Name/Title
Pioneers and the ForestDescription
The Europeans who settled North America lived in an age of wood. They used wood to heat and cook, to build houses, barns, and stores, to fence fields, to make carts, boats, yokes for oxen, ploughs, hay rakes, and other farming tools as well as for furniture, buckets, tubs, brooms, toys, and a host of other household items. Wood was also widely used and a crucial commodity on the southern Manitoba prairies.
The settlement founded at Red River in the heart of the Hudson’s Bay Company trading empire was well situated between sprawling grasslands to its west that supplied traders with bison meat and hides and fur-rich forests, lakes, and streams to its north and east. However, timber was in short supply. Wood was scarce as early as the 1820s and by 1858 great swaths of riverbank had been cleared of trees. The demand from the growing population soon outstripped the local supply and people relied more and more on imported wood. How the settlers, commercial enterprises, and the government handled this supply and demand situation makes for a fascinating economic and social history.
The Earl of Selkirk recruited the original colonists from the highlands and elsewhere in Scotland, plus some from Ireland. Upon arrival, they were allocated farm lots along the Red River north of the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red, popularly known as “The Forks.” The settlement’s population grew rapidly from a mere two hundred in 1814 to two thousand by 1825, due in large part to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s merger with its fur-trade rival, the Northwest Company, in 1821.By this time, settlers included Scots, Irish, English, Swiss and even De Meurons mercenaries from Germany. More than half the population consisted of Cree and Ojibwa people, French voyageurs, and the Métis—a people of mixed European and Aboriginal parentage.
Beginning in 1839, groups of Métis traders travelled 800 km by ox cart to St. Paul, Minnesota to exchange furs and buffalo hides for household goods. By 1858, six hundred carts carrying hundreds of tons of cargo were plying the route. Steamboats began arriving in 1859 and soon free traders built a few stores, hotels, and saloons near The Forks, creating the nucleus of what would become Winnipeg.
Over seventy years, the wood economy of Red River Settlement shifted dramatically from a “Pioneer Era” (1812–circa 1860s), when families cut most of their own wood for fuel and building, to a “Commercial Era” (1860s–1880s) that saw the expansion of lumber imports, the rise of lumber companies, and the control by the Canadian federal government of timber harvesting.
From the start, the Settlement lacked adequate wood supplies. Most (80 percent) of the land within 30 km of the centre of the Settlement was either prairie or marsh. Forests were confined to the borders of rivers and scattered groves.
Based on recent forest surveys, the species that bordered the Red and other prairie rivers included white or American elm, green ash, Manitoba maple, peachleaf willow, eastern cottonwood, and, in favourable locations, basswood (also known as linden or whitewood. Stands of bur oak grew on higher ground while islands of trembling aspen and balsam poplar dotted the open prairie. River valleys and prairie groves contained limited building timber, so much had to be acquired from distant forests.
To the east of Red River lay huge tracts of forests covering more than 16,000 square kilometers. In the early days of the Settlement, lowland peat bogs probably covered two-thirds of this land, supporting black spruce, tamarack/larch , and eastern white cedar. Expanses of jack pine and, in places, red pine could be found on dry sandy ridges and uplands. Scattered groves of eastern white pine grew on slightly moister sites.
Jack pine also grew on soils with intermediate moisture where it was joined by white spruce, balsam fir, and white birch. Aspen was common throughout, on dry to wet soils, either in pure stands or mixed with the other species. Groves of deciduous trees bordered major streams.
Before commercial logging, these forests contained enough standing timber to build thousands of houses. Once cut, it took replacement trees decades to mature due to the short growing season and low soil fertility in the area. Throughout the Settlement’s history, people obtained their firewood and construction timber in one of three ways:
1. Households harvested their own wood, sometimes with neighbours or hired workers.
2. They bartered or purchased from a woodcutter.
3. They purchased from a commercial outlet. (Merchants advertised lumber and firewood for sale in The Nor’Wester newspaper’s first issue on 28 December 1859.)
The hindsight of over a century enables us to appraise how effectively the Red River Settlement and its successor, the Canadian Government, managed their forest resources. The apparent aim of both was to ensure the availability of wood for expanding settlements rather than to sustain the resources in the region. At that time, officials knew little about forest productivity, an essential ingredient in estimating the amount of cutting that would be allowed. Science-based forestry did not begin in North America until the 1880s.
Source: Shay, Thomas. "Pioneers on the Forest Fringe: The Wood Economy of the Red River Settlement, 1812-1883". Retrieved from https://mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/78/woodeconomy.shtml.