LOGGING was probably the first commercial activity of white men on this continent. Old Norse accounts tell that Leif Ericson went to the shores of a land across the North Atlantic and brought back a cargo of timber some time about A.D. 1000. There are references to other voyagers who also visited that land and brought back timber. There is record of a timber-laden ship, homeward bound from "Markland" to Iceland, that was wrecked in 1347 just before it reached port.

Later explorers were also greatly impressed by the timber that they saw on the North American shores. In 1605 Capt. John Weymouth of the British Royal Navy nosed his ship into one of the harbors of what is now the coast of Maine. His men cut some samples of northern white pine timber and he took these back to England with him. This pine is still known as Weymouth pine in the British Isles.

When the colonists arrived they found timber growing to the water's edge. They had to cut trees to make room for their homes and for their fields. Houses, barns, stockades, and bridges were built of logs that were everywhere readily available. The small, round timbers were preferred because they could be handled easily. The date of the first sawmill is a matter of debate; some contend that the settlers in Virginia were using one some time between 1608 and 1620. There is an authentic record of a sawmill that was established in 1634 near the site of South Berwick, in Maine.

Captain Weymouth's efforts to inform his countrymen about the quality of the timber in North America were highly successful—especially with the Royal Navy. Mast timbers were soon in heavy demand. White pine from the New England shores and yellow pine from the Colonies to the south began to move to England in ships built specially for this trade. Depletion of the supply of tall trees on the Baltic shores made the English apprehensive about the preservation of their new-found supply. Suitable trees in the New England forests were marked with the King's broad arrow and thus reserved for the exclusive use of the Royal Navy.

The colonists used logging equipment and methods of rudimentary character. The early mills and shipping docks were mostly on tidewater. Heavy stands of timber grew on stream banks or on slopes from which logs could readily be put in water by hand and then floated to mills or shipside. Timber that was more distant from the watercourses and hardwood logs that would not float had to be skidded—either by the brute strength of men or by use of the oxen that pulled the farmers' plows. The colonists soon found that skidding could be done most easily on ice and snow, and wintertime became the traditional season for such work. Scandinavian and Dutch colonists added their skill to the more scanty experience of the English.

NEW METHODS have developed, although some of the pioneers' practices are still used throughout the country—principally on small jobs. The ax and the ox team are primitive logging tools, but they can still be found at work in the woods. The ax has been improved in design and quality of its steel. Modern metallurgy has enabled the manufacturer to make a top-grade tool every time, something not possible when ax-heads were forged by hand; some were good and some were poor. When a logger got hold of a really good ax he guarded it jealously—and might even take it to bed with him. The crosscut saw, introduced about 75 years ago, was at first a crude cutting tool.

The modern crosscut saw is made of excellent steel, holds its set and cutting edges well, and runs freely in the cut. The peavey, invented about 85 years ago by a blacksmith in Stillwater, Maine, has made the work of rolling logs by hand easier and safer. The pulp hook, the bow saw, the explosive wedge, and even the tractor, the power saw, and the motortruck are becoming commonplace throughout the country, even on small logging jobs.

But it is in the bigger operations that revolution after revolution in logging methods has taken place. Big-time logging had its origin in Maine, where heavy stands of pine and spruce, watercourses leading to good harbors on tidewater, and long, cold winters when little else could be done provided a favorable environment. The Machias, the Penobscot, the Kennebec, and the Androscoggin watersheds were the nursery from which came a new technique of logging and a tribe of loggers that later fanned out to other timber regions across the continent.

Maine loggers developed the art of chip-chopping in felling trees and in cutting them into logs. They learned to take advantage of gravity and snow and ice in skidding the logs to watercourses. They developed the art of driving the logs down the streams to sorting booms at tidewater. Living in rough camps far back from the towns and farming country, they were a tough and hardy brood—now well celebrated in song and story.

But their very energy and efficiency in time brought about depletion of the accessible large virgin pine and spruce of that State.

THE CENTER of large-scale lumbering began to move westward—first to the headwaters of the Connecticut, then the Hudson, and then the Susquehanna and the Ohio. Rafting was developed on the more placid waters of the Susquehanna and Ohio, not only to keep the logs together but also to keep afloat the choice hardwoods that were bound into the rafts with the pine. Winter logging and stream driving were developed still further in the Lake States to keep pace with the increasing capacity of the sawmills and the ever-expanding demand for lumber. There, too, the first logging railroad came into use, and cable skidding was developed.

As the virgin timber stands of the Lake States neared depletion, the tide of the lumber-industry migration split. Some of it moved into the flatland pine stands of the South. Some of it moved across the Rocky Mountains to the great coniferous forests of the Pacific slope. In those regions, especially in the West, the use of the cable skidder and the logging railroad reached its apogee. The volume of timber cut and moved to the mills by those methods was astounding. They were, however, destructive, wasteful, short-sighted.

Along the path of the migrations, the pioneer loggers were joined by hardy men from other parts of the country and by a large number of immigrants from abroad—Scandinavians, French Canadians, Austrians, men from the Balkans and from Russia. All contributed to the growing store of logging lore.

The French Canadians introduced the travois or dray—an idea that they had borrowed from the Indians of the Plains. The Austrians brought in the log chute and slide for use on steep slopes. The idea of cableways came from Switzerland. The English developed the crawler track, used first in the steam log-hauler in Maine.

Some of the best known lumber companies operating today on the west coast and in the South originated in Maine, in Pennsylvania, and in the Lake States.

AS THE TIDE of logging advanced across the country, and then eddied back into the Rockies, the southern swamps, the Appalachians, and the wilderness areas of northern Maine and New Hampshire, there were always ingenious loggers who kept on inventing new devices and others who were ready and eager to try them out.

But there also have been loggers determined to resist any change of the methods that they knew to be tried and true. Men still living can remember, when the crosscut saw was introduced, how loggers, proud of their chip-chopping skill, left camp rather than use the new tool. In recent years the introduction of the power chain saw was met by similar resistance. Crews have been known purposely to leave a power saw where it would be smashed by a falling tree in order that they might resume the use of their familiar crosscut saws.

But still the tide of change goes on. In region after region horses replaced oxen because they are faster and more intelligent. It is interesting to watch a good woods-wise horse as he goes about his skidding job, often without reins or word of command. He comes up the skid trail, turns around in front of a log, and waits for the teamster to hook the skid chain. Then he moves away down the trail without guidance or command, swinging wide, or even squaring away on the curves to keep his load in the trail and to avoid getting it stuck on stumps and roots. Right up to the skidway he goes, stops with the load in the correct position, and waits for it to be unhooked.

As the sources of timber became more distant from the mills or from the rivers, it was necessary to increase horsepower efficiency. That was done by scoots, sleds, wagons, and bummers. The next step was the use of mechanical power, first applied in the steam log-hauler—steam engines built on the pattern of the early locomotive with the rear end on crawler tracks and the front on wheels or a sled. The man who did the steering occupied a seat in front of the boiler and directly over the front truck. Log-haulers were used to pull trains of sleds or wagons out of the woods to a landing. Later, on many operations, they were replaced by logging railroads that handled bigger loads on longer hauls.

The invention of the geared locomotive made it possible to negotiate steeper grades and sharper curves than had been possible with the conventional line-haul locomotive. Motortruck log hauling has become so efficient that it is fast replacing the logging railroad even in the heavy timber of the Pacific Northwest. This change has been greatly speeded up by improvements in motortrucks themselves, by the construction of public motor highways, and by the bulldozer, the tractor grader, and other tools for building low-cost access roads.

Water transportation is still used. River driving remains the cheapest means for transporting large quantities of wood over long distances. Elaborate systems of dams and other works are used to provide the necessary flow of water to carry the wood down. In one famous case, Maine loggers diverted water from the St. John headwaters into those of the Penobscot and precipitated some international complications with Canada. When the drives must be taken across lakes or other bodies of still water, it is usually necessary to enclose acres of floating wood in booms of long logs chained end to end. The two ends are drawn together and this giant wood-filled purse is then pulled across the lake.

For longer voyages on big bodies of water that may be rough, various types of barges and rafts have been used. A plywood company is towing rafts of hardwood logs made buoyant by spruce frames the length of Moosehead Lake in Maine. Large quantities of pulpwood are rafted across Lake Superior from Canada to the United States. On the Pacific coast, a cigar-shaped structure bound together with cables and containing up to a million board feet of long logs is pulled by a tugboat. High-grade spruce logs needed for aircraft manufacture were recently brought from Alaska to Puget Sound by this method.

BACK IN THE WOODS the methods for skidding the logs to the roads have also become more specialized. As logging pushed into the rougher and more swampy country, the horse reached the end of his road. Other skidding methods had to be found.

Various types of chutes and slides have been tried, but cable skidders have generally been more successful. The first was the cable skidder that pulled the log by a single cable reeled in on a steam-powered drum. It was soon found that the inward pull of the cable, carried through a block hung on a nearby tree, would also have a lifting action sufficient to bring the log over the stumps and other obstacles. Thus the method known as "high-lead" logging was born. Then another drum was attached to the winding engine and a lighter cable was strung through blocks out to the scene of the cutting and fastened to the end of the main dragline; in this way it was possible to have a power haul-back on the dragline. It was only a step further to the idea of a cable skyline with a carriage pulled in by the dragline and out again by the haul-back. The further development of a locking and tripping device made it possible to pick up the log at its stump, pull it up to the carriage, and bring it to the landing entirely suspended in the air. Many and varied are the adaptations of the cable systems—the North Bend, the Dunham, the Tyler, the slack line, and so forth. Each has its merits for specific localities or types of timber.

On the more favorable terrain, the arts of ground skidding developed in another direction. Loggers found that their scoots and sleds, first used for winter skidding, were effective also in the summer. In country with stony and gravel soils these devices helped to keep the logs clean and free from dirt that wrecked saws and chipper knives at the mills. Wheeled devices of various kinds came into use—carts, wagons, and bummers. Finally came the colorful high wheels, which supported the front ends of huge loads of long logs as they were dragged to the landing.

Ground skidding, however, really got its new lease on life with the development of the crawler tractor equipped, with winch and arch. The arch is even more sturdy and effective than were the high wheels. The cable from the tractor . winch is carried through a fair-lead at the top of the arch, and this gives some of the high-lead effect in the bunching of scattered loads of logs. The crawler tracks, or pneumatic tires, upon which the arch is mounted, provide a means for carrying the front end of the load. Other devices, such as the skidding pan, the tractor-drawn scoot, and the tractor-drawn wagon on crawler treads, have been highly successful. They have nearly supplanted cable logging except in the heaviest timber and on the steep and swampy lands.

LOADING has also gone through several stages of development. First it was found that logs could be rolled up inclined skids easier than they could be lifted. The skidway or brow built out from a hillside to hold logs off the ground at about the height of the hauling vehicle was the next step in the development of loading methods. But as the logs and the volume to be handled got bigger, hand loading rapidly became obsolete. Power loading came into use. First came the cross haul, by which horses or a tractor can be used to roll logs up inclined skids onto the hauling vehicle. Next came the jammer, an inclined A-frame with a sheave at the apex over which the loading cable could be passed to give a lifting as well as a pulling action. Then came a variety of jib booms and cranes, some mounted on stationary spars, some on sleds, some on crawler tracks, and some on pneumatic tires. These made the loading job much faster and easier. In recent years a number of types of self-loading trucks, with cross hauls, jib booms, or flippers powered from the truck motor have been put into use on smaller jobs.

The last part of the logging job to be mechanized has been felling and bucking. Chain saws, consisting of teeth mounted on a bicyclelike chain, were introduced from Germany about 1924. The cutting chain runs around a grooved steel guide bar and is powered by a small gasoline, electric, or pneumatic motor. Recent improvements have made this a reasonably reliable tool. It is now widely used throughout the country.

In the flat, open pinelands of the South, a circular saw mounted ahead of a wheeled frame like that of a garden cultivator has proved useful. The power is provided by a small gasoline motor mounted between the shafts of the frame. The saw can be used either in the horizontal position for felling or in the vertical position for bucking. Either type of power saw, properly handled by a well-trained crew, enables the crew to cut twice as much wood per man-day as would be possible with hand tools. Portable circular slasher saws are now commonly used to cut short pulpwood and millwood bolts from tree-length second-growth poles skidded into the landing. Powered chain conveyors are in use to carry the bolts from the saw to the hauling vehicle or to a pile. Such equipment can buck up to 80 cords of 4-foot wood a day.

SEVERAL OF THE WAR-BORN devices, developed for other uses, are being adapted for use in the woods. Electric generators that produce alternating current of 180 to 360 cycles (the standard frequency is 60 cycles) make possible electric motors of smaller size and lighter weight for use as chain-saw power units. High-pressure hydraulic systems utilizing synthetic rubber tubing are being employed in light and extremely flexible loaders. One of these, mounted on a crawler tractor, has hydraulically operated arms that can be used to gather up a cord of wood just as a boy picks up an armful of stovewood. The hydraulic arms can push the load along on the ground, lift it into the air to a height of 12 or 15 feet, swing it around to any desired position, and drop it into a truck or railroad car. Another type of hydraulic crane, mounted on a truck, can revolve a full circle. Hydraulic outriggers push out from the base of the machine to the ground and thereby stabilize it while it is in use. The boom is extensible and the cable is pulled in by hydraulic power. It has an hydraulically operated grapple for use in picking up short wood.

The principles of package handling are also being adapted to logging. Steel straps and cables are used to bundle a cord or more of short bolts or long logs for more convenient handling during transshipments. Pallets of wood and tubular steel devices are used as packaging for short bolts. Some of them can be loaded, skidded through the woods, and pulled up a ramp onto a truck and off again at the mill.

There are also some developments in cable skidding—particularly in light, fast equipment that reduces the damage to the remaining trees. One west coast inventor has put his motive power and the operator into a carriage that rides on a skyline. A winch in the carriage hoists the bundles of logs up under the carriage; then the carriage pulls itself along the skyline to the landing. The new equipment can carry tractors and the other heavy equipment into otherwise inaccessible places.

Swiss engineers have developed several extremely light cable-logging systems to bring small logs or bundles of wood off steep slopes. One consists of an endless cable (suspended from trees), which makes a circuit from the cutting area to the landing. The cable runs through star-shaped wheels. Individual bolts of wood are hung on the line by one crew at the cutting area and taken off by another at the landing.

Rubber treads are being tried now on crawler tractors to make them more adaptable to the rocky terrain. A hydraulic braking device, developed to arrest heavy planes landing on the decks of carriers, has been used to hold trucks to a predetermined speed as they come down steep slopes. Fluid drives are being used in cable skidders, tractors, motortrucks, and sawmills. That type of transmission gives greater capacity to absorb shocks and to take overloads.

New steel alloys are utilized to improve cutting tools of all sorts—axes, circular-saw teeth, and chain-saw teeth. New explosives and earth-moving machinery are also finding their place in logging-road construction. Prefabricated bridge units are also beginning to find use on these roads.

Some of these developments have been set-backs to the development of forest-management practices. Early logging methods were not particularly harmful to the forest—generally the early loggers searched out the biggest and best trees, felled them, cut out the best parts by hand, and then skidded the logs to the mill or the water with animals. By our present-day standards those methods were wasteful, but they did leave a good stand of trees for continuing growth.

As time went on and the markets for timber became bigger and less selective, faster and faster methods of logging and more complete cuts became the style. Particularly harmful were the high-lead cable-skidding jobs that usually went with logging railroads. It was costly to put a temporary logging railroad into a timbered area, and frequently the operator believed it was necessary to cut everything merchantable in the area to repay his railroad-installation cost. Cable skidding, especially a carelessly used high-lead, frequently knocked down everything that was not cut. Skylines frequently are not so destructive, except when the line is pulled directly from one tail spar to another, mowing down everything between. Both railroads and steam-powered cable skidders were also responsible for starting many forest fires. Some of the new cable-skidding systems powered by internal-combustion motors can be operated with a minimum of damage.

Tractor and truck logging in itself is not so damaging. Truck roads frequently can be built more cheaply than railroads, and they have a lasting value, particularly for fire protection after the logging job is completed. Tractors can be operated efficiently on a selective-logging job, if proper care is taken in laying out the skid trails and in felling the trees so that they can be pulled directly into the trail without switching around. Some tractor drivers, particularly of the heavier and more powerful machines, are responsible for much unnecessary damage as a result of the way in which they plow around in the woods.

The chain saw also has been responsible for some unnecessary losses in the woods. It takes considerable experience with the chain saw to learn to fell trees as accurately as the old-time loggers do with hand tools, but it can be done. Once skill is acquired, tricks can be done with it that were impossible by hand methods. The chain saw with its faster cutting rate also makes it economical to recover sound portions from partially rotten or poorly formed trees that would not have been touched by men using hand tools.

INTEGRATED LOGGING is the harvest of all the trees that should be cut at a given time in one operation, and the distribution of each product obtained to the industry that can use it to the best advantage.

Too much of our logging has been one-product logging: A pulp mill would cut the spruce and fir pulpwood from a stand; a few years later a veneer mill would go into the same area to log out the high-grade hardwood veneer logs. That usually required the construction of new roads and camps or the rebuilding of old ones. Later operations in the same place might be conducted by an ash or hickory handle-stock concern, a white pine or hardwood sawlog man, and finally a fuel or distillation-wood operator. Many of these operations would leave lying on the ground material that could have been used to advantage by one of the other concerns. The sum total of the logging costs would be much greater than the total of one integrated operation, recovery from the trees cut would be less, and in many cases fast-growing trees that should have been left would have been cut to help pay the overhead costs of the individual jobs.

There are many obstacles to conducting completely integrated logging. When labor is scarce, each concern wants to obtain the maximum amount of material with its force for its own needs. Different equipment is sometimes needed to log different products. Unfamiliar specifications and markets have to be learned. But advantages usually outweigh disadvantages. Pulp companies can trade high-grade veneer logs for two to three times as much wood suitable for their mills. At the same time the veneer mills can augment their dwindling and increasingly expensive supply of raw materials.

Modern logging machinery and methods make possible delivery of tree-length logs to the landing or even to the mill, where a trained crew can buck out and segregate the various qualities of material that are needed by different industries. Truck logging over public or private roads enables industries to obtain their raw material from lighter and more selective cuts over a wider area.

THE OLD RACE OF LOGGERS, proud of their skill with loggers' hand tools and contented to live a rough life, is dying out. It is almost impossible these days to find a crew that will be satisfied to live in a rough lumber camp, 20 miles back from a hard road, working from dawn to dark all winter, and then proudly bringing down the drive—"walking down the middle of the river" the old loggers used to call it—for a brief period of roistering in town in the spring. Such methods were picturesque, but they wasted timber and manpower. Mills cannot get their full quota of logs that way any more.

The introduction of modern machinery and the trend toward permanence of logging operations on tracts managed for sustained timber production are beginning to bring a new breed of loggers into the woods. Young men who once would have shunned logging now see better opportunities in woods work. Operators, alarmed by the advancing age of the old-time loggers who were willing to lead single lives in remote camps, see the need for change. In every region one can now find examples of the new logging community with comfortable homes for families, with schools, churches, electric light plants, and waterworks. Logging is still one of the most dangerous major occupations in American industry, but operators, unions, insurance companies, State industrial accident commissions, and other agencies are engaged in a concerted accident-prevention program, in which they are achieving substantial progress.

All in all, it is a new day and a better day for the loggers who want a normal home life, good working conditions, steady work, year-round employment at good wages, and modern personnel policies that pay attention to the logger's capabilities for advancement and to safety and training for the job.

Charles F. Brannan

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