American Wealth: Timber

The history of the United States is fundamentally a history of rapid exploitation of immensely valuable natural resources. The possession and exploitation of these resources have given most of the distinctive traits to American character, economic development, and even political and social institutions. Whatever preeminence the United States may have among the nations of the world, in industrial activity, efficiency and enterprise, in standards of comfort in living, in wealth, and even in such social and educational institutions as are dependent upon great wealth, must be attributed to the possession of these great natural resources; and the maintenance of our preeminence in these respects is dependent upon a wise and economical use of remaining resources. Thus the question of conservation is one of the most important questions before the American people ...
John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920), xix.

Remember this: this text criticizing wasteful over-cutting of timber and other wanton exploitation of the sources of American wealth was published in 1920. Its criticism of wrong-headed government actions was published a dozen years prior to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the office of President of the United States. Long before publicly funded welfare existed for the poor and destitute, it existed for the railroads. These railroads, and companies with which they made sweet deals (Weyerhaeuser), came to own most of the nation's timber resources.

The three largest timber holdings in the United States— those of the Southern Pacific, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, and the Northern Pacific—aggregated about 9,000,000 acres of timber land—since the forfeiture of the Southern Pacific lands in Oregon, only about 7,000,000 acres—some of it among the finest in the world. The five largest holdings in the country included 12,794,000 acres, an average of 2,560,000 acres each. Among holdings smaller than these were 9 of from 500,000 to 1,500,000 acres, averaging almost 1,000,000 acres each; 27 holdings of from 300,000 to 500,000 acres each; 48 holdings of from 150,000 to 300,000 acres; 124 of from 75,000 to 150,000 acres; and 520 holdings of between 18,000 and 75,000 acres. Thus 733 holders owned in fee a total of 71,521,000 acres of timber land and land owned in connection with or in the vicinity of this timber land—an average of nearly 100,000 acres each. There were also 961 smaller holders owning a total of 6,731,000 acres, an average for each of 7,000 acres—the equivalent of forty homesteads. This makes a total of over 78,000,000 acres owned in fee by 1,694 holders—nearly one twentieth of the land area of the United States, from the Canadian to the Mexican border.
John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (1920), 317.

Indian Names: Nez Perce

Tribal names, as the names Native, Native American, Indian, American Indian, Native American Indian, are inventions more often than not. Some of these inventions stem from simple confusion, as when Captain James Cook heard the Nuu-chah-nulth offering instructions on where to anchor his ship, he heard "Nootka" and gave them that name. Some names are corruptions of what their enemies call them, as is the case with Sioux. Some names remain shrouded in the mists of time.

Already by 1835, the reasons for calling the Salish people in Montana, Flathead, and for calling the Ni-Mii-Puu, Nez Perce, had been forgotten. At least Samuel Parker could not discern the reasons during his travels.

I was disappointed to see nothing peculiar in the shape of the Flathead Indians, to give them their name. Who gave them this name, or for what reason, is not known. Some suppose it was given them in derision for not flattening their heads, as the Chenooks and some other nations do, near the shores of the Pacific. It may be so, but how will those, who indulge this imagination, account for the Nez Perces being so called, since they do not pierce their noses. That those names are given by white men, without any known reason, is evident from the fact, that they do not call each other by the names which signify either flat head or pierced nose.
Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838), 76.

Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, my friend Otis Halfmoon told a class that I was teaching that the name Nez Perce probably stems from the Ni-Mii-Puu sign language term for themselves in which they pointed from right to left across their face to indicate that they had crossed over between those mountains. He speculated that someone thought they were piercing their noses with the gesture, adding that he is glad they did not think it was an act of cleaning their noses.

Young's Cauldron

In early 1836, Ewing Young purchased a large iron cauldron from Courtney Walker. Walker had the job of disposing of the goods left behind by Nathaniel Wyeth's abandoned Columbia River enterprise. A successful ice merchant in New England, Wyeth had come west with dreams of making a fortune packing and shipping Pacific salmon for consumption outside the region. Along the way, Wyeth also sought profits from trapping for furs, brokering timber sales, and importing goods to Oregon from Hawaii and the east coast. Wyeth's Oregon enterprise failed to turn a profit so he liquidated his assets in the region and returned to the ice business. Meanwhile, Young had carried on successful trade between New Mexico and Missouri for more than a decade before working his way west to California, and from California driving a herd of horses into Oregon. Wyeth's cauldron had been shipped to Oregon for pickling salmon. Young originated from Tennessee and saw in the kettle potential for preparing sour mash that he could then distill into whiskey.

Oregon was not a wholly lawless frontier, but with joint occupation by the United States and by England, and with a small non-Indian population, enforcement authorities were far from prominent. United States law banned sale of liquor in Indian Country. The Hudson's Bay Company, England's presence in the region, understood that liquor sales to Indians had a deleterious effect on the fur trade--their business in the region. Young's plan to build a distillery provoked cooperation between HBC employees, American settlers, and missionaries that had recently arrived from the United States with the professed purpose of bringing Christian civilization to Oregon's Native population. The Oregon Temperance Society formed and started a petition drive to dissuade Young from manufacturing spirits.

Book Prices: Two Artifacts

Reading through one of my old journals in the quest for a poem that I wrote eighteen to twenty years ago because my nineteen year old son said some things that reminded me of its central metaphor (dissipation of smoke), I stumbled across an entry that contains a list of books purchased, retail outlets, and total price spent over approximately one week. The number of texts acquired in that week seems excessive until I compare in to the number I have acquired in the past week.

One book appears in both lists.


Journal Extract

4 January 1990

I've gone hog wild the past few days in purchase of books. In San Francisco, at City Lights Books: Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone, trans. Paul Bowles; at Manzanita Used Books, downstairs from John and Kay*: Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought; at the AHA [American Historical Association] conference: Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers; and Robert V. Remini, The Life of Andrew Jackson.

On the trip back to Washington at the Trees of Mystery Gift Shop: Marcelle Masson, A Bag of Bones: Legends of the Wintu Indians of Northern California.

Back in Seattle [before the trip back to the eastern part of the state and Washington State University where I was in my first year of PhD work], at Target: Gary Larson, The Prehistory of the Far Side; and Tony Hillerman, A Thief of Time (which I read that night); at Shorey's: Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence; Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men; and Click Relander, Drummers and Dreamers; at Left Bank Books: Louise Erdrich, Jacklight; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization; Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; and Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks; and at the University Book Store: Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe; and Claude Levi-Strauss, Triste Tropiques. The total price of these books was approximately $125.00.

Before this list in my journal, I wrote a paragraph that connected a comment in the last book listed to a book by one of my graduate studies professors.

At the end of "Sao Paulo" in Triste Tropiques is a description of attitudes among students at a freshly founded university that would bear juxtaposition with [Albert J.] von Frank's The Sacred Game. Levi-Strauss describes his students as hungry for new ideas to adorn rather than to inform. This hunger for intellectual adornment rather than eagerness to understand the development of the ideas is a form of provincial mentality. However, Levi-Strauss should not be construed as simply claiming that the European scholar's quality of mind is superior. Earlier in his narrative he describes how his own education taught him to reduce all systems to a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (he does not use these terms).


Second Artifact

At the beginning of the long Labor Day weekend, my wife and I went to Best Buy to look at memory chips for my camera and the Nook and Kindle readers. We left the store with none of these, but with two new iPads and some of the gear designed to protect them and enhance their use. Naturally, the iBooks reader was my first download from the App Store. It comes with A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh. I've added thirty-eight more books since then, including (I will not list them all) Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century; Ludvig von Mises, Economic Freedom and Interventionism; John Adams, Revolutionary Writings; Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne -- Complete; James Joyce, Ulysses; Ambrose Bierce, Write It Right (I own this in paperback, too); Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (I also have the Library of America hardback edition); Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (I have a newer translation in paperback); William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience; Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room; and Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence (see the list above).

The iBooks reader is one of six book reading and storage apps that I have installed so far. In the Kindle Reader, I have nine full books and three samples in addition to the free dictionary that came with it. These include Memoirs of William T. Sherman (about $2); William Gibson, Zero History (at ~$14, my most expensive purchase out of the approximately $35 that I've spent on books the past week); Greg Gibson, It Takes a Genome; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species; Karsten Muller, The Chess Cafe Puzzle Book; and the two volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (another text that I have in paperback).

In the Nook Reader, I have Bram Stoker, Dracula; and Rudyard Kipling, Kim. In other readers, I have such texts as Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason; Fernando Pessoa, 35 Sonnets; Sun Tzu, The Art of War; James Wilson, Collected Works, vol. 1; Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; and quite a few more.


Accounting

Are books more expensive now than they were twenty years ago?

In the last days of 1989 and the first few of 1990 I drove from San Francisco to Seattle and managed to acquire fifteen books for $125. In the waning days of summer in 2010, after acquiring a device that cost some $600+ I managed to acquire fifty books or so for less than $40 without leaving my living room.


* John and Kay were friends of one of my professor's that put myself and another graduate student up while we attended an academic conference. It was in their home that I heard for the first time Allen Ginsberg reading Howl on vinyl.

Addendum: my wife reminded me that iBooks comes pre-installed on the iPad.

Snippets

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (1999) sits in a certain room of my house where I spend a lot of time waiting. By the end of 2010 I should have finished reading it through in one to five minute segments. There I read this morning the passage I read two days ago, being reminded anew of a passage in another book completed two weeks ago.

Borges' note on method:

I let them talk; I carefully avoided formulating questions that might suggest determined answers.
Borges, "A History of the Tango," 394

Lembke's critique:

In fact, there was much more wrong with his testimonies than he acknowledged to his readers. In the first place there is [Bob] Greene's [Homecoming (1989)] own leading question: "Were you spat upon?" Had he asked a more neutral question such as, "What were your homecoming experiences?" the veterans' responses would be much more valid.
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), 80