LOGGING THE PACIFIC SLOPES

NEWELL L. WRIGHT.

Lumbering started on the west coast about 1850, in the days of the Gold Rush. Sawmill machinery was brought around Cape Horn from the East in sailing vessels. The first mills were for medium and small-sized timbers. Logs were furnished by farmers and land clearers from the timbered areas that adjoined navigable waters wherever it was cheaper to put them in a stream than to pile them for burning. Much of this was done with the ax, saw, and log jack, toil and sweat, grunt and groan.

The start was small but, step by step, production increased, and machinery was built to saw the larger logs. This called for more power in the woods.

Timber was abundant much too much for the early settler, whose first thought was food and whose first problem was to find unforested areas or clear fields for farming. Fire was the great land clearer, and in the early 1850's great forests went up in smoke. Soon the timber line receded, and the ox team and skid road came into being. The big timber started moving to the crack of the bull whip and the roar of the puncher.

Horses followed the ox team; as production increased, speed as well as power was needed. The proper application of gravity was the influencing factor in logging with the ox and horse team. Grades favorable with the load were necessary, but logging shows were plentiful, and no great engineering skill was needed.

A good woodsman usually the foreman did the locating. Rough ground and poor timber stands were bypassed. Only the high-quality timber was cut, and only the best logs were removed. The margin between costs and recovery value was low, and low-grade material could be handled only at a loss. Fire ravaged much of the lands that were so handled; some remained in fair condition, and new growth was started;practically all reverted to the counties for nonpayment of taxes.

As the demand for lumber increased and transportation facilities (such as adequate ports for seagoing vessels and transcontinental railroads for land shipments) became available, domestic and foreign markets expanded. More production was needed. In logging this meant greater increases in speed and power. In the early eighties there was much timber near the mills, but some of it was on ground unsuitable for ox-or horse-team logging. Of the various steam-powered machines that came into use, the most successful was the donkey engine, which had a horizontal drum and a vertical-type boiler.

Because it had been a slow and laborious job to haul the felled and bucked timber to the skid roads, the first donkey engines supplanted the horses and oxen in this work. They were strong enough to pull logs out of canyons with little application of blocks, which often were necessary when horses and oxen were used. For some time the animals were still used for skid-road work and for hauling the logs to the water. The donkey engine yarded the big logs to the road and made up the turn for its trip to the water. It was soon found that a machine could do it faster, however, so roading donkeys were built. These machines were bolted to huge log sleds, which made good foundations and made the unit easily movable in the woods. The unit was moved by hanging a block some distance ahead and running the main drum line out through the block, then back to the sled; it was made fast on the sled runner. By applying steam to roll the drum, the unit would be moved toward the block. It simply pulled itself by its own power.

The roading donkey was built with huge drums, which had a great line capacity. When the roading distance got greater than the line capacity of one machine, often one and sometimes two more machines were added to relay the logs to the water. The building of donkey sleds and skid and pole roads became a craft of importance. The skid-road builder sometimes assisted the foreman in making the location. Straight roads on easy grades were most desirable.

Such logging was successful in limited areas of timber, but soon the length of haul compelled a different line of action.

The demand for lumber was good. In 1899, Douglas-fir lumber was averaging almost $9 a thousand at the mill. Eastern lumbermen were becoming interested in the big timber of the West. Large consolidations were under way. By 1905, timberland homesteads were being picked up for $5 or so an acre. At the turn of the century railroad logging was starting. The need for logging engineers was recognized. Until colleges supplied the training, some of the best logging engineers in the early days were trained woodsmen, self-educated in civil engineering. Logging railroads became the principal medium of transporting logs to the mills; it still is considered the cheapest for hauls of more than 50 miles when transportation by water is not possible.

Always original and ever a pioneer, the logger did not follow the road specifications of the regular railroad systems. Because his capital was more limited, he kept construction costs at a minimum, even at the sacrifice of operation. Seven-percent favorable grades and 20 curves were common; so there was need for the geared engine, which sounded, when traveling 15 miles an hour, like a passenger train going 60. It probably has delivered more logs to waterways at lower cost than any other piece of transportation equipment.

In the western woods this was the age of steam. Three notable western machinery builders expanded into the heavy logging-equipment field, and the competition brought about great advances in the construction of the donkey engine.

DONKEY ENGINES were generally listed by diameter of cylinder and length of stroke in inches. One of the first prize machines was a 7 by 9 inch, with a single drum. A line horse was used to pull the cable line and the choker a length of cable with a flat hook on one end and an eye in the other to be passed around the log and fastened to the main haul line back to the woods.

On rough ground the haul-back job became too hard for a horse, so an ingenious mechanical engineer designed the haul-back drum. A line smaller than the main line was found sufficient for this work, but it had to be more than twice as long, because it went out to a corner haul-back block at about the main-line length from the donkey engine, over to a lead haul-back block. From there it was strung to and hooked on the main line at the fair leads, on the end of the donkey sled. The haul-back line had first to be pulled out through the blocks by hand and hooked to the end of the main line. From then on, steam did the work until the line needed changing to reach more logs. Laying out the haul-back line was an arduous task and all hands were called to help. To speed up the job, an additional drum was added to the machine. This held what is called a straw line, about three-eighths inch in diameter, which was easier strung out by hand and was used to string out the haul-back line. On simple yarding donkeys this is the drum arrangement in use today.

The yarding donkey, sitting at a point near where the logs were to go in the water, on a skid road, or on cars, dragged the logs in a straight line from a distant point. Immovable objects, such as stumps and trees in the line of travel, had to be avoided, or the log rolled or kicked around them with the main line. The logger's term for these obstacles was "hang-ups." A poorly chosen skid road caused the rigging clinger to remark that he had been fighting hang-ups all day. The more hang-ups, the fewer logs hauled out. The selection of good donkey settings and skid roads greatly influences the log production and marked the worth of the crew boss, or hook tender,

ASSEMBLING LOGS to facilitate loading on cars was important to a smooth-working operation. It was necessary to accumulate enough logs at one point so that a well-balanced carload could be formed. This was done by building inclined log-crib landings with jump-up approaches so the logs would be hauled first to the higher part of the landing and then rolled toward the front.

These landings served only the timber on one side of the tracks and the setting was half of a circle or square. The selection of landings was influenced by timber and topography. Because some of the small operators located their roads to conform with these previously chosen landings, expensive mistakes in railroading often resulted. The operators who controlled larger bodies of timber did more intensive planning of the railroad system, built main lines to more exacting specifications, and depended on spurs to reach landings that had been chosen in advance.

Loading in the west coast fir region a region on the Pacific slopes that is representative of two distinct types was done by the gin-pole crotch-line method. The loader was set parallel to the track facing the landing. The gin pole was set across the track from the landing and leaned toward it so that the lead block was about plumb with the outside rail. In the early setups, the main line was shackled to two loading straps of equal lengths, and on the end of each was an L-shaped loading hook. The loaders pulled the slack of the main line as they carried the loading hook to the ends of the log for hooking. The loading engineer placed the log as the head loader required by hoisting it and judging its swing. Soon the addition of a haul-back drum lessened the work of getting the hooks back over the log as well as regulating its placement on the car. A third drum was added for use in spotting the cars for loading when the train crew was away. A somewhat similar loading method was used in the ponderosa pine region another Pacific slope region although not so extensively.

It was soon found that logging by the ground-lead method resulted in less hang-up delay when the logs were pulled uphill by the donkey. The log tended to follow up the side of a stump and shear away from it. More power and speed were needed, which the machinery builders supplied when they turned out the 10- by 12-inch and 11-by 13-inch compound-geared yarders with extended firebox boilers. Noting the speed-up resulting from fewer hang-ups, a versatile logger experimented with fastening a heavy yarding block on a high stump. The idea caught on at once. By 1918, camp after camp had gone to the air, in a manner of speaking.

HIGH-LEAD LOGGING was under way, and the lay of the ground brought out various adaptations to fit the problem.

Through the years many changes have been made in loading devices in order to conform to the progress in high-lead and high-line systems of logging. Among these various methods are the McLean boom, the single tong boom, and the duplex system.

In the early 1890's logging in the pine region developed in a big way. Logs rolled out in an almost endless procession of splendidly matched four-horse teams and big wheels.

Railroad logging outfits had their logs loaded on cars with speed and precision by use of a steam jammer, and large production was maintained. The steam jammer is one of the fastest log loaders in use even today and, although in more general use in the pine region, it has also found favor among some of the heavy fir-log producers.