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A Call to Guard This Rugged, Untouched Wilderness on the Shores of Lake 
 
Superior, Where Stands the Largest Virgin Hardwood Forest Left to the Nation

 
 
 
                                           By BEN EAST 
 
 
THERE are those who will tell you that Americans 
don't repeat the mistakes of the past. I wonder! 
  In the summer of 1865, when the disbanded armies of 
the Blue and the Gray were straggling homeward along 
dusty roads, one of the finest pine forests then in exis- 
tence on the North American continent blanketed the 
northern half of the mitten-shaped wedge of land be- 
tween Lake Michigan and Lake Huron that is the Lower 
Peninsula of Michigan. It stretched in an almost un- 
broken blanket, this stand of white pine, from the val- 
leys of the Grand and the Saginaw Rivers, northward 
two hundred miles to the Straits of Mackinaw. It shut 
out the full light of the sun from 12,000,000 acres of land. 
  The early lumber barons who began the harvest of that 
 
 
there was enough white pine in Michigan to last the 
world forever. I reckon they believed it. Well, the 
axes rang in the snowy woods, and yellow lumber mount- 
ed in giant piles along the banks of the Saginaw and the 
Grand, the Muskegon and the Manistee, the AuSable 
and many another river. 
  The towns and villages that spread across the prairie- 
lands were built with Michigan pine. Chicago burned 
in 1871 and pine from the roaring mills across Lake 
Michigan to the east went into its rebuilding. Today, of 
the virgin pine that was to last the world forever, there 
remains south of the Straits of Mackinac two eighty-acre 
 
 
Tall pines stand guard over Lake-of-the-Clouds, lying 
like a silver platter in a craterlike bowl of green hills