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SENSATIONAL LOGGING
By Marie Coolidge Rasft
THE great movement called "Conservation of American Forests and Waterways" has not yet reached such a stage of development as entirely to eliminate the picturesque features of the lumber industry. Sensational logging — thrilling and spectacular— is still a feature of the Cumberland mountains, just as it is in the great Northwest, in the Adirondacks and down in the yellow-pine belt of the "Sunny South." Modern inventions and modern ingenuity have done much to change methods and to better conditions, but the result is the same as it was in the days when donkey engines, temporary railroads, telephones and dynamite were unknown.
Forestry experts agree that the great industry must soon run its course, even if the government does not intervene in a very radical manner for the protection of America's birthright, the forests. As the industry of logging is waning, so therefore is the interest in logging increasing, and the story of the great forest slaughter becomes a real factor of education. A few generations from now it will doubtless become a mere matter of history. As the last buffalo to-day is of more value than the whole herd was before civilization crept westward, so do the latter days of logging increase in importance as they near their end.
As absence makes the heart grow fonder — even so of the forests. The old woodsman, who tells the exciting tale of the days when he rode log-rafts down the Ohio, or the Susquehanna ; the business man, who recalls the flays of his boyhood in the mountains, when the sound of the woodchopper's axe seemed louder in the stillness than the
honk of an automobile now sounds in a city street; the university freshman just come from his western home among the pineries; even the most ignorant chopper on a log job, is now, at heart, a conservationist. The general agitation of the subject has moved him more than he himself realizes. Even the capitalist who owns the forest and knows so well its monetary value, becomes — for material reasons if not for poetical ones — more or less a conservationist, and begins to husband his resources. Everything possible is now done to prevent careless felling, which, in the past, has done so much to destroy the many small, growing, sap trees. Now, engineering methods are brought into play. There is clear, methodical sighting to get the proper direction for the falling tree. The chopping is done with regularity and with scientific precision. Even the quick, deft understroke is important, which, with the clever use of wedges, brings the great tree down in exactly the right spot.
All of the work is systematized, and nowhere can it be studied to better advantage, and surrounded by more beautiful scenery, than in the Cumberland mountains. That picturesque borderland between the Blue Grass State and "Old Virginny " famous for its feuds, romances and tragedies, is now the scene of some of the most remarkable engineering of modern times.
A trip there is interesting, exciting and never-to-be-forgotten. The route is romantic, following as it does a picturesque trout stream most of the way. and at times the road is so far above the stream that the latter seems but a
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