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JAMES J. HILL

"In 1894. Mr. Hill, having
completed the Great North-
ern Railroad to the Pacific
coast, was in need of funds.
The Great Northern had
inherited from the old St.
Paul & Pacific 990,000 acres
of magnificent timber-land.
Mr. Weyerhaeuser got this
land for two dollars an acre"

contributions was
chiefly that he never
drove her away. No
other great fortune
was ever built from

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nothing in this way; no other man ever
rose more easily from poverty to afflu-
ence; and yet this fortune, colossal when
the Cosmopolitan first called attention to
it, is now become so vast that thoughtful
men are appalled at its extent, and no
man may predict its results.

In this most singular career, the few highlights doubtless have been made familiar to you: how he came to this country in 1852, a poor emigrant eighteen years old, with no ambition except to be a farmer; how he spent four years in farm labor in Pennsylvania; how he drifted aimlessly westward to Rock Island; how he fell by blind chance into the lumber trade, first as a laborer, then as a salesman. Early the golden goose began its min

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THE FAMOUS SHERMAN ACT

istrations in his behalf, but at first her offerings were disguised. The firm that employed young Weyerhaeuser sent him presently to open a branch lumber-yard at the new town of Coal Valley, Illinois, and if all had gone well with that firm,

suppose he

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would have been there yet. The firm failed, and fortune's favorite found himself without a job. At Rock Island, the bankrupt house had a small sawmill that because of the bankruptcy stood idle. Weyerhaeuser's brother-in-law, F. C. A. Denckmann, was a skilled machinist. He knew how to operate machinery, and Weyerhaeuser knew how to sell lumber. Together they leased the mill from the creditors, sawed lumber, sold it, made some money; leased the mill again, and finally acquired enough funds and credit to buy it. Those were booming times along the Mississippi; by the cool-headed and prudent, money was easily made. The river was the one highway for a vast new region rapidly filling with settlers. No railroads had yet appeared there, all traffic was by water. - The river towns arose almost over night; as a new population poured in upon the fertile empire, lumber was in great demand; the logs from which it was made drifted cheaply down the river from what was deemed an inexhaustible supply; and as always in a new country, waste ran riot, while shrewd men picked profits with both hands.

Of all the wasting, the waste of lumber was the most reckless. In the North were illimitable regions filled with beautiful white pine; all men felt free to wanton with its riches. For years, the log rafts that floated to the lumber-mills were made up in a way that destroyed fifteen per cent. of their value. Nobody cared. Great holes were bored into every log, sometimes in the middle and always near the ends; short stakes and withes were driven into these; and birchpoles, passed through the rude staples thus formed, held the logs together in what were called strings. A raft was made of these strings, eight to twelve of them, fastened together by means of more holes and more staples.

All day the great rafts followed one another, sweeping down the stream. Sometimes they smashed upon a tow-head, a sand-bar, or a rock, and the logs were lost. Nobody cared. Send down another raft. Loose logs from the wrecked rafts floated with the current or lined the banks. Why bother about logs?

Weyerhaeuser had in his peasant's blood thrift and a holy horror of waste; life had been too hard a struggle for the generations whereof he was born. In the midst of this mad extravagance, he enforced strict econ

omy. If a log was lost at the Weyerhaeuser & Denckmann slide, somebody must go after it in a skiff; if a raft struck the bank at the curve of Maquoketa River, he wanted to know why. When some good mind hit upon the idea of pushing a raft with a steamboat instead of letting it float, Weyerhaeuser made his calculations and seized with avidity upon the new plan; his pencil had shown him that the saving of time worked out additional profit. When somebody else devised a system of tying logs together with great cables, called brails, instead of boring holes in them, Weyerhaeuser instantly adopted brails on all his rafts. Brails saved money.

The rafts came chiefly from the tributary rivers of the North, the Black, Wisconsin, Chippewa, and St. Croix, where all winter the axmen felled the great trees, and in the spring and summer, expert log-drivers made up the rafts at places where permanent booms were fixed to catch the loose logs.

If

you wanted a raft, the best way to get it was to go to the place where it was made and buy it. At almost the outset of his venture with his brother-in-law, Mr. Weyerhaeuser adopted this plan. He went up to the Chippewa boom to do his bargaining.

It was the great turning-point in his career. Two things made at once upon his mind an ineffaceable impression. He had been born and reared in a country where rigid laws perpetuated the timber supply from generation to generation. He now looked upon a land where there were no such laws, where all men were free to cut, destroy, and waste timber as they pleased, giving no thought to the future's supply nor to any interest of the public. Every man for himself, and the rewards to those of the longest arms and the most prehensile hands.

Naturally, the first question in the mind of a man who knew Germany concerned the results of a national policy so totally different from that of the European country. He saw these results, too. At the beginning, the timber had been cut chiefly along the Wisconsin and the Black, the southernmost of the rivers of the pine belt. Now the timber-land there had already been denuded; the supply was coming to an end; the army of loggers had been compelled to advance to the north. Every year, its line of attack moved farther away; every year, it left a larger area of denuded land upon which not a tree was planted to replace those

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accounts, therefore, he resolved to buy timber-land and to eliminate some of the waste in his own case by cutting and floating his own logs.

In those days, enormous areas of pine-forest land were still in the public domain and could be had from the government through the usual process of entry. The intent of the law was that no one person

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should obtain in this way more than one quarter-section, or 160 acres; but by means of dummies and false entries this limitation was easily evaded. With great activity and success, Mr. Weyerhaeuser entered upon the acquiring of valuable timber-lands along the Chippewa. After a time, his efforts began to attract unfavorable attention from several sources and finally from the government of the United States, until he found himself summoned to appear before the Interior Department at Washington to explain certain entries that he had acquired.

Mr. Weyerhaeuser cared no more about political parties than he cared about the Great Cham's beard, but this appeared to be a case wherein the assistance of political influence would be salutary, if not indispens

The shaded portion of the map represents the original white pine district, which is rapidly being devastated by the destructive methods of the Lumber Trust

was

able. The national administration Republican, but the member of Congress from the Rock Island

district was a Democrat; so there was nothing doing at home. Across the river in Iowa was a district represented by Hiram Price, who, possibly because he looked like Henry Clay, and possibly because he was of an assertive piety, was one of the powerful men in the Republican party. According to the story that was circulated in Davenport in my youth, Mr. Weyerhaeuser, in much concern, hastened across the river and appealed to Price, and Price put forth his power and relieved Weyerhaeuser's cares. At least Weyerhaeuser went to Washington under the ægis of Price, and nothing came of the inquiry at the Interior Department. The tracts of timber-land along the Chippewa remained in Weyerhaeuser's possession and became the nucleus of an empire.

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The Northern Pacific had a vast area of worthless desert. Under the "lieu-land" act, it exchanged these sand-dunes for an equal amount of the finest timber-land in the world, the famous standing pine, fir, and spruce of Washington and Oregon. Of this splendid domain, the Northern Pacific now proceeded to "sell" to the Weyerhaeuser interests hundreds of thousands of acres, for about six dollars an acre

Every year had fed his desire for such possessions. As the results of the national waste became more apparent, they would have impressed any mind not made of iron.

Already the land values were soaring. A tract obtained one year, gratuitously, by entry perhaps fraudulent, was valued the next year at ten dollars an acre, and in three

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