When Tehkummah was first opened for settlement in the mid-1860s, the thinking was that there was little in the way of saleable wood on Manitoulin Island.

Back then, pine was the only species that had any real commercial value and land surveyors had noted that pine stands on the island were few and far between.

If a settler was fortunate to find pine growing on their land, the feeling was that they would most likely use it to build structures. Selling it made little sense since doing so would mean constructing their homes and outbuildings out of lesser quality woods that would be unlikely to stand the test of time.

However, Crown regulators decided to tax the sale of lumber on the island anyway. They had seen how fishing and oil resources had been exploited in the past and decided that over regulation would be a better approach than under regulation.

So laws were enacted requiring that dues be paid on every tree cut down by settlers during land clearance that was subsequently sold. If a settler wanted to cut down trees for the purpose of sale, they were required to obtain a license from the government prior to starting. They could only sell wood cut from their own property and only after they had met their existing land clearance obligations. Any lumber they harvested was then heavily taxed based on type and volume. So much so that it was nearly impossible for a settler to earn money from the legal sale of lumber.

Not surprisingly, settlers who were strapped for cash frequently defied the timber laws. Those that found they had excess pine on their properties sold it to small lumber operations that sprang up on the island often without bothering to pay the government its due. It's not like the government had any real way of tracing which logs came from which properties.

The most notable of these early lumbering operations was RA Lyon and Associates, which became a major employer on the island in the decades after it was first established at Michael's Bay in 1866 with the goal of supplying the insatiable need for lumber in southern Ontario. Although Lyon was licenced to harvest saleable wood from vast tracts of land, initially in Tehkummah and later in other parts of the island, the company also bought wood on the sly from settlers who harvested it from their own land and pretty much anywhere else they encountered saleable species.

Within a year of settlement beginning, a forest bailiff was hired to ensure that the law was followed. However, non-compliance was so widespread, the territories these bailiffs were supposed to oversee were so vast, and pressure from their neighbours was so strong that enforcement proved impossible. And while most forest bailiffs did their best to adhere to the law, the ones who didn't found ways to profit from looking the other way.

It wasn't long before things grew worse. Although pine was initially the only commercial tree species on the island, before too long a shift in the market meant cedar was in high demand, most notably for railway ties, telegraph poles and fence posts. While pine may have been scarce on the island, cedar was plentiful, and settlers were even less inclined to pay the tariffs.

By the 1890s, the situation had become untenable. A lack of any real guidance or oversight from their bosses in Ottawa combined with rampant illegal lumbering and low pay meant forest bailiffs had no chance of being effective and by 1893, the office of the forest bailiff was dissolved.

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