"It certainly is a fine plant, and has many miles of railroad tracks, half a dozen locomotives, and ten times as many flat cars and trucks, four movable sawmills, six or eight movable donkey engines, a six-foot flume a mile long, from the top of one hill to the side of another, and a large quantity of machinery of all kinds."
"And how many men are employed at such a place as that?"
"I don't know exactly, but I should say close on to four hundred. They employ one man who does nothing but purchase provisions for the crowd, and have eight or ten cooks and also a first-class doctor."
"If they have a railroad, I don't suppose they have much use for horses," said Owen.
"The railroad runs through only a small part of the property, and to get the logs to the road they use both the donkey engines and horses. They build a skid road first, the same as you do in Maine, and then hook the logs fast to each other, making a train of them. Sometimes they use as high as twenty horses to move the log train. When they use a donkey engine, they chain the engine fast to some trees, and then hook the logs fast to a wire rope, that winds up on a big drum, moved by the engine. When the logs get to the drum, the donkey engine and drum are moved ahead, and then the logs are drawn up as before, and this is kept up until the logs are drawn to the spot where they are wanted."
"I suppose it is nothing but lumber in some towns," said Dale, after a pause.
"The majority of the cities in the Northwest owe their prosperity to the timber industry. In fact, some cities could not exist at all, were it not for this traffic. Saw- and shingle-mills abound, and the output of some of the shingle-making machines is truly astonishing. When I was out here last fall, I inspected a shingle machine that turned out five thousand first-class shingles an hour. One town in Washington turns out nothing but shingles, and sends them by trainload and shipload everywhere."
"I suppose we'll find a big difference in the work there from what it was in the East," said Dale.
"Not so very much different outside of the fact that everything is done on a large scale, as I said. The lumbermen of the United States are about the same everywhere. To be sure you'll find plenty of foreigners out in Oregon, especially Scandinavians, and also a fair portion of French-Canadians. But the men are a whole-souled lot, and if you do what is right by them, they will stick by you, no matter what happens. Ten years ago I was a total stranger in the Northwest; now I have a host of friends out there—real friends, who will help me down to their last dollar, if I actually need it," concluded the man who had given out so much valuable information.