St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

The Failure of Government Regulation of the St. Croix Pinery

While disputes such as these became more common as the population of the North Country became denser, it is nonetheless striking how little legal and legislative action inhibited the activities of lumbermen. Legal issues were almost always restricted to local courts, even on a border river like the St. Croix. Legislative regulation by the States of Minnesota and Wisconsin was largely restricted to the granting of charters for dams or the passage of laws designed to facilitate the lumber business. The regulation of log marks or the establishment of inspection districts for the scaling of logs were both state regulations that provided a structure conducive to the expansion of the lumber industry. There was remarkably little interest on the part of either Minnesota or Wisconsin in conserving the forests of the St. Croix valley. The states used neither taxation policy nor their investigative authority to try to promote greater efficiency in forest operations. Instead tax policy actually promoted the "cut and get out" tactics of the loggers by presenting hefty tax bills to the owners of uncut forestlands. Two prevailing cultural assumptions inhibited a more creative role for government in forest management. The overwhelming majority of Americans believed that the appropriate disposition of land was private ownership and that the highest use of that land was for farming. Most residents of the Upper Midwest believed that the lumber boom was only a temporary phase of settlement that would in time yield to new and greater opportunities. [89]

Aside from the occasional involvement of the United States Army Corps of Engineers in navigation issues, the federal government was even less of a factor in regulating St. Croix logging. As the largest landowner in the valley the United States government proved a poor steward of some of the finest forestlands in the nation. For at least a generation, from the 1837 Sioux Treaty to the Civil War, pine timber on federal lands was there for the taking. Large-scale operators like Isaac Staples purchased land to secure their long-term futures, but men without access to eastern capital had the option of stealing public timber as a means of establishing themselves in the industry. In hushed tones over steins of lager beer, loggers debated how extensive was the larceny, but no one doubted its existence. Finally in 1855, Thomas A. Hendricks, the United States Commissioner of Public Lands issued a circular directing public land offices to collect the value of all depredations brought to their attention. Typical of federal efforts of that era, Hendricks provided no means to investigate thefts. The result was that only trespassers who had been turned in were ever approached for compensation and the General Land Office often relied upon the trespassers themselves to report how much timber was taken. Typical was the July 1859 case of two Hudson, Wisconsin men arrested for timber stealing. The only reason they were brought to trial was that they had fallen out with a third accomplice who "out of pure maliciousness" turned informant on them. The Wisconsin legislature protested such prosecutions on the grounds that theirs was a frontier state and such logging should be allowed "in view of the necessities of the people." In twenty years only $150,000 was collected in all of the lumber districts in the country. Federal legal expenses required to collect that money topped $50,000. [90]

A more determined effort to deter timber thefts was launched by the General Land Office in 1877 at the behest of Carl Schurz, the independent reformer who served as Rutherford B. Hays's Secretary of the Interior. Schurz sent special agents to several of the most active logging regions with the power to investigate trespasses and to seize illegally cut logs. A wave of panic swept over the industry when Colonel E.A. Pratois arrived in Minnesota to begin his investigation. In May the federal agents were at the Taylors Falls land office "ascertaining the amount of trespassing on the St. Croix River and its tributaries." There was great fear that "a good many prominent lumbermen will be found to have their hands in the grand scheme of denuding the public domain of its valuable timber." The St. Croix lumbermen loudly proclaimed their innocence and complained that the real abuses had taken place on the Chippewa and Upper Mississippi rivers. "That any of the first families of Stillwater were engaged in this business is preposterous," complained the Stillwater Lumberman. "But Lord, how those Minneapolis and St. Cloud fellows did steal!" In the end the agents determined that 81.7 million feet of pine logs had been plundered from public lands, just between 1868 and 1876. [91]

One single case of trespass found thirty-five million board feet, with a dollar value of over $75,000, feet stolen. All told there were twenty-nine cases brought to trial in Minnesota because of Schurz's probe. Unfortunately, thanks to the United States Congress the prosecutions never lived up to the build up of the investigation. The House refused to increase the Department of the Interior's total investigatory budget above its paltry twelve thousand dollars. Which made it impossible to build cases for prosecution, even though the penalties from those cases would have returned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the federal government. Schurz tried to drum up public support for broad changes in United States public land policy. He called for an end to preemption rights and homestead privileges for forest lands on the grounds the lands were not suited for family farms and that current policy encouraged very valuable public lands to be privatized at next to no return to the public. He advocated managing forestlands for sustained yield by keeping them in public hands and leasing cutting rights. Such a policy would have created the equivalent of the national forest system in the 1870s. Unfortunately, neither Minnesota nor Wisconsin was ready for reform. "I found myself standing almost solitary and alone," Schurz complained. "Deaf was Congress, and deaf the people seemed to be." Actually, Congress was worse than deaf. The House, slavish to the interests of timber industry, passed the Timber Cutting Act that made it legal for homesteaders and mining companies to cut public domain timber. More importantly the act gave St. Croix lumbermen facing prosecution or investigation a giant loophole. Anyone who was found to have stolen timber from the public domain in the past, or accused of doing so in the future, simply was required to pay a fee of $1.25 per acre. The prospect of any future investigations of timber fraud vanished with this legal absolution for past sinners and the shameless invitation to "go and sin some more." [92]

The Schurz investigation was greatly resented not only by the lumbermen of the valley but also by the people of the St. Croix. As an earlier investigator had lamented "local sympathy sealed up sources of information." Yet, the image painted by the investigation of the lumber baron plundering public lands would linger. It would later resonate quite strongly in the valley when a lack of timber forced once busy mills to close. Then public ire would be directed against Weyerhaeuser and Liard, Norton. This is ironic because the big downriver timber companies did not become deeply involved in the valley until after the vast majority of the upper St. Croix forest was no longer in the public domain. In fact Liard, Norton, & Company was never involved in a single trespass case in Wisconsin, nor did it resort to filing fraudulent homestead claims. On the other hand the names of some of the richest of the original Stillwater lumbermen are listed on homestead applications in Burnett County, Wisconsin, including Isaac Staples and Frederick Schulenberg. By the 1880s the forest had been privatized by lumbermen, who controlled thousands of acres and railroads, due to the land grants offered by state and federal legislation, which owned hundreds of thousands of acres more. These large corporate owners tried to protect their holdings from the type of depredations that had previously been directed against public lands. Rather than being timber thieves the Weyerhaeuser syndicate were themselves victims of fraud. The job of protecting corporate lands from theft largely fell to men known as timber cruisers. [93]

The job of the timber cruiser was to estimate the amount of board feet of lumber that was present in a tract of standing timber. Many of the first cruisers were former government township surveyors. One of these was Albert C. Stuntz, who traveled all over the Upper St. Croix valley in the 1860s and 1870s. Sometimes he traveled alone, on other occasions he was assisted by Chippewa canoemen. He camped out in the woods in all seasons, although when he came across a logging camp he was grateful for its hospitality. In 1864 he visited a logging camp on the Namekagon River. "Laid over at Mackey Bros. Camp in Sec. 27," he wrote in his diary, "nothing to read or amuse myself about camp. Life is carried on as usual Some mending Boots and Fiddling Some reading Some Sleeping & Some Talking." A handful of large lumber companies maintained a salaried cruiser; the holders of railroad land grants usually required a staff of such men. There were, however, a number of experienced landlookers based in Stillwater who were available for assignment as needed by any lumberman. Accuracy and integrity were crucial requirements for timber cruisers. Upon their reports a company might base its entire winter logging program, or determine the price at which it would buy or sell land. Timber cruisers were most often the first to discover a timber trespass and their familiarity with what went on in the forest over many years, plus their knowledge of tract books made them the most effective investigators of the crime. During the 1880s William M. Croom, timber cruiser for Liard, Norton, & Company discovered numerous signs of "old cuttings" in what the company had thought was virgin St. Croix valley pine forest. Little could be done to seek redress for depredations committed in the indefinite past, but cruisers were kept busy accessing the value of ongoing trespasses. Yet, while these abuses were very common, by the 1880s they were generally the result of error not larceny. William Sauntry made a practice of firing foreman who "cut a round forty." He told one of his employees "a man who'll steal for you, will steal from you." Most trespass cases were the result of errors made in laying out boundaries or the result of deep snow obscuring the lines between tracts. Damage claims were generally settled promptly and amicably, short of court action. [94]

Figure 22. Logging Dams on the Upper Valley (Source: Army Corps Report, 1880 and U.S. Surveys 1852-55)
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