CHAPTER XV.

ONTARIO-FOREST RESERVES.

At the outset the business of lumbering was regarded as an essentially transitory feature of the process of clearing and settling the country. In the older portions of Canada the greater part of the land denuded of its timber was suitable for agricultural settlement, and needed for farms by the incoming population. It was regarded as desirable to have the country cleared as quickly as possible for the plow. As lumbering operations were pushed farther back, a large territory was reached where most of the land was broken and sterile and not suited for farming, but where much of it was covered with valuable pine timber.

If the policy which was followed in clearing the agricultural lands of the southern part of the Province had been pursued in the newer territory, large areas, when stripped by the ax and the bush fires usually attendant on lumbering operations under old time methods, would have been practically worthless, their only value consisting of their timberproducing capacity.

The increase in the value of timber induced more conservative methods of cutting and led to the adoption of the system of fire ranging by which the danger of destruction of standing timber by bush fires has been greatly lessened. The large lumber operators realize that, instead of making a thorough clearance of their limits within the shortest possible time, it is often more profitable to treat the forest as a farm, reaping a periodical crop, with as little injury as possible to its reproductive capacity.

As large tracts of country in New Ontario were opened up for settlement and travel by the building of railroads, the question of what action to pursue regarding the large areas of valuable pine land, which if unprotected would be liable to destruction by bush fires, became one of increasing urgency.

An advance in the direction of establishing forest reserves from which settlers would be excluded was made in 1893 by the setting aside of the Algonquin National Park in the Nipissing District. This territory being under license, however, is not, strictly speaking, a forest reserve, though it serves some of the purposes of such. In June, 1897,

a royal commission was appointed, consisting of E. W. Rathbun, of Deseronto; John Bertram, Toronto; J. B. McWilliams, Peterboro; Alex. Kirkwood, chief clerk of the lands branch of the Crown lands department, and Thomas Southworth, clerk of forestry, to investigate and report on the subject of restoring and preserving the growth of white pine and other timber trees upon lands not adapted to agricultural purposes or to settlement. The two first named gentlemen were practical and experienced lumbermen. After a personal investigation extending over considerable tracts of country they presented a report, the most important feature of which was a recommendation that the Government take the power to withdraw from sale or settlement and set aside to be kept in permanent forest reserves such areas of territory as are generally unsuitable for settlement and yet valuable for growing timber.

In accordance with this recommendation the Ontario Legislature in 1898 conferred the requisite authority upon the administration by the Forest Reserves Act. The first action taken in pursuance of this policy was the creation of the Eastern Forest Reserve, consisting of 80,000 acres in the counties of Frontenac and Addington, in 1899. The following year the Sibley Reserve, comprising about 45,000 acres on the north shore of Lake Superior, was set apart. A more important step was taken in 1901 when the Temagami Forest Reserve was constituted, comprising an area of 2,200 square miles around Lake Temagami in the Nipissing district. This contains one of the most valuable of the pine forests in Ontario, the quantity of standing timber being roughly estimated at from 3,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 feet. This reserve was subsequently enlarged by the addition of territory to the north and west, bringing its area up to a total of 5,900 square miles. The Mississaga Reserve in the Algoma district was added to the list in 1904. It comprises about 3,000 square miles of virgin timber. It is altogether probable that as settlement advances in New Ontario, only the fringe of which has so far been touched by civilization, further areas will be set apart as forest reserves, wherever timber covered tracts of importance are found to exist on non-agricultural lands.

Of recent years, the forestry work of the Province of Ontario has been under the management of Thomas Southworth, spoken of above, with the title of Director of Forestry. His extensive studies and practical experience have qualified him to speak with particular authority of all the phases of this general subject of forest preservation and its financial aspects. For this reason we reproduce in this chapter an arti

cle prepared by him at a recent date.' This article to a certain extent is a reproduction of what has been said elsewhere, but it so clearly explains and logically summarizes the whole subject that it is reproduced, as follows:

The Province of Ontario is one of the greatest business corporations in the world. Whether viewed in the light of an inheritor having a vast estate to dispose of, or as all this and a trading company as well, Ontario is an extensive corporation doing business in a very large way.

Its shareholders are the individual people of the Province, and handsome dividends are yearly paid to them in the form of the support of public services, charity and education, that would otherwise be paid for out of their private pockets in the form of taxes.

I presume it may be stated that the working capital of the Province is, through the right to levy taxes, only limited by the ability of the citizens to pay, as is the case with other similar corporations having more and richer shareholders, but it is proposed to refer only to the estate or inheritance common to us all in our land and water areas, and what they contain or produce. This includes land, forests, minerals, game, fish and water powers, all of which supply an income that could be increased if desired.

Unlike many corporations or trading companies, however, the Province realizes that there are ways in which the " greatest good to the greatest number" of the shareholders in this enterprise may be reached other than in the direct payment of cash dividends, and it has been deemed for the general good that the forest should be worked as the chief producer of cash dividends.

Therefore for the purpose of this article we will eliminate any consideration of any of the provincial assets other than that of the Crown forest.

The forest wealth of the Province has until recently been classed under two divisions: That still remaining the property of the Crown partly sold under license to lumbermen and partly without any claim at all; and that part held by settlers to whom lands had been allotted or sold by the Crown.

In the development of the timber trade in Ontario the idea gradually evolved was to dispose of the merchantable timber, principally pine, for cash revenue, before handing over the land on which it grew to individuals to be converted into farms. Having this idea in view, the business was not regarded as one of our permanent industries. The lumberman was considered as but the forerunner of the farmer, and no attempt was made for many years to do any more than harvest the standing crop of pine and other coniferous trees to the best advantage. No idea of taking off another crop than the original one was thought of. For many years this process worked well. As lumbermen established camps, and cut over their limits, the shantyman often become a farmer, squatting upon a tract of good land as he found it in the limit, and he was soon followed by his friends. This process has settled many townships in the Province, and where the land included in the limit was good for farming, no better plan could probably be devised. The hardwoods and enough pine for building purposes were left on the land for the settler, 1 Published in The Canada Lumberman January 19, 1905.

and from the money received from the largest pine, roads were built for the settler and the whole people of the Province shared in the dividends.

As the lumberman pushed farther north in search of pine, however, the character of the country changed. Large areas were placed under license to lumbermen in which the land was unsuited for farming. The settler still followed the lumberman and tried to make farms where nature had provided that forests only could be profitably grown, finding out only after their capital and the best years of their lives had been spent, that they had made a mistake.

While these men have been wasting their efforts dragging out a bare existence, the Province has lost large sums in cash that might have been derived from these same areas had they been left to produce a second crop of pine timber.

In addition to the encroachments of settlers upon the forest area, fire proved a prominent factor in emphasizing the ephemeral character of the lumber industry; large tracts were burned over, until it began to be recognized as the natural thing that fire followed the lumberman. The success of the fire ranging system adopted in 1885 showed that this danger could be largely removed.

This partial immunity from forest fires led our legislators to consider the possibility of giving the forest industries a more permanent character, and in 1895, when I was appointed to the forestry work under the Government, I was directed by the then Commissioner of Crown Lands, the Hon. A. S. Hardy, to submit a report on the best method of reafforestating these burned areas with pine; to ascertain the comparative cost of planting and of sowing tree seeds, with plan of operation.

Estimates of the cost of seedling trees for replanting were secured, and in the process of investigating the burned over areas to ascertain the probable cost of getting them in condition to replant or sow, I concluded and so reported that neither was necessary except in a few places. The cost of replanting or even of seeding successfully would be so great per acre that the directors of the corporation, the Legislature, would never vote the money necessary to accomplish the work over so large an area; and they would be right, for it is very likely that the initial expense compounded even at three percent, for the number of years necessary for the plantation to reach a merchantable age, plus the annual expenditure for protection and care, would exceed the amount realized from the crop even at the enhanced prices likely to be obtained at that time.

It may be said that even so, for the sake of the incidental or indirect benefits in the way of climatic effect and water supply the investment would be worth while, but it was found that planting was not at all necessary, that practically all the investment required was time and freedom from settlement or fire. On burned over territory a new forest was growing, and in nearly every case, where pine was present in the previous crop, pine was growing again, not at first perhaps; the first crop after the fire was usually birch, poplar or other trees that seed yearly and whose seeds carry immense distances, but nearly always pine followed where the fire had left any parent pine trees within a wide radius, and would be found growing up under the shade and protection of the broad leaved trees, under the exact conditions required to make good timber.

This condition of affairs simplified the problem of reafforestation on Ontario Crown lands, and in my report to the Government in 1896 I recommended that areas found unsuited for general farming should be permanently withdrawn from settlement and placed in forest reserves.

In the following year the Government appointed a royal commission to report on the same subject. This commission included among its members two of the ablest lumbermen in Canada, the late E. W. Rathbun and the late John Bertram, and this commission indorsed this recommendation as follows:

"A large portion of the central division of the Province is more profitable from the standpoint of public revenue as forest land than under cultivation for farm crops, and as in addition to this it contains the headwaters of all our principal streams, all that part of this division found upon examination to be not well adapted for farming should be added to the permanent Crown forest reserves."

In 1898 the legislature passed an act entitled "An Act to Establish Forest Reserves," the first specific action by legislation toward the creation of a permanent Crown forest. This act was submitted to the legislature by Hon. J. M. Gibson, then Commissioner of Crown Lands, and was passed without a dissenting voice.

The passage of the forest reserves act, and the creation of reserves thereunder, is the formal announcement of the Government policy of gradually separating the non-agricultural from the agricultural lands, and is the first organized and definite attempt to create a permanent forest estate to be owned in perpetuity by the Crown and operated for timber crops. Under the act there have so far been created four forest reserves, amounting in all to 5,821,000 acres. These include the Eastern Forest Reserve of 80,000 acres; the Sibley Forest Reserve of 45,000 acres; the Temagami Forest Reserve of 3,776,000 acres, and the Mississaga Reserve of 1,920,000 acres.

2

There should be added to this Algonquin Park, created in 1893 mainly as a game preserve, with an acreage of 1,101,000 acres, making a total of permanent forest reserves of 6,922,000 acres.

These reserves are of different character. The two former, the Eastern Reserve in Frontenac County and the Sibley Reserve, which takes in the township of Sibley including Thunder Cape on the north shore of Lake Superior, have been lumbered, and in most cases burned over, and now contain a very thrifty growth of white pine and other trees. It will be some time before they are ready again for lumbering operations, but the growth is very rapid and the time when they may be again operated for pine and other timbers will be much less than would be imagined in the absence of definite information and measurements of the rate of growth of this young timber.

The Temagami Reserve lies in the district of Nipissing and contains 5,900 square miles or 3,776,000 acres. This reserve besides including some of the most picturesque and beautiful lakes in the world, of which Temagami and Lady Evelyn might be mentioned, contains a very large quantity of pine timber now ready to be cut. About forty years ago the band of Indians living in the territory, alarmed at the incursions of the lumbermen who were operating on Lake Temiscamingue and at the suggestion, it is said, of a Hudson Bay officer equally interested with them in the preservation of this country as a hunting ground, started a fire that swept over a good many hundreds of square miles, including the northern part of Temagami, Lady Evelyn, Anima, Nipissing and other lakes. Over this burned territory there is now a thrifty growth of poplar, birch, as well as pine and other coniferous 2 The area of Algonquin Park is placed at 1,109,383 acres in other carefully compiled statistics on Ontario, which are at hand.