CHAPTER XXXV
A GANG OF FRIENDLY LOGGERS
A perfect day of early September was drawing to its close, and the gang of loggers belonging to Camp No. 10 of the Northwest Lumber Company, which operated in the vast timber belt clothing the northern flanks of Mount Rainier, were about to knock off work. From earliest morning the stately forest, sweet-scented with the odors of resin, freshly cut cedar, and crushed ferns, had resounded with their shouts and laughter, the ring of their axes, the steady swish of saws, and the crash of falling trees. To one familiar only with Eastern logging, where summer is a time of idleness, and everything depends on the snows of winter, followed by the high waters of spring, the different methods of these Northwestern woodsmen would be matters of constant surprise. Their work goes on without a pause from year's end to year's end. There is no hauling on sleds, no vast accumulations of logs on the ice of rivers or lakes, no river driving, no mighty jams to be cleared at imminent risk of life and limb—nothing that is customary in the East. Even the mode of cutting down trees is different.
The choppers—or "fallers," as they are called in the Northwest—do not work, as do their brethren of Maine or Wisconsin, from the ground, wielding their axes first on one side and then on the other until the tree falls. The girth of the mighty firs and cedars of that country is so great at ordinary chopping height that two men working in that way would not bring down more than two trees in a day, instead of the ten or a dozen required of them. So, by means of what are known as "spring-boards," they gain a height of eight or ten feet, and then begin operations.
The ingenious contrivances that enable them to do this are narrow boards of tough vine maple, five or six feet long, and about one foot wide. Each is armed at its inner end with a sharp steel spur affixed to its upper side. This end being thrust into a notch opened in the tree some four feet below where the cut is to be made, the weight of a man on its outer end causes the spur to bite deep into the wood, and to hold the board firmly in place.
Having determined the direction in which the tree shall fall, and fixed their spring-boards accordingly, two "fallers" mount them, and chop out a deep under cut on the side that is to lie undermost. They work with double-bitted or two-edged axes, and can so truly guide the fall by means of the under cut that they are willing to set a stake one hundred feet away and guarantee that the descending trunk shall drive it into the ground. With the under cut chopped out to their satisfaction, they remove their spring-boards to the opposite side, and finish the task with a long, two-handled, coarse-toothed saw.
As the mighty tree yields up its life and comes to the ground with a grand, far-echoing crash, it is set upon by "buckers" (who saw its great trunk into thirty-foot lengths), barkers, rigging-slingers, hand-skidders, and teamsters, whose splendid horses, aided by tackle of iron blocks and length of wire-rope, drag it out to the "skid-road." This is a cleared and rudely graded track, set with heavy cross-ties, over which the logs may slide, and it is provided with wire cables, whose half-mile lengths are operated by stationary engines. By this means "turns" of five or six of the huge logs, chained one behind the other, are hauled down the winding skid-road through gulch and valley, to a distant railway landing. There they are loaded on a long train of heavy flat cars that departs every night for the mills on Puget Sound. Here the sawed lumber is run aboard waiting ships, and sent in them to all ports on both shores of the Pacific.
So wastefully extravagant are the lumbermen of Washington that only the finest trees are cut, and only that portion of the trunk which is free from limbs is made into logs. All the remainder, or nearly half of each tree, is left on the ground where it fell. Here it slowly decays, or, turned into tinder, catches fire from some chance spark and leaps into a sea of flame that sweeps resistlessly through the forest, destroying in one day more timber than has been cut in a year.
Thus, while thoughtless and ignorant persons declare the timber supply of the Northwest to be inexhaustible, others, who have carefully studied the subject, do not hesitate to say that within fifty years, at the present rate of reckless destruction, the magnificent forests of Washington will have disappeared forever.
Such questions were far from troubling the light-hearted gang of loggers whom we have just discovered in the act of quitting work for the day. If any one of them were to be asked how long he thought the noble forests from which he earned a livelihood would last, he would answer: