FORESTRY IN THE BLACK HILLS

ARTHUR F. C. HOFFMAN, THEODORE KRUEGER.

On the western edge of the Great Plains, separated from the massive Rocky Mountains by long stretches of prairie, lie two of our national forests, the Black Hills and the Harney.

Huddled along the State line between Wyoming and South Dakota with all but a thumb in the southwestern quarter of South Dakota this island of timber extends about 40 miles from east to west, and 120 miles from north to south. Its gross area is 1,524,797 acres, all but 20 percent (311,756 acres) of which is owned by the Federal Government.

Its altitude ranges from 3,500 to 7,240 feet (at Harney Peak), but most of the forest exhibits a rolling topography. There are, however, some fairly deep canyons on the lower ends of the main drainages and some plateaus that have precipitous sides. Its generally high situation subjects the forest to extremes of weather severe hail storms, unseasonable freezes, tornadoes, and heavy rains and snows. A favorable factor for tree and forage growth is that the period of heaviest precipitation is in May and June, when more than 15 inches of rain may fall, although the average is usually about 8 inches.

Fauna and flora of East and West meet on the Black Hills and Harney National Forests more simply named the Black Hills National Forest or the Black Hills. The commercial timber stand is 95 percent ponderosa pine and about 5 percent western white spruce (Picea glauca var. albertiana). A small area contains lodgepole pine. The total stand of coniferous timber is estimated to be 2,346 million feet, board measure. The average tree contains about 250 board feet, and the average stand is a little over 5,000 board feet an acre. The few hardwoods here have rather low economic importance: Paper birch, the boxelder, cottonwood, aspen, ironwood, and bur oak.

The spruce grows in the higher altitudes on the northern and western slopes and in the draws and gulches. A narrow stringer of grassland lies in the gulch bottoms. The remainder of the forest is the natural site for the pine.

Wherever seed trees exist, natural reproduction does occur rapidly and surely; planting and seeding are necessary only in places where fire completely killed the stand. The young growth invariably comes in so thick that it is called dog-hair stands, and must be thinned to relieve the overcrowded condition. Up to 1948, 266,000 acres had been thinned.

IN SETTLEMENT AND USE, the Black Hills area is new country. It was considered to be Sioux Indian land until the gold stampede to the southern hills began in 1875. Agitation followed to open the area to settlers. On February 28, 1877, President Grant signed an act that excluded the Black Hills from the Indian reservation and legally opened the country. Settlement and mining activities had already started, however, and most of the camps and towns were established by 1876.

Unregulated cutting of the timber started at once to provide material for buildings and mines at Lead, Deadwood, Rochford, Carbonate, Mystic, Galena, Sturgis, and Rapid City. Portable sawmills operated at most of these places, and a string of them extended along the eastern side of the forest from Sturgis to Black Hawk. Cutting was also done on Rapid Creek to supply Rapid City.

At first, utilization of the forest was poor. Little action was taken to prevent forest fires until a series of large fires convinced settlers and miners that the timber supply would have to be more wisely used. Utilization began to be somewhat closer, probably because within the decade a large demand had developed for mine timbers, ties, fuel, and for lumber and heavy timbers.

No consideration was given then to the future of the resource, however, and clear cutting was the rule until about the turn of the century.

By 1897, enough of the residents realized that better care of the timberlands was necessary to assure adequate future supplies of timber and forage, and they petitioned the Government to make a forest reserve of the area. In 1897, President Cleveland withdrew all land in the Black Hills from entry; on September 19, 1898, the Black Hills Forest Reserve was placed under administration. It was later divided into two units for administrative purposes and renamed the Black Hills National Forest and Harney National Forest.

Applications to purchase timber were received by the supervisor almost immediately. The first one was from the Homestake Mining Company, which for some time had been cutting timber in this area. The resulting sale, the first one made on any national forest in the United States, is familiarly known as Case 1. The company has continued to be a heavy purchaser of national forest timber.

The conditions of sale and cutting for Case 1, compared with those now in effect, are of historic interest, as showing the initial step in the developing of silvicultural practices on the forest.

Offered in Case 1 were 15,519,300 board feet of saw timber and 5,100 cords of wood from the tops of live trees, at a minimum of $1 a thousand board feet and 25 cents for a cord. Standing dead timber was offered for 50 cents a thousand feet and down dead timber for 15 cents a cord. The timber to be sold was called Norway pine but was actually ponderosa pine. In comparison, the advertised minimum stumpage price in the same locality had increased in 1948, in one case at least, to $17.37 a thousand board feet.

Eight contracts were let for the eight sections of land comprising the sale area. Cutting started at Christmas in 1899. Cutting the first year was to a strict 8-inch-diameter limit, which produced an average of about 5,000 board feet an acre. Later, at the request of the Forest Service, the method of cutting was modified so that not more than two of the larger trees were left on an acre for seed trees. One of the requirements of the contract was that the slash be piled by the operator after all tops had been made into cordwood. In general, however, the slash was poorly piled; on the less accessible places, where the cordwood was hard to get out, the purchaser's contractors followed the practice of covering the trimmed tops with slash.

Before the cutting was completed and the case closed in April 1908, four extensions of time had been granted. The total cut was less than the estimated volume by almost a million board feet, but, because of the removal of practically all of the reserve stand, the area will not be ready for a second cut for many more years.

A survey showed that actually an average stand of only 482 board feet had been left per acre when the cut was made. In 1924, the average stand per acre had increased to 2,611 board feet. This indicates how rapidly the volume increases when heavy cuttings are made, but is no argument for cutting as heavy as that originally done in the Case 1 area.

When the forest was established, it was thought that local demands would be sufficient to use the entire allowable cut. In the beginning, the lumbering and timber industry grew at the same rate as the mining industry developed. Actually, for many years, the size of the timber industry was limited by local demand.

The Homestake Mine is still the largest single user of local timber on the Black Hills National Forest. The company has purchased large holdings Of timberland that were in private ownership to supplement timber available to them from the national forest.

Railroads also used a great deal of the Black Hills timber. The agricultural areas surrounding the national forest developed at about the same rate as the mining industry, which provided a market for the agricultural products; farmers, too, were users of the products of the timber.

A sawmill, now known as the Warren Lamb Mill, was established in Rapid City in 1907. The expanding lumber industry needed outside markets to absorb the production that exceeded local needs, but the ban on interstate shipping of any except fire-or insect-killed timber restricted the growth of the lumbering industry, until 1912. In that year it was lifted.

Thereafter the industry was free to expand and was limited only by the size of the allowable cut provided for by the management plans. The volume of timber cut varied in accordance with business conditions : It was up in good times and down in times of depression, but through the years more stability was evidenced in this industry than in some other industries, such as farming and livestock raising.

To date an estimated 2,800 million board feet of timber has been cut from the areas in the Black Hills. Of that amount, about 1 1/2 billion feet were cut in the old mining days from 1876 to 1898, before the national forest was created. Between 1908 and 1948, the cut was 1,084,923,000 board feet.

The average annual cut of 40 million feet since 1942 has furnished 140,000 man-days of labor a year in woods and mills to local people.

BLACK HILLS TIMBER has always had a high cull factor ( 15 to 35 percent). The timber cuts out mostly low grades of lumber. Eventually, lumber from the Northwest was shipped into the Black Hills territory and competed strongly with local lumber. The larger mills developed new markets by becoming a supplier of special products that could be made from low-grade lumber boxes and crates for the meatpacking industry, grain doors, table tops made by gluing together small pieces of lumber, and shipping crates for refrigerators. Utilization of a high percentage of the log became general.

When the forest was established and cutting of timber started under government supervision, it was not supervised by trained foresters. Young men who later occupied responsible positions in the Forest Service, however, started their early work and gained experience on this forest. The development of proper methods of cutting, slash disposal, and fire protection were started and gradually improved.

Before the establishment of the national forests, most of the timber cutting was in the accessible stands. The sawmill operators took as many or as few of the trees as they wanted and converted them into mine timbers, ties, lumber, or cordwood. They passed up the diseased, the deformed, and the limby trees, and those on steep or rocky slopes. Consequently, the stand was left in poor silvicultural condition, cluttered with slash, and extremely vulnerable to damage by fire. Poor trees occupied space needed for growing better trees.

Federal foresters imposed regulations that were intended to stop such wasteful cutting. Much experimental marking was done. Foresters developed a progressive intensification of cutting practices from clear cutting to diameter limit, selection cutting, and the present shelterwood system. Records show that the latter system was originally advocated by some early-day foresters. More recently the tendency has been away from heavy cuts to light cuts at shorter intervals.

In the first rules for marking that were prepared for the forest, emphasis was placed on the need to insure natural reproduction in case of fire. As insurance, it was the policy to leave two, three, or four seed trees on an acre. The first marking rules apparently were based on the idea that a second cut would not be made within 80 years or more.