those in the richest of the New England cities, six hotels, seven or eight churches, and a full supply of professional men,— lawyers, doctors, editors, and the rest. In the village of Salina, a mile or two farther up, on the opposite side of the river, is a population of two or three thousand more. The city of East Saginaw, some two miles below Saginaw proper, under the eastern bank of the river, in 1850 was only the "Hoyt Plot," with one small cottage, one board shanty, and one log-hut, occupied by an Indian trader. In eighteen years the Hoyt Plot has grown to be a city of over twelve thousand inhabitants; on the site of the board shanty stands the Bancroft House, built eight years ago, at a cost of $90,000, one of the most admirably kept hotels in the country; a double line of horse railroad connects the city with Saginaw and Salina; and there are miles of streets, with great blocks of brick and stone warehouses. Bay City, four miles from the mouth of the river, was an Indian trading-post until 1836; it was laid out as a town in 1837, in 1865 became a city, and has now an estimated population of some seven thousand. Portsmouth, a few miles above it on the river, has a population of two or three thousand. Wenona, opposite to Bay City, has probably a thousand permanent residents. And it is safe to say that more than thirty thousand persons have their homes at present on the banks of the Saginaw River.

No contrast can be greater than the contrast of the quiet of the Saginaw River thirty years ago and the activity and movement seen there to-day. In the summer the river is alive with craft of all kinds, large and small, steamships of a thousand tons and little tug-boats, which dart up and down like their namesakes on the Thames or in New York Harbor. About forty of these tug-boats are employed on the river. Lines of propellers ply in every direction, and there are countless barks and schooners. The seventy saw-mills along the banks fill the air with their continual murmur. Great piles of lumber, stacked upon the long wharves, rise from the water-side. The massive bridges which span the broad stream are thronged with passengers and vehicles. Wreaths of smoke float off to the bay from a hundred tall chimneys. Huge logs, jammed together, hide long reaches of the water by their mass,

and you see the strange, half-clad Tritons plunging and leaping and hauling among them. On the elevated tram-ways small mules draw cruel loads, and on the inclined planes there is incessant pulling and sliding. In some places acres of the bank are white with the refuse sawdust. From the opening of the season in April or May to the close in November the stir of industry is incessant.

But the summer life of the river depends upon the winter life of the forest. Year by year, as the wood is cut off, the lumberman has to go farther in from the main stream, and the log has a longer journey to make before it gets to the mill. The first party of woodmen usually go out in November, as soon as the ground begins to freeze; they select a place for their camp as nearly as possible in the centre of the "lot" which they are to work upon, taking care to get a dry soil, in the neighborhood of some spring or brook; they build a log-house, and cut a road to the nearest stream, on which the logs must be floated down. The log-houses are large enough to accommodate from twenty to fifty persons. In the centre a raised fireplace is built, directly under the apex of the roof, and the only chimney is a tunnel above this fireplace. The work of wood-cutting begins as soon as the road is finished and the ground becomes hard enough to haul the logs, usually early in December,― and it is continued until the streams break up in the spring. The daily wood-chopping begins with the early morning, and is kept up so long as there is light. In the evenings the woodmen sit around their fire, play cards, smoke their pipes, tell stories, and sometimes get up rude dances. There is very little drinking among them during the season of work in the woods. Suttlers are not allowed upon the premises, and the men have usually no money to buy liquor. They are paid by the day, and supplied with suitable food by their employers. Pork and beans, dried fish, bread, and tea are the most approved articles of diet. Coffee is not generally provided, and the delicacies consist chiefly in the wild game which the woodmen themselves may chance to catch. There is plenty of this to be had, if there were time to take it; for the woods are still full of squirrels, rabbits, coons, deer, and black bears,

whose flesh is not unpalatable: the streams, too, are full of fish. But the men are too busy in their craft to do much fishing or hunting, and are content with their simple, but nourishing, regular fare. In addition to their "nourishment," they get, on an average, about a dollar a day for their labor. The whole gain of a lumberman, in his winter's work, is about a hundred dollars, which a new suit of clothes and a few weeks of sport in the spring generally exhaust. The life of lumbermen is like that of sailors, and very few lay up the fruits of their toil. In character, the men are quite as good as the average of those who lead a roving life. A large number of them work in the mills in the summer season; some go on farther west; and others go home to their friends in Canada or Maine. Comparatively few of the wood-choppers are Germans or Irishmen, though there are parties of both these races. They are gregarious in their habits. In cutting trees they go in pairs, and very few of them are willing to live in separate huts or away from the camp. They sleep along the sloping side of the house, with their feet inwards, toward the central fire, which is kept burning during the night. They dispense with prayers and preaching, and make little account of Sunday. A few have books, but the taste for reading is not general; mending clothes and sharpening axes, with such amusements as we have mentioned, fill the spare time. Their occupation is healthy and cheerful. The stock of medicines rarely needs to be replenished, and there is not much for a physician to do in their strong-armed company.

A gang of forty men, it is estimated, will cut, in the course of the winter, three million feet of lumber, the product of about five hundred acres, and draw it to the streams. Only the trunks of the trees are saved for lumber. These are sawed into logs of twelve, fourteen, or sixteen feet in length, according to their diameter and the width of the stream down which they are to be floated. It needs some art to launch them properly, and to place them so that they will float freely when the ice breaks up in the spring. A few inches of snow upon the ground greatly assist the lumber operations, by enabling the men to substitute sledges for the drag with its heavy weight and its friction. As the lumber territory retreats farther

inland the streams grow smaller and transportation is more difficult.

The logs as they are cut are marked with the private mark of their owners. When they reach the main streams they are caught and bound into rafts, guided down to the main river, and distributed to the various booms of the mills. The Titibawassee Boom Company, organized in 1864, rafted out and distributed in that year ninety million feet of lumber. In 1867, the fourth year of their operations, they rafted and distributed more than two hundred and thirty-six million feet. They used, in their rafting work, more than $20,000 worth of rope. They have now twelve miles of booms, and they employ two hundred and fifty men, who work through the summer, and are usually unable to bring down all that is cut during the winter. The actual number of logs rafted by this company in 1867 was 958,117; and adding to these the long timber, square timber, flat timber, and piles, the number of pieces was 967,695. To supply this great product, 150,000 to 200,000 pine-trees must have been cut down; and this is only the work upon a single one of the four branches of the Saginaw. On the Cass River there were rafted down, in 1867, 232,469 logs, yielding 74,643,300 feet of lumber. On the Flint River only a small part of the yield is rafted down, as there are many inland mills; the best lands on this river, too, have already lost their timber. But in 1867 five and a half million feet were floated down it to the Saginaw River, in addition to fifty-five million sawed in the nine mills of the city of Flint, which has been made by the enterprise of Governor H. H. Crapo, a Massachusetts man, one of the great lumber centres of the West, though it is not near any navigable water.

The working season of the saw-mills varies with the late or early opening of the streams, but lasts on the average for eight months of the year. Some of the mills keep a surplus of logs in their booms through the winter, that they may be ready for work earlier in the spring. Many of the mills run night and day, with double gangs of men. A few of the smaller inland mills use water-power, but the larger mills are run by steam. The fuel for the engines, of course, costs nothing. The refuse slabs and sawdust of all the mills far more than supply all that

is needed. Attached to the larger mills are long piers and platforms, from which the lumber is lowered directly to the decks of the vessels. Most of the mills saw only boards, but in many there are saws which cut staves, shingles, shooks, laths, and long timber. The staves and shooks, however, being made from red and white oak, are hardly to be included among the

66

lumber products proper. "Portable" saw-mills are getting to be common in the inland places. All the larger mills have, at least, one circular saw, and one or more gang saws. In the great mill of Sage, McGraw, & Co., the invested capital of which is $300,000, there are four gang-saws. The whole number of mills in the Saginaw Valley, or tributary to it, exclusive of those at Flint, was, in 1867, eighty-two, with an invested capital of $3,428,500. In these mills there are seventy-five circular saws, sixty-nine vertical or "muley" saws, and thirty-nine gang-saws, - one hundred and eighty-three in all. The lumber manufactured in these mills, boards and shingles, amounted to 423,960,190 feet, which is but little more than half their capacity. The aggregate of logs in the booms was 17,304,605. The number of men employed in these mills was 2,402. In addition to this lumber, nearly sixty-four million laths were made during the year. Of this vast product of the year, less than one eighth remained unsold at the close of work in the winter. About four hundred million feet of manufactured lumber were actually transported from this valley during the summer and autumn of the year 1867. Figures like these oppress the imagination. And yet the product of the Saginaw mills is only a part of the product of the Saginaw Valley. We have to add to these the nine large mills in Flint, with their product of fifty-five million feet of lumber, nine and a half million laths, and six million feet of shingles.

The opening of the Saginaw lumber region stimulated the opening of other lumber regions both on the east and west sides of the Peninsula; and a complete statement of the lumber product of the State takes in a very wide range, from Port Huron to Alpena, from Grand Haven to Grand Traverse. Port Huron, at the outlet of Lake Huron, where the Black River empties into the St. Clair, is the nearest of all the depots