The clearing of other forest-types — A variant in the above procedure is reported for a wet woodland-type: MacDonald (1804) said that he had heard of wet alder woodland being converted to useful meadow for grazing simply by the pulling up of the alders by the roots. And it appears that land under another type of woodland, ”second— growth” red maple, was considered especially difficult to clearm: the general comment of Lewellin (1832) that red maple ”was destroyed with difficulty", is backed up by specific examples in evidence submitted to the Land Commission of 1875. There, it was said that the ready ability of ’white maple’ (as it was called), to sprout from cut stumps, made clearing such land very costly and difficult.299 One farmer in fact said that it was

confessed", Stewart added, “ a settler in indigent circumstances, who relies from the beginning for the means of subsistence on the produce of his labour, must not at first meddle with the burnt lands, he should cut down and clear away the forest, which will never disappoint him."

297 Lord Selkirk also saw the special problems presented in the clearing of old burned land. However, he also thought there might be some advantages, and during his first visit to the island in 1803 he proposed to carry out an experiment on Point Prim to test, whether, as he put it, “fire might be made a useful instrument of improvement". The idea for this was sparked by a conversation that he had with Jo Laird, a Loyalist settler from Vernon River, who considered that if clover were sown immediately after an area of forest had been burned, cattle would be attracted to the resulting pasture and keep it clear of trees -— the only disadvantage was that the cattle might be at risk from branches falling off the dead trees. Selkirk further considered that because of the longer leverage given by the standing tree trunks on such burned areas the tree roots would be much easier to remove than those of “chopped wood", "In this way" Selkirk wrote “old burnt lands could perhaps be sooner brought into complete cultivation than any others". To test whether this was so he directed that during his year-long absence travelling elsewhere in North America, a fire-break (a “cut", as he called it), was to be made through the woods across Point Prim, and that 100 or 150 acres on the point be “burnt and pastured". However on returning a year later, in October 1804, he found that his instructions had not been carried out, the reason being given was that his agents thought that there was too great a risk of such a fire spreading to the now settled areas. Even so, it is doubtful whether Selkirk‘s (and Laird's) views would have been proven right even had the experiment been carried out, as otherwise the use of fire in land clearance would have gained more support in the succeeding half century — which, from Stewart‘s and MacGregor's comments in footnote 296, clearly had not been so. The only opinion that l have found in favour of fire is that of an anonymous author writing in the Summerside Journal in 1867 who in describing the ‘terrible’ forest fires that once occurred on the island said that that they “greatly facilitate the labors of the farmer. In a few years the trees are uprooted by the wind. Another fire passes over them; if the land be cleared before a new growth of wood has time to spring up, the settler is spared much exhausting labor" (Anon. 1867),

293 The evidence that such maple was “second—growth" comes in the testimony of William S. McNeiII and Joseph Doucette (both of Lot 24) in evidence to the Land Commission (1875).

299 Land Commission (1875): evidence of John Doughart of Lot 20, and William S. McNeill and Joseph Doucette of Lot 24. Both

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impossible to clear such land, the sprouts growing ”the height of a man in one year”, while the roots were especially difficult to remove (he claimed that even a team of horses had problems uprooting the small roots), and that only by setting sheep to graze on the land could such maples be "kept

down (I 300

THE EFFECTS OF FOREST CLEARANCE

The overall effect of clearing on the forest — Forest destruction and removal on each farm was a gradual process taking place over many years with a few new acres of cleared land being added each year.301 Thus for many years an individual farm would have consisted of various parcels of land in different stages of clearance, from fully arable land under the plough and areas of unstumped pasture, to areas where the trees had only recently been cut down and burned. The bulk of the farm remained under largely unaltered forest, provided of course that there had been no runaway burns from the settler’s own clearing operations or from those of his neighbours. The forest thus held on for many years and Walter Johnstone's estimate in 1822 that perhaps not 20 or 30 acres of the standard 100 acre farm would be cleared in the lifetime of the pioneer settlerm, seems to have been an overestimate, since thirty years later John Lawson (1851) considered that only from about five to twenty acres of each farm was cleared —

McNeill and Doucette cite much higher costs for the clearing of such land compared with normal forest: McNeill said that ‘stumping‘ cost £5 to £6 an acre; Doucette said $20 an acre for clearing “second growth of maple", and some areas "covered with young maples“, would cost not less than $40 an acre. (Compare these much higher costs with those for normal woodland contained in footnote 284.)

3"” All in the testimony of William s. McNeill of Lot 24 (Land

Commission 1875), it was probably also red maple that Johnstone (1822) had in mind when he said that “some of the hardwood, unless cut at a particular season, so far from rotting, springs again at the root, and being thus kept alive, must be dug out with as nearly as much difficulty as at the first". This, as noted, is why Stewart (1806) mentioned “the beginning of summer" as the best time to kill trees by girdling.

3‘“ Selkirk (1803) was told by one source (the Scot, Angus Currie) that 3 or 4 acres of new clearing per year was "an exertion" — though he calculated that Laird (the Loyalist) had cleared more than six acres a year. However, McEachern (‘the Catholic priest') considered 7 or 8 acres in the first year possible, though this was “more than ever after“, as in the first year there was no other farm work to distract them. In the Appendix to the Report of the Land Commission (1860) (not extracted), 2 acres per year is given as the typical rate of land clearance by “a new settler beginning without capital" (cited by Clark (1959) (pp, 213-14).

3°: Johnstone 1822.