As for the wood...might as well stick it out and see how well you can do.
rofl, i can haz found a pun
Be careful with the elves though. The more profit you give them, the more likely they are to bring nothing but berries and cloth.
I disagree. One year, I offered them about 100,000 DB of skull totems and masterwork pig tail clothing. The following year, they brought me a bunch of useful crap, including sun berries, a tame alligator, a cougar, and three (!) giant leopards.
As for the wood problem, you're fine as long as you have a reliable water source. Be sure to make one of your logs into a bucket, unless you have easy access to some copper.
I once had a fort that had about 50 wooden items total. Only about half of the dwarves had beds, but I offset that by putting multiple artifacts in the meeting area.
Once you get access to metal and magma, the rest comes fairly easy. Native copper is good, but Tetrahedrite is even better. Tetrahedrite is an ore of copper that produces a silver bar 20% of the time when smelted. However, if you don't have any other (claimed) silver ores, a single tetrahedrite ore can be used as both copper and silver to make two billon bars.
I usually make most of my bins and barrels out of billon once I find tetrahedrite ore. Fortunately, it appears to be the most common type of ore, and can appear in ANY stone layer.