The Canadian Timber Trade.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 72, 21 September 1895, Page 2

The Canadian Timber Trade.

In the recent number of Great Thoughts is given a description of " A Colossal Tim-ber-slide in Canada," which gives some idea of the colossal scale on which the timber industry is carried on there. The Government owns the bush country, and yearly parcels of land, 12 miles square, are sold on lease under the name of the townships to timber merchants or lumber* men, who have only the right to clear away the timber within five years, when the land is again sold to intending settlers in freehold. One of these firms, that of Gilmour, of Trenton, have a mill which cuts half a million feet board measures of logs daily. They ' commence on on the Ist May and cut until October, when the mills shut down and all hands are sent to the bush to fell and skid for next season 'a cnt. The firm estimates 25,000,000 feet of wood to be cut out each year for 20 years on the 85 square miles of their ' limit,' and has therefore expended 1,500,000 dollars in building slides, dams, and the most wonderful " portage" that has yet been erected in Canada. The slide is a mile long, the logs going into a trough into which engines pump 15,000 gallons of water per minute, and are carried by locks into the river system on one side of the Muskoko " divide" into another system of creeks and rivers 300 miles down to Trenton on the Trent, a river which enters Lake Ontario. Thus the problem was solved of conveying an unlimited quantity of timber from one system of lake 3 and rivers across a wide and broken strip of land into another network of streams 150 feet higher in level. The machinery for the slide was taken up by a specially built steamer, the Alligator which can propel itself on land as well as on water, and can be utilised also as a sawmill. This accomplished, the vessel towed the machinery in a barge to Dorset, pulled itself up on to the shore by means of a wire rope and winch, worked by its own engines, previously diacpnneoted ftoin the puddle wheels* Its bottom being flat, with heavy runners bolted on, the boat slides along with ease. Once well on dry land the industrious Alligator did not rest, but one of its paddle wheels being removed, a 00-inch circular saw fixed in its place to the shaft, the vessel cut 20,000 feet board measure per day, preparing thus all the planks and timber used in the construction of the slide and dam.