Читать книгу American Forest Trees - Henry H. Gibson - Страница 9

Table of Contents

This is the largest pine of the United States, and probably is the largest true pine in the world. Its rival, the Kauri pine of New Zealand, is not a pine according to the classification of botanists; and that leaves the sugar pine supreme, as far as the world has been explored. David Douglas, the first to describe the species, reported a tree eighteen feet in diameter and 245 feet high, in southern Oregon. No tree of similar size has been reported since; but trunks six, ten, and even twelve feet through, and more than 200 high are not rare.

The range of sugar pine extends from southern Oregon to lower California. Through California it follows the Sierra Nevada mountains in a comparatively narrow belt. In Oregon it descends within 1,000 feet of sea level, but the lower limit of its range gradually rises as it follows the mountains southward, until in southern California it is 8,000 or 10,000 feet above the sea. Its choice of situation is in the mountain belt where the annual precipitation is forty inches or more. The deep winter snows of the Sierras do not hurt it. The young trees bear abundant limbs covering the trunks nearly or quite to the ground, and are of perfect conical shape. When they are ten or fifteen feet tall they may be entirely covered in snow which accumulates to a depth of a dozen feet or more. The little pines are seldom injured by the load, but their limbs shed the snow until it covers the highest twig. The consequence is that a crooked sugar pine trunk is seldom seen, though a considerable part of the tree’s youth may have been spent under tons of snow. Later in life the lower limbs die and drop, leaving clean boles which assure abundance of clear lumber in the years to come.

The tree is nearly always known as sugar pine, though it may be called big pine or great pine to distinguish it from firs, cedars, and other softwoods with which it is associated. The name is due to a product resembling sugar which exudes from the heartwood when the tree has been injured by fires, and which dries in white, brittle excrescences on the surface. Its taste is sweet, with a suggestion of pitch which is not unpleasant. The principle has been named “pinite.”

The needles of sugar pine are in clusters of five and are about four inches long. They are deciduous the second and third years. The cones are longer than cones of any other pine of this country but those of the Coulter pine are a little heavier. Extreme length of 22 inches for the sugar pine cone has been recorded, but the average is from 12 to 15 inches. Cones open, shed their seeds the second year, and fall the third. The seeds resemble lentils, and are provided with wings which carry them several hundred feet, if wind is favorable. This affords excellent opportunities for reproduction; but there is an offset in the sweetness of the seeds which are prized for food by birds, beasts and creeping things from the Piute Indian down to the Douglas squirrel and the jumping mouse.

Sugar pine occupies a high place as a timber tree. It has been in use for half a century. The cut in 1900 was 52,000,000 feet, in 1904 it was 120,000,000; in 1907, 115,000,000, and the next year about 100,000,000. Ninety-three per cent of the cut is in California, the rest in Oregon. Its stand in California has been estimated at 25,000,000,000 feet.

The wood of sugar pine is a little lighter than eastern white pine, is a little weaker, and has less stiffness. It is soft, the rings of growth are wide, the bands of summerwood thin and resinous; the resin passages are numerous and very large, the medullary rays numerous and obscure. The heart is light brown, the sapwood nearly white.

Sugar pine and redwood were the two early roofing woods in California, and both are still much used for that purpose. Sugar pine was made into sawed shingles and split shakes. The shingle is a mill product; but the shake was rived with mallet and frow, and in the years when it was the great roofing material in central and eastern California, the shake makers camped by twos in the forest, lived principally on bacon and red beans, and split out from 200,000 to 400,000 shakes as a summer’s work. The winter snows drove the workers from the mountains, with from eight to twelve hundred dollars in their pockets for the season’s work.

The increase in stumpage price has practically killed the shake maker’s business. In the palmy days when most everything went, he procured his timber for little or nothing. He sometimes failed to find the surveyor’s lines, particularly if there happened to be a fine sugar pine just across on a government quarter section. His method of operation was wasteful. He used only the best of the tree. If the grain happened to twist the fraction of an inch, he abandoned the fallen trunk, and cut another. The shakes were split very thin, for sugar pine is among the most cleavable woods of this country. Four or five good trees provided the shake maker’s camp with material for a year’s work.

Some of the earliest sawmills in California cut sugar pine for sheds, shacks, sluiceboxes, flumes among the mines; and almost immediately a demand came from the agricultural and stock districts for lumber. From that day until the present time the sugar pine mills have been busy. As the demand has grown, the facilities for meeting it have increased. The prevailing size of the timber forbade the use of small mills. A saw large enough for most eastern and southern timbers would not slab a sugar pine log. From four to six feet were common sizes, and the lumberman despised anything small.

In late years sugar pine operators have looked beyond the local markets, and have been sending their lumber to practically every state in the Union, except probably the extreme South. It comes in direct competition with the white pine of New England and the Lake States. The two woods have many points of resemblance. The white pine would probably have lost no markets to the California wood if the best grades could still be had at moderate prices; but most of the white pine region has been stripped of its best timber, and the resulting scarcity in the high grades has been, in part, made good by sugar pine. Some manufacturers of doors and frames claim that sugar pine is more satisfactory than white pine, because of better behavior under climatic changes. It is said to shrink, swell, and warp less than the eastern wood.

Sugar pine has displaced white pine to a very small extent only, in comparison with the field still held by the eastern wood, whose annual output is about thirty times that of the California species. Their uses are practically the same except that only the good grades of sugar pine go east, and the corresponding grades of white pine west, and therefore there is no competition between the poor grades of the two woods. The annual demand for sugar and white pine east of the Rocky Mountains is probably represented as an average in Illinois, where 2,000,000 feet of the former and 175,000,000 of the latter are used yearly.

While there is a large amount of mature sugar pine ready for lumbermen, the prospect of future supplies from new growth is not entirely satisfactory. The western yellow pine is mixed with it throughout most of its range, and is more than a match for it in taking possession of vacant ground. It is inferred from this fact that the relative positions of the two species in future forests will change at the expense of sugar pine. It endures shade when small, and this enables it to obtain a start among other species; but as it increases in size it becomes intolerant of shade, and if it does not receive abundance of light it will not grow. A forest fire is nearly certain to kill the small sugar pines, but old trunks are protected by their thick bark. Few species have fewer natural enemies. Very small trees are occasionally attacked by mistletoe (Arceuthobium occidentale) and succumb or else are stunted in their growth.

Mexican Pinon (Pinus cembroides) is known also as nut pine, pinon pine and stone-seed Mexican pinon. It is one of the smallest of the native pines of this country. The tree is fifteen or twenty feet high and a few inches in diameter, but in sheltered canyons in Arizona it sometimes attains a height of fifty or sixty feet with a corresponding diameter. It reaches its best development in northern Mexico and what is found of it in the United States is the species’ extreme northern extension, in Arizona and New Mexico at altitudes usually above 6,000 feet. It supplies fuel in districts where firewood is otherwise scarce, and it has a small place as ranch timber. The wood is heavy, of slow growth, the summerwood thin and dense. The resin passages are few and small; color, light, clear yellow, the sapwood nearly white. If the tree stood in regions well-forested with commercial species, it would possess little or no value; but where wood is scarce, it has considerable value. The hardshell nuts resemble those of the gray pine, but are considered more valuable for food. They are not of much importance in the United States, but in Mexico where the trees are more abundant and the population denser, the nuts are bought and sold in large quantities. Its leaves are in clusters of three, sometimes two. They are one inch or more in length, and fall the third and fourth years. Cones are seldom over two inches in length. The species is not extending its range, but seems to be holding the ground it already has. It bears abundance of seeds, but not one in ten thousand germinates and becomes a mature tree.