute. In Philadelphia, the bells of Independence Hall rang with such intensity that uninformed bystanders mistook it for a general alarm of fire. President Ulysses Grant received the official telegraphic dispatch from Stanford at 2:47 p.m. Eastern time: “We have the honor to report the last rail laid, the last spike driven. The Pacific Railroad is finished.”

  Stanford’s message to Grant, like so much of the press across the continent, made it sound as though the railroad were a strictly metal-based technology, the harbinger of an age of iron and steel in America. The multiple speakers at Promontory Summit struck a similar tone, using metaphors like “iron horse” and the “iron chain [that would] marry the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” These attitudes were, of course, understandable. Trains were a transformative technology ushering America into a new age of industrialization, one defined by increased mechanization, easier transport, and geometric growth in productivity. However, the material that the railroads depended on most, especially during the formative years in the nineteenth century, was neither iron nor steel, but that stalwart of American development: wood. In truth, every aspect of the system relied on forests and their timber in vast quantities.

  The concept of using a railed pathway for transport had largely been developed in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At that time the British already possessed well-developed iron forges and abundant coal deposits, but wood remained relatively expensive (just as it had in Hakluyt’s day during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I). British engineers favored the materials most readily available—as well as the most permanent—and designed a system that used iron rails set in granite or stone pilings.

  When railroad technology first reached America in the early nineteenth century, however, the resource situation was almost the opposite of England’s. Wood was cheap and plentiful, while iron forging remained costly and primitive. Eager to reduce costs and labor, and unconcerned about the long-term survival of any given railway, American engineers quickly modified the British design to use wood throughout the system, including the tracks.

  Most early American railroads used wooden rails with thin straps of iron placed upon them, so-called strap railroads. This design appeared in the nation’s first commercial railway, the Granite Railway, a three-mile-long track built in 1826 to haul granite from Quincy, Massachusetts, to nearby Milton during the construction of the Bunker Hill memorial. According to a contemporaneous report, “the rails are of pine timber 6 inches wide and 12 inches deep. . . . On top of the wooden rails there is nailed oak scantling, 2 inches thick and 4 inches wide, on which is fastened a bar of rolled iron 5-16 of an inch thick and from 2½ to 2¾ inches wide.” This American style of strap rail construction reduced iron use from ninety-one tons per mile (the British average) to only twenty-five, dropping the cost per mile from $180,000 to between $20,000 and $30,000. By 1840, when the nation had more than three thousand miles of track, fully two-thirds of American railways used some variation of strap rails, with the
underlying wood varying based on region and availability.

  The strap rail system may have reduced construction costs, but it also created problems that more than offset any savings. The most notorious concern was something known colloquially as “snake heads,” when the strap of iron pulled free of the wooden rail and curled upward. One midcentury observer noted, “A twenty-foot bar of iron, wriggling its way through a well-filled passenger car, has, on more than one occasion, resulted in the mangling of as many human forms as in some of our first-class ‘smash ups.’” Such shortcomings, combined with advancements in iron production and iron-track design, convinced most Americans to abandon wooden tracks. Strap rails fell out of fashion largely before the midcentury construction boom that increased the national network more than twentyfold between 1840 and 1870. Nonetheless, instances of wooden railways persisted throughout the nineteenth century. During the Civil War, for example, cash-strapped and hurried Confederates were compelled to build them in order to move troops and supplies. Wooden railways also proved popular in lower-cost logging operations of the late nineteenth century—in extreme cases, lumberjacks simply lined felled logs in two parallel tracks, and a locomotive outfitted with special, spool-shaped wheels rolled along these so-called pole roads.

  While strap rails yielded to pure iron ones relatively early in the development of the nation’s train network, wood endured far longer as the primary material for railway bridges. The entire transport system depended on such bridges, for every line inevitably crossed ravines and rivers in the nation’s rugged landscape. The English had favored structures of iron and masonry, but Americans again found that they could reduce costs and increase construction speeds by substituting timber. Before the arrival of railroads, American engineers had already developed sophisticated timber bridges that used truss and trestle geometry to give wooden architecture incredible strength. In 1812, for example, a 340-foot-long truss-reinforced timber bridge, appropriately named “Colossus,” spanned the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia without any intermediate supports, making it the longest such structure in the world. America’s prowess in wood construction prompted a Scottish engineer to write in 1859, “To any engineer about to practice in a new country, the study of the American timber bridges is invaluable, as showing what gigantic and useful works may be constructed with that material.”

  Nearly every railroad built before 1875 relied on wooden bridges. The Granite Railway, for instance, had used wooden frames to cross several deep ravines. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the nation’s first major railroad and the earliest to feature a steam-powered locomotive, erected a 110-foot timber-truss bridge in 1829. The following year, the South Carolina Railroad began constructing a 136-mile-long trestle railroad, in which the entire structure was set atop elevated wooden supports, often ten feet high. The Central Pacific Railroad, as it passed through the Sierra Nevada Mountains en route to Promontory Summit, Utah, built numerous elaborate bridges, some more than one hundred feet high and one thousand feet long.

  Eventually, wooden bridges, like wooden railways before them, fell out of favor. While they were cheaper and faster to construct than metal and stone structures, they decayed more rapidly. More permanent materials, such as stone, earth, iron, and steel, started to replace timber, and new major bridges, benefiting from advances in metallurgy, began to feature all-steel designs as early as 1873. Despite this, many wood trestle bridges endured. An 1896 government report estimated that more than two thousand miles of timber trestles remained, valued at $60 million, roughly twice the total capital invested in iron and steel structures to that point. Over the course of the twentieth century surviving trestle bridges grew increasingly scarce.

  The era of the timber bridge was also the era of the wood-burning steam engine. Wood remained the cheapest source of fuel in the country until the late nineteenth century. It burned cleanly and evenly, and, most important, was readily available almost everywhere. American engineers adapted the coal-burning engines of British design for the tree-rich landscape; and the wood-burning locomotive, with its proud funnel-shaped smokestack, became the iconic image of the American railroad. It was a voracious, inefficient consumer of fuel that feasted upon trees and required a network of intermediate supply stations to provide fresh loads of wood, keeping farmers along the route busy gathering fuel. By midcentury, these American engines were devouring three to four million cords annually—in comparison, recall that the entire city of Boston required only six hundred thousand cords. The annual amount of cordwood burned in railroad engines likely peaked at seven million cords around 1870.

  As with wooden rails and bridges, wood-burning engines were an imperfect technology. Most notably, American locomotives produced a billowing smoke infused with cinders. Charles Dickens, during his initial visit to North America in 1842, described the exhaust as “a whirlwind of bright sparks, which showered about us like a storm of fiery snow.” An 1831 traveler on the first American-built passenger train explained how the wood-burners terrorized passengers:

  They used dry pitch-pine for fuel, and . . . a volume of black smoke, strongly impregnated with sparks, coals, and cinders, came pouring back the whole length of the train. Each of the outside passengers who had an umbrella raised it as a protection against the smoke and fire. They were found to be but a momentary protection . . . all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck-passengers, each whipping his neighbor to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station.

  Eventually, engineers created spark arresters and smokestacks that provided some degree of protection for passengers, but the deadly exhaust remained a fire hazard for the surrounding countryside. Wherever the train went, forest blazes followed, often raging unchecked across thousands of acres. This problem continued even after trains converted from wood fuel to coal—by 1880, coal was providing more than 90 percent of engine fuel—and it lessened only with the eventual shift to diesel and electric locomotives.

  Aside from locomotives, which featured metal construction from the outset, every other type of railroad car was built almost entirely of wood throughout the nineteenth century. American engineers had modeled the first railway cars in imitation of the popular melon-shaped road carriage, which featured all-wood construction. By 1835, the body design had changed to the more familiar long rectangular body, but the wooden construction remained. Railroad car manufacturers produced thousands of these each year, and they required enormous quantities of high-grade lumber. A major builder like George Pullman could consume 50 million board feet annually. Some reports estimated that 350,000 acres of commercial forests—an area greater than all of Cape Cod, Massachusetts—disappeared each year in the late nineteenth century to meet the needs of the railway car industry. The shift away from wood began in earnest only during the 1890s, when iron and steel became structural necessities for longer coach bodies. Like the trestle bridge, however, the wooden car enjoyed a graceful slide toward obsolescence—in 1920, 60 percent of the passenger cars in service still featured all-wood construction.

  The American railroad’s largest single use of timber—one that exceeded the combined totals for rails, bridges, cars, snow fences, telegraph poles, and the countless other aspects of train infrastructure—was the crosstie, the lateral beam that rested below the rails. These intermediate supports acted as cushions and shock absorbers, ensuring a smoother and safer ride. British engineers had supported their early rails with stone blocks, the most permanent material available. Americans initially had followed this model, but limitations appeared quickly: New England’s harsh climate compromised the integrity of the blocks; laborers could not produce new ones fast enough to keep pace with demand; and high prices made them prohibitively expensive for many train lines. Shortages of stone blocks forced engineers to look for alternatives, and again wood offered a plentiful and cheaper option.

  Once railroads began to employ wood ties, engineers discovered that the
y offered benefits beyond economic expediency. A passenger from the 1830s explained: “The moment of passing from the wooden to the stone [supports] can be at once both heard and felt by the passengers in the car. Upon the wood the sound is less harsh, and the vibration less rapid than upon the unyielding stone, the elasticity of the [wood] rendering it the most pleasant to ride upon.”

  Not just any slab of timber, however, was suitable for a rail tie. The wood needed to be sturdy enough to withstand the force of a passing train without splitting or wearing down. It also had to hold spikes well and resist decay, though even the best ties succumbed to nature after about ten years. The most coveted varieties were hardwoods such as white oak and chestnut. Railroad men felt that the highest-quality ties came strictly from the heartwood of second-growth trees, and, as an 1874 article noted, they never hesitated to select from “among the very best fine young trees, eight to ten inches in diameter.” With average ties having dimensions eight feet long and eight inches square, most trees only produced a single tie, and each mile of track required an average of twenty-five hundred ties.

  Initially railroads used ties from the local forests and woodlots, but as the network expanded, demand for ties outstripped local supplies. By midcentury, the need for crossties made railroads the single largest consumer of wood in the country. An 1873 article summarized the situation:

  It is estimated that the number of railroad ties in present use in the United States are 150,000,000. And as young timber is mostly used, a cut of 200 ties to the acre is above rather than under the average, and it, therefore, has required the product of 750,000 acres of well timbered land to furnish the supply. Railroad ties last about five years, consequently 30,000,000 ties are used annually for repairs, taking the timber from 150,000 acres.