where have all the forests gone?

Speaking of unsolved murders in the 50's, I don't know if that young pup, Old Dog, remembers them but there were three spectacular child murders in the fifties.  I say they were spectacular because they got a lot of ink.  Moms and dads throughout the city wagged their fingers at their kiddies as they went out to play on the suddenly darkened streets of the dangerous city.  Now you be careful out there so you don't end up like the Scheussler boys and their buddy, or the Grimes sisters, or that poor beheaded Anderson girl.  As a kid I remember getting goosebumps reading about them in the thick black type of the World's Greatest Newspaper, but I can't recall that it did anything to curb my behavior because i knew nothing like that could ever happen to me.

The Scheussler case has been settled, likely this no account horse guy who I think was convicted of killing the Brach heiress, and the other two I think they had likely suspects but never enough on them to pin the rap on them. 

I used to watch the murder channel, but I don't know, most of them were so stupid, the murderers seldom got what they were after, they were so banal, it was just depressing.


I always equate the Victorian era very roughly with the civil war.  Railroads were just beginning to transform the country and the airplane would not appear until the turn of the century.  It was a boom time for our hometown.  The plains were being settled but there were no trees out there and they needed wood to build houses, and Michigan and Wisconsin were full of forests which were chopped down and floated south and rode the brand new rails to become some settler's dream home. 

Are there still forests anywhere in the United States?.  A few years back when /I visited the exotic city of Winona coming from the south we passed through some national park with 'forest' in its name.  We passed places that looked like hotels or motels, but they were called lodges, as in hunting lodges I guess.  Is that the sort of country, albeit with more water, that Beaglestonia is a part of?

But are there any real forests in the USA anymore?  Dark, shadowed areas with tree after tree after tree, the kinds of places where Hansel and Gretal got lost in?  Seems to me that if the land is wet and fertile enough to grow big trees, it would most likely make good farmland, so that's what somebody has probably done with it.