happy. The railroad companies got their roads for nothing; the lumber companies obtained the timber gratis; the land companies got more from the settlers than they paid for the land.
Everybody got something for nothing except the settlers, who finally footed the whole bill by paying a big price for the land that their own government had given away.
Timber Thieves
The lumber barons developed the country by cutting down the timber. That is, they did precious little cutting themselves, but engaged working people for the task. The lumberjack received enough for his winter's toil that by spring he could purchase a railroad ticket to the Dakota harvest fields, where, by thrift and frugality, he could accumulate the price of another ticket that would bring him back to the lumber camp in the fall. The lumber companies did not take all the wood off the land. They kindly left the stumps, slashings, barks, limbs, branches and twigs behind them to furnish the fuel for forest fires which burned the top soil away from the stumps and rocks. This made it easy for the settlers to locate the places to plant the dynamite later on.
Not all of the timber grew on the land of the lumber companies. Some of it stood on state or government land. In such cases the lumber barons purchased a forty or an eighty in the heart of the public forest to locate a lumber camp. But what is a lumber camp without a road leading to it? Consequently they would send one of their smooth lobbyists to Madison to persuade the little legislators to grant a special permit for a logging road from the aforesaid camp to civilization. It is not known that such a modest and reasonable request was ever turned down.
The result was marvelous. You may have heard of the World's Seven Wonders. The Pyramids of Egypt are one of them. The logging roads of Wisconsin are the other six. If the Old Romans may boast of having built the longest roads in the world, the honor of having built the widest ones belongs to the lumber companies of the sovereign state of Wisconsin, for they were often wider than long. They usually extended from one road to the other. And the timber———? Well, that obstacle to good roads was floated down the nearest stream to the company’s sawmill, where it was converted into beams, boards and shingles and sold at a more or less reasonable sum to the people who elected the men who gave the permission to build the logging road.
Corporations and Corruption
The La Crosse and Milwaukee railroad was chartered by the Wisconsin legislature in 1852, to build a railroad from Milwaukee to La Crosse. The stockholders and directors
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