HUNTING SPRUCE GUM.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10060, 4 June 1910, Page 7

HUNTING SPRUCE GUM.

The woods of Maine yield more than one-half of the tons of genuine spruce chewing gum o iiiaumed in America every year. 1 hough, says the Philadelphia record, the city factories turn out large quantities of artificial gum, made from bitumen, pitch,, and paraffir, and flavoured with many beguiling essence?, and sell their products so cheaply that the poorest citizen can afford to buy all the gum he wants to chew, the ciean, amber-tinted life-blood of the black spruce tree is getting to be an expensive luxury. .Before the pulp mills came to Mair.e crystal pure gum was sold by this joboers for from 40 to 60 cents a pound. Most of it was selected from the cewly chopped .trees by the lumbermen. The advent of the pulp mills and the rapid transportation of the cut timber by rail from the stump to trie factory brought about a change of method. Old growth spruce tim-\ her, from which the best quality gum is obtained, is now so rare that an active lumberman, will not secure more than a pound in a vtintf r. The demand continuing constantly, priceß doubled in a few yesrr, givn g birth to a new industry, which uives i profitable employment co. more then 1 two hundred men for a month in every ycar.lt has taken about twenty ve»r3 to complete the evolution of gum picking from crude art to a science. 'The men mho engage in tha business have regular routes, which they travel over year after year. The territory is leased from the landowners. Before coming down from a tree the hunter mak«is deep horizontal gashes on the sunny side of the trunk, forming wounds from which the pitch will exude during the summer, and later harden into gum for the next i harvest. Little gum of last season's > ripening has come to market,,and the retail price in Bangor is 15'centp. an ounce. When the pickers come in with their packs the price will fall to 1.75 dol, and 2 dols. retail, and about ].sodoJ v in ten-pound Jots. It is asserted that the habit of gumchewing gives one a clear brain, and that the chesver can think quickly and act wisely in conducting the affairs or life. More than two-thirds of the gum gathered in Maine is s Id in Boston, and most of this is retailed to local customer,?, a fact which may I account for the high intellectual condition of Boston. \ Persons who visit the backwoods towns of Maine near many stories about enterprising citizens who haye gained sudden wealth by cornering the gum supply. In 1888 a Boston druggist named Brown came to Bangor to purchase lumber for a group of \ cottages he was about to erect near Cottage City. He sold'spruce gum in his store, buying it from.the/jobbers at an average rate of l'tol. a pound. Finding he could buy it in Bangor for j 59 cents, a' pound, he purchased all he could get, ' visiting t'i3 camps m otder to get as much as passbile. . . ~ He bought neirly tvn ton?, which he placed in boxes and stored away to jawait the opening of the river so that it cuuld bs taken to Boaton by boat.' The ice was late in going out of the Penobscot that year, i and before the druggist received his gum the price had gone up to 2dol. a pound. He made a profit of more than 5,000d01., on an investment of less than 2,000d015.