by Eric Rutkow
On December 29, 1870, this group of downriver lumbermen, putting aside their former hostilities and rivalries, met in Chicago to form a new company for the purpose of purchasing and running the Beef Slough Boom. They named the new venture the Mississippi River Logging Company (MRLC) and authorized capital of one million dollars, making it one of the largest logging ventures in the nation. The members reputedly represented three-fourths of the sawmilling interests from the top of the Mississippi down through St. Louis. In 1872, Weyerhaeuser, who was widely recognized as the inspiration for the idea, was elected president, a position he would hold for almost forty years.
The MRLC’s great size did not initially translate into authority over the Chippewa River. During the first year, upriver obstruction prevented almost three-quarters of the members’ logs from reaching Beef Slough. According to Norton, who was an original member of the MRLC:
This was enough to discourage almost anybody, yet, stimulated by Mr. Weyerhaeuser’s faith in ultimate success, the parties engaged in the enterprise expressed a willingness to go on the second year. . . . [I]t was decided that the only way to make the Chippewa River a success was to put in so many logs that [the upriver millmen] could not detain them all without filling their own booms with logs that did not belong to them, thus interfering with their own supply for the season.
MRLC members pooled their resources and increased the number of driven logs from 40 million board feet to more than 100 million board feet in a single season. The Chippewa River was choked its whole length with pine, and Weyerhaeuser’s strategy soon succeeded. In 1874, for example, 133 million feet of logs reached Beef Slough despite the best efforts of the millmen at Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls.
The measures required to gain de facto control of Chippewa navigation created a new challenge for Weyerhaeuser. As Norton explained, “He could see from the amount the Company was putting in [each year that] the timber owned by the loggers from whom it was getting logs would soon be exhausted; and to make its business more permanent and give it a standing on the river, pinelands would have to be purchased so far as means were available to do so.” The new target, therefore, were the pine trees themselves. Most remained under the control of either the federal government, a handful of speculators, or, somewhat curiously, Cornell University—the school’s founder, Ezra Cornell, who made his original fortune laying down telegraph poles, had recognized that Lake States pinelands were a valuable commodity and in 1868 endowed his eponymous institution with a $250,000 investment in five hundred thousand acres of prime tracts along the Chippewa.
During the early 1870s Weyerhaeuser quietly began to purchase several lots along the Chippewa. He then made his first major acquisition in 1875 on behalf of the MRLC: fifty thousand acres from Cornell at ten dollars an acre (a twentyfold increase on what Cornell had paid seven years before), with payment to be made over a ten-year span at 7 percent interest. The purchase contained more than five hundred million board feet of white pine, and the financing structure encouraged members to log the land as quickly as possible to cover the annual payments. Profits rolled in, and Weyerhaeuser’s colleagues began to imitate his actions. By the end of the 1870s MRLC members had acquired more than three hundred thousand acres of prime Chippewa pineland under terms similar to this first Cornell purchase.
With these land purchases, the Lake States industry officially entered the era of industrial capitalism. Mill owners now controlled every step of the lumbering process, from tree felling straight through to distribution. This was the same sort of vertical integration that was happening in major industries across the nation. Weyerhaeuser had helped accomplish the same feat as John D. Rockefeller in the oil industry or Andrew Carnegie with steel. The main difference was that lumbering was such a massive industry, present in so many jurisdictions, that it was impossible to forge a national monopoly on the scale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The most that was possible was complete control of a region, and this was Weyerhaeuser’s new goal.
In the spring of 1880 a great flood roared through the Chippewa Valley. The surge swept millions of board feet downriver that belonged to the upriver Wisconsin sawmills. Much of their product ended up floating in the Beef Slough Boom, presenting the downriver mill owners a potential opportunity to exact revenge on their longtime antagonists. Weyerhaeuser, however, was convinced that infighting ultimately harmed everyone’s bottom line—in Norton’s words, he “saw the importance of a unity of interest of all who were operating on the Chippewa.” Relying on his reputation for sound judgment, honesty, and insightfulness, Weyerhaeuser engineered a log exchange between the two factions. Downriver men kept the logs already in the boom, while the upriver men gained the rights to logs that the MRLC had not yet driven. The following year, building on the goodwill he’d amassed through the log exchange, Weyerhaeuser led an effort to purchase an enormous upriver boom using a coalition of firms that included six upriver sawmills.
In the fall of 1881, Weyerhaeuser finally managed to link all rival mill owners together through a new corporation. Members of the MRLC and most of the upriver mill owners jointly formed the Chippewa Logging Company, a comprehensive enterprise “to cover and govern in the ownership of such timberlands, improvements and franchises . . . [thereafter purchased] for the use and benefit of such united interests.” This new organization became known as the “pool,” though some referred to it as the Weyerhaeuser syndicate, for he was the undisputed leader. A letter sent to the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1887 from Eau Claire, formerly a hotbed of upriver resistance, explained: “[H]is associates place him at the forefront of all the lumber corporations in which he is interested. They have the utmost faith in his experience and abilities, and his word is law. They believe that no other man in America knows so much about pine as he does.”
With Weyerhaeuser at the helm, all the members of the pool benefited from increased security and economies of scale. This new company drove an annual average of a billion feet of logs down the Chippewa throughout much of the 1880s. In its peak year, it sent one and a half billion feet of logs, an amount effectively equal to the national total from 1839—Norton suggested that this quantity “can hardly be comprehended by one not acquainted with lumbering.” Weyerhaeuser’s pool soon became the largest lumbering concern in the entire country, and Weyerhaeuser became the nation’s greatest lumber baron, overseeing an empire worth an estimated $70 million—for comparison, this amount equaled the 1882 capitalization of the Standard Oil Trust. In the words of an 1888 New York Times article, “[Weyerhaeuser] has at last, it seems, become powerful enough to practically monopolize the great industry of [the Lake States].”
The Lake States logging industry that Weyerhaeuser helped build, however, was already approaching the limits of its growth. Production peaked in 1892. The rapacious logging of thirty years was beginning to take its toll on many of the best stands of white pine on the Chippewa and other rivers. The industry also started to face increasing competition from railroads, which could reach the commercial trees far away from any rivercourses. Furthermore, new logging frontiers were starting to open in the South and the West. Lumbermen, including Weyerhaeuser (whose story was far from completed), shifted their energies and capital toward these virgin forests. The Lake States region was no longer leading the nation in production at the close of the nineteenth century.
Nonetheless, during the thirty years that followed the Civil War, the Lake States lumber industry had ushered in an era of industrial capitalism and provided the raw materials for the infrastructure boom that reshaped much of the nation. The region produced between eight and ten billion board feet annually throughout the 1880s. The first historian of lumbering in the Old Northwest estimated in 1898 that Lake States loggers, in total, had “enriched the nation” by over $4 billion, an amount almost twice what the North spent on the Civil War and more than triple the value of all the gold from the first fifty years of California’s gold rush.
This development, however, did not come without a pr
ice. The thirty-year assault on the forests of the Lake States had forever corrupted the landscape. Lumber barons, responding to financial and tax structures that incentivized rapid clear-cutting, favored a policy of “cut out and get out.” Few worried about the environmental impact of their actions, especially since the government provided no forms of regulation. Industrial logging ultimately left millions of acres denuded. Much of the Chippewa pinelands that so impressed Weyerhaeuser during his 1868 visit, once cut over, proved inadequate for agriculture, and large tracts remained unrehabilitated for generations, unlikely to ever regain their former glory.
While the saw and ax bore much of the responsibility for this destruction, they did not act alone. The single greatest source of devastation for the nation’s trees in the age of industry was actually forest fire, the new scourge of a nation increasingly dependent on its vast woodlands.
The Great Peshtigo Fire
THE LUMBER TOWN of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, was a tiny island of commerce in a wooded ocean. In the words of the local priest, Peter Pernin: “Trees, trees everywhere, nothing else but trees as far as you can travel . . . valleys overgrown with cedars and spruce trees, sandy hills covered with evergreens, and large tracts of rich land filled with the different varieties of hard wood, oak, maple, beech, ash, elm, and birch.” While the town was relatively isolated, it had excellent access to the Chicago-based half of the Lake States distribution networks. The swift-flowing Peshtigo River, which bisected the town, emptied into Lake Michigan’s Green Bay six miles to the southeast, and a narrow-gauge railroad connected Peshtigo to a port on the bay. From there, vessels shipped goods from Peshtigo directly to Chicago for dispersal across the nation.
Commercial life in Peshtigo revolved around a diversified lumber business known as the Peshtigo Company. The enterprise belonged to William Butler Ogden, a Chicago industrialist who had made his fortune in land speculation and the railroads—he was, among other things, the first president of the Union Pacific Railroad Company and the first mayor of Chicago. “To my mind,” wrote Isaac Stephenson, a lumber baron who was a partner in the Peshtigo Company, “[Ogden] was one of the dominating figures of the Middle West during this period and had as much if not more to do with its development than any other man.” The centerpiece of Ogden’s Peshtigo investment was an enormous woodenware factory, rumored to be the largest in the world. The main building was 341 feet long and, in some places, four stories tall. Every working day this massive operation produced 45,000 shingles, 5,000 broom handles, 1,500 pails, 170 tubs, 92 barrelheads, and 50 boxes of clothespins. Other properties in the Peshtigo Company included two sawmills and a second factory that manufactured sashes, blinds, and doors. The entire operation employed roughly eight hundred men, about half the total population of the town.
By 1871, Peshtigo was developing into a bustling and vibrant community, enjoying the prosperity that the lumber boom years were providing. Along sawdust streets and wood-plank sidewalks stood countless small shops, two boardinghouses, a fancy hotel, and a school. A Congregational church rested on the eastern side of town and a Catholic church, run by Father Pernin, claimed the western side. The first issue of a local paper, the Marinette and Peshtigo Eagle, appeared that June. To top it off, a new railroad was about to connect Peshtigo directly with Chicago.
Despite all these positive signs, the summer of 1871 brought trouble in the form of a severe drought. Laborers working on the new railroad at times laid down their tools and refused to work in protest over insufficient amounts of drinking water. The region’s swamps grew so dry that one could walk freely along the surface. According to Stephenson, “the forests and brush were reduced to tinder.” As the season wore on and the rains refused to arrive, the threat of fire began to grow.
Fire had always been part of forest life, but industrialization had heralded a new age of deadly forest burns across the nation. When loggers cleared an area of its commercial trees or railroad workers forged a new path through the woods, they left behind all the small trees, stripped branches, and undergrowth. This accumulated refuse dried out over time, becoming increasingly combustible. As the scale of industrial logging and railroads increased, whole forests were turned into tinderboxes waiting to explode. All that was lacking was a necessary spark, and the same industrialized activities that created the situation often provided one. One of the worst offenders, as noted earlier, was the cinder-filled exhaust from wood-burning trains. Loggers also contributed their fair portion to the problem through careless behavior, especially the failure to extinguish the smoldering embers from campfires.
As summer drifted into fall in Peshtigo, the threat of catastrophic fire began to close in. A conflagration broke out to the northeast of the town during the second week of September but burned out before reaching the village. Then, on Saturday, September 23, fire arrived for the first time. An observer of that initial scare wrote, “It is as though you attempted to resist the approach of an avalanche of fire hurled against you. . . . [B]uildings were covered with wet blankets and all under the scorching heat and in blinding suffocating smoke that was enough to strangle one. . . . Strange to say not a building was burned—the town was saved.” The townspeople had avoided an outright disaster, but the underlying threat remained. A correspondent for the local paper wrote on October 7, “Unless we have rain soon, God only knows how soon a conflagration may sweep this town.” He spoke with chilling prescience.
The morning of October 8, like most mornings that fall, started without any clouds that might offer potential respite. The air hung mercilessly still, full of trapped summer heat. Far above a dense mass of smoke hovered in the sky. The small train that connected Peshtigo to Green Bay rolled into town as though everything were normal, carrying a cargo of two hundred laborers fresh from Chicago to help lay rails for the new train. Father Pernin tried to leave for Marinette, a nearby village where he also said Mass, but villagers begged him to stay. He explained, “There seemed to be a vague fear of some impending though unknown evil haunting the minds of many, nor was I myself entirely free from this unusual feeling.” As morning wore on, villagers noticed flocks of birds behaving strangely, forming and flying away without making a sound. By noon, the sun disappeared completely, in its place an eerie yellow half-light, which came from no visible source and cast a ghastly pallor over the town.
This yellowish light turned to a sullen red as the day wore on. The morning’s smoke continued to thicken, building from the west. Around 9:00 p.m., villagers started to notice a terrifying sound coming from the same direction as the smoke. According to Pernin, “This sound resembled . . . the rumbling of thunder, with the difference that it never ceased, but deepened in intensity each moment more and more.” Suddenly, a whirling slab of fire, seemingly from nowhere, flew through the air and crashed into the street. In an instant the sawdust streets and wood-plank sidewalks of Peshtigo were ablaze. Winds as powerful as tornadoes ripped through the town and spread the fire from building to building. Within thirty minutes the flames had penetrated every structure.
Villagers ran chaotically through the streets, trying to escape the inferno surrounding them. Forty people, disoriented from the opening blast of fire, rushed into the Peshtigo Company’s boardinghouse, praying that the building might withstand the assault. The flames roasted every one of them alive.
The only hope to escape this fiery hell lay in the Peshtigo River, and the villagers who had avoided the worst ravages of the opening firestorm raced toward possible safety in its waters. Father Pernin was among the people who reached its shore. “As far as the eye could reach,” he wrote,
[the banks] were covered with people standing there, motionless as statues, some with eyes staring, upturned towards heaven, and tongues protruded. The greater number seemed to have no idea of taking any steps to procure their safety, imagining, as many afterwards acknowledged to me, that the end of the world had arrived and that there was nothing for them but silent submission to their fate.
The sky above rag
ed with brilliant flashes of orange. The heat grew so intense that logs in the nearby millpond started to smoke and burst into flames. Hundreds of desperate villagers and imported laborers struggled to survive in the river, their bodies in the chilly flow, their heads in the searing atmosphere. Father Pernin remained immersed until 3:30 a.m., an excruciating five and a half hours.
The fire had consumed Peshtigo but its hunger remained. Flames devoured trees for miles around, feeding on the dry debris that littered the forest floor, wiping out thousands of acres of marketable trees. The logging towns of Marinette and Menominee to the northeast appeared to be next in line for nature’s fury. Town leaders packed the women and children on steamers, which headed out into the safety of Lake Michigan. Most of the men stayed behind. According to Isaacson, who was in Marinette when the fire struck, “we struggled all night in the blinding smoke and intense heat, not knowing how soon the seething fringes of fire would close in upon us.” The flames burned through about half the city, but shifted course as if by miracle. Other settlements were not as lucky, and several smaller communities fell before rain finally began to fall on October 9.