The Valley of the Giants

by Peter B. Kyne

The old man appeared to divine the trend of his son's thoughts. “Yes, Bryce, that was a disastrous year,” he declared. “The mere loss of the logs was a severe blow, but in addition I had to pay out quite a little money to settle with my customers. I was loaded up with low-priced orders that year, although I didn't expect to make any money. The orders were merely taken to keep the men employed. You understand, Bryce! I had a good crew, the finest in the country; and if I had shut down, my men would have scattered and—well, you know how hard it is to get that kind of a crew together again. Besides, I had never failed my boys before, and I couldn't bear the thought of failing them then. Half the mills in the country were shut down at the time, and there was a lot of distress among the unemployed. I couldn't do it, Bryce.”

Bryce nodded. “And when you lost the logs, you couldn't fill those low-priced orders. Then the market commenced to jump and advanced three dollars in three months—”

“Exactly, my son. And my customers began to crowd me to fill those old orders. Praise be, my regular customers knew I wasn't the kind of lumberman who tries to crawl out of filling low-priced orders after the market has gone up. Nevertheless I couldn't expect them to suffer with me; my failure to perform my contracts, while unavoidable, nevertheless would have caused them a severe loss, and when they were forced to buy elsewhere, I paid them the difference between the price they paid my competitors and the price at which they originally placed their orders with me. And the delay in delivery caused them further loss.”

“How much?”

“Nearly a hundred thousand—to settle for losses to my local customers alone. Among my orders I had three million feet of clear lumber for shipment to the United Kingdom, and these foreign customers, thinking I was trying to crawfish on my contracts, sued me and got judgment for actual and exemplary damages for my failure to perform, while the demurrage on the ships they sent to freight the lumber sent me hustling to the bank to borrow money.”

He smoked meditatively for a minute. “I've always been land-poor,” he explained apologetically. “Never kept much of a reserve working-capital for emergencies, you know. Whenever I had idle money, I put it into timber in the San Hedrin watershed, because I realized that some day the railroad would build in from the south, tap that timber, and double its value. I've not as yet found reason to doubt the wisdom of my course; but”—he sighed—“the railroad is a long time coming!”

John Cardigan here spoke of a most important factor in the situation. The crying need of the country was a feeder to some transcontinental railroad. By reason of natural barriers, Humboldt County was not easily accessible to the outside world except from the sea, and even this avenue of ingress and egress would be closed for days at a stretch when the harbour bar was on a rampage. With the exception of a strip of level, fertile land, perhaps five miles wide and thirty miles long and contiguous to the seacoast, the heavily timbered mountains to the north, east, and south rendered the building of a railroad that would connect Humboldt County with the outside world a profoundly difficult and expensive task. The Northwestern Pacific, indeed, had been slowly building from San Francisco Bay up through Marin and Sonoma counties to Willits in Mendocino County. But there it had stuck to await that indefinite day when its finances and the courage of its board of directors should prove equal to the colossal task of continuing the road two hundred miles through the mountains to Sequoia on Humboldt Bay. For twenty years the Humboldt pioneers had lived in hope of this; but eventually they had died in despair or were in process of doing so.

“Don't worry, Dad. It will come,” Bryce assured his father. “It's bound to.”

“Yes, but not in my day. And when it comes, a stranger may own your San Hedrin timber and reap the reward of my lifetime of labour.”

Again a silence fell between them, broken presently by the old man. “That was a mistake—logging in the San Hedrin,” he observed. “I had my lesson that first year, but I didn't heed it. If I had abandoned my camps there, pocketed my pride, paid Colonel Pennington two dollars for his Squaw Creek timber, and rebuilt my old logging-road, I would have been safe to-day. But I was stubborn; I'd played the game so long, you know—I didn't want to let that man Pennington outgame me. So I tackled the San Hedrin again. We put thirty million feet of logs into the river that year, and when the freshet came, McTavish managed to make a fairly successful drive. But he was all winter on the job, and when spring came and the men went into the woods again, they had to leave nearly a million feet of heavy butt logs permanently stranded in the slack water along the banks, while perhaps another million feet of lighter logs had been lifted out of the channel by the overflow and left high and dry when the water receded. There they were, Bryce, scattered up and down the river, far from the cables and logging-donkeys, the only power we could use to get those monsters back into the river again, and I was forced to decide whether they should be abandoned or split during the summer into railroad ties, posts, pickets, and shakes—commodities for which there was very little call at the time and in which, even when sold, there could be no profit after deducting the cost of the twenty-mile wagon haul to Sequoia, and the water freight from Sequoia to market. So I abandoned them.”