To control his valley he must have money; to
get money for his developments he must have timber. Also, ownership of
vast limits of growing spruce was necessary to the control of the
valley. He must own more timber thereabouts than anybody else. He must
dominate the timber situation. To a man whose total resources totaled a
matter of fifty thousand dollars--the bulk of which was tied up in a dam
and boom company as yet unproductive--this looked like a mouthful beyond
his capacity to bite off. Even with timber in the back reaches selling
at sixty-six cents an acre, a hundred thousand acres meant an investment
of sixty-six thousand dollars. True, Scattergood could look forward to
the day when that same timberland would be worth ten dollars an acre--a
million dollars--but looking ahead would not produce a cent to-day.
Of timberlands, whose cut logs must go down Coldriver Valley to reach a
market, Scattergood's maps showed him there were probably a quarter of a
million acres--mostly spruce. Estimating with rigid conservatism, this
would run eight thousand feet to the acre, or twenty billion feet of
timber--and this did not take into consideration hardwood.
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