American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

  On the interior side of the Cascades, the stands of Douglas fir petered out but the forest continued, transforming into an equally productive region of mixed conifers. Here the most notable species was the ponderosa pine. Many considered this tree to produce lumber as fine as any eastern white pine. And these western pines were especially easy for loggers to fell. Holbrook explained, “A stand of ponderosa is more like a park than like a jungle. It prefers relatively level ground. There is little underbrush; loggers do not, as in the [Douglas] fir region, have to clear a path to get close to a pine.” This pine forest, at its densest in the Pacific Northwest states, extended north and south for the better part of a thousand miles.

  Commercial exploitation of these marvelous forests of the Pacific Northwest had begun long before Weyerhaeuser made his famous purchase. The logging industry traced its roots at least as far back as a primitive mill built at Fort Vancouver in 1827. Serious production started around midcentury, when the California gold rush and the growth of San Francisco spurred demand for construction materials. The industry that subsequently developed relied on capital from California, expertise from New England loggers, and markets based on the West Coast or overseas, primarily in Latin America and eastern Asia. Most of the lumber was handled in oceangoing vessels. The scope of operations, however, hardly compared with that of the other lumber-producing regions of the country. For the most part, the Pacific Northwest trade was undercapitalized, limited in scale, and completely isolated from the lucrative markets back East. The majority of forest acreage was simply untouched, pristine.

  As the nineteenth century folded to a close, circumstances began to develop that would facilitate a rush of capital in the region’s woodlands. The first major factor was, not surprisingly, the arrival of the transcontinental railroads. The Northern Pacific reached Tacoma, Washington, in 1883; the Union Pacific arrived at Portland, Oregon, in 1884; and three years later the Southern Pacific gave Portland a second line. Rates remained high for the first decade, but in 1893, James J. Hill, president of the Northern Pacific, slashed his freight charges low enough to stimulate an eastern trade. At the same time, demand for lumber in the Pacific Northwest started to grow rapidly, largely due to the Klondike gold rush of 1897 and the building boom in Seattle.

  The lumber barons of the Lake States watched these developments eagerly. They had been eyeing the region’s timber prizes since at least 1884, when Sargent declared in his seminal Report: “[T]he prairies . . . must draw their lumber by rail, not as at present from the pine forests covering the shores of lake Superior, but from the fir and redwood forests of the Pacific coast.” The desire to purchase Pacific Northwest acreage increased with each year as the supply of white pine dwindled. To make matters seem even more urgent, the federal government was aggressively taking control of these virgin timber resources through presidential proclamation of forest reserves.

  What had happened in the southern longleaf forests was about to be repeated, but on an even larger scale.

  Most of the valuable acreage was either part of the public domain or had been gifted to the railroads through several highly controversial land grants in the 1860s and 1870s. Lumbermen began to claim this terrain through a combination of shady business deals, strained interpretations of federal law, and outright fraud. Weyerhaeuser led this buying binge with his purchase of nine hundred thousand acres, a deal arranged through James J. Hill, who was not only president of the Northern Pacific but also Weyerhaeuser’s next-door neighbor. A 1907 Cosmopolitan magazine exposé on the lumber baron explained the impact of his purchase:

  The shrewd deal, whereby Weyerhaeuser got the richest timber lands in the world at practically no cost and without the slightest danger to anyone, turned the attention of the syndicate to the Northwest, and having gobbled up everything in the Mississippi River district, the same machinery that had worked so effectively there was put in operation in the West.

  By 1914, 50 percent of the region’s timber was controlled by thirty-eight owners—Weyerhaeuser’s company holdings alone totaled 90 billion board feet. Weyerhaeuser himself seemed to avoid accusations of illegal land grabbing, but his affiliates and partners did not. They became constant foils for such conservationist crusaders as Roosevelt and Pinchot, their suspicious acquisitions exposed through a series of land fraud litigations. In 1908, an influential polemic addressing the crisis was simply called Looters of the Public Domain.

  The industry that arose on the back of this land grab diverged from its prior iterations in the Lake States or Deep South. Giant trees and steep mountain slopes created unique challenges that encouraged the development of new technologies. One of the earliest innovations was the skid road, a chute that ran down mountainsides and allowed loggers to slide trees toward a collection point. Then, in 1881, a Northern California logger invented the Dolbeer steam donkey, a powerful engine with a winch capable of pulling felled trees toward a central point, often the skid road. The donkey engine quickly replaced oxen as the main source of motive power, and the system of dragging logs by cables became one of the industry’s most widespread techniques. As the twentieth century progressed, Pacific Northwest loggers would lead the way nationally in adopting diesel engines, trucks, bulldozers, and chainsaws, all mainstays of the modern profession.

  It wasn’t merely technology that defined lumbering in the region. Pacific Northwest loggers themselves differed from their contemporaries in the longleaf pine forests. In the romanticized version, one not wholly unjustified, these men were seen as travelers from the earlier lumber regions, inheritors of a tradition that extended back to the nation’s first tree fellers in Maine and New Hampshire. In fact, it was in the Pacific Northwest at this time that the nation’s prototypical lumberjack hero, Paul Bunyan, was given formal life. Legends of his exploits by most accounts had been circulating around lumber camps at least since the 1840s, but it was only in 1914 that he was finally given a face as part of an advertising campaign for the Red River Lumber Company of Westwood, California. According to William B. Laughead, the artist behind the original image, the idea was born when his boss said: “Say, you’ve heard a lot of this Paul Bunyan stuff in the camps, haven’t you? . . . There must be an angle there. . . . You go ahead and write something up and let me see it.” The character—with his ax and boots, checked coat, and thick mustache—soon began to appear in advertisements placed in lumber trade magazines across the country. And the legend—once confined to the occasional logging campfire—quickly grew into one of the most important folk heroes in America. Within twenty-five years, there had been at least seventeen full-length books written about his exploits, each grander than the next. He could fell whole forests with a single swing. One account suggested that “when he was but three weeks old [he] became restless in his sleep and rolling over destroyed three-four acres of standing timber.” He made logging seem like the domain of heroes, men of unlimited capacity.

  But reality in the Pacific Northwest was often far less inspired. Many of the loggers there were not simply eastern transplants, but immigrants, wayfarers, and poor young men with few options. In 1920, Rexford G. Tugwell, who later became one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisors, described them through the eyes of a Progressive witnessing a scene of social breakdown:

  Picture a bent and, to me, a rather pathetic figure, plodding along a woods-trail in the astonishing Northwest forest. . . . Perhaps he drags along a frayed old imitation-leather suit-case; more likely everything in the world he can call his own is wrapped in a filthy blanket-roll that hangs upon his back. His eyes are dull and reddened; his joints are stiff with the rheumatism almost universal in the wettest climate in the world; his teeth are rotting; he is racked with strange diseases and tortured by unrealized dreams that haunt his soul.

  The life of a Pacific Northwest logger, as Tugwell suggested, was a difficult one. The pay was bad, the work unsteady, the owners unsympathetic. In Tugwell’s words, “As a community, a lumber camp is a sad travesty at best.”


  The main solace for many of these destitute and shiftless laborers came at the end of the logging season or between jobs, when they could blow their paychecks on the vices of nearby cities. There, they lived a life that would make a sailor blush. The parts of town where loggers gathered became known as “skid roads,” a term (along with the bastardized version, “skid row”) that eventually came to denote the worst sections of an urban area. Holbrook vividly described these as “block upon block of rooming houses, houses of easy virtue, beer joints, pool halls, tattoo parlors, burlesque theaters, an I.W.W. or wobbly hall, and the kind of store that has a pile of paper suitcases on openhanded display near the entrance, with every one chained down.”

  The arrival of industrial logging in the Pacific Northwest brought not only this new logging culture, but an increased threat from serious forest fires. The same circumstances that had set the Lake States forests ablaze—accumulated slash and debris, sparks from railroads, abandoned campfires—now shook the region. The first of the major conflagrations struck in September 1902. Known as the “Yacolt Burn,” it ripped through more than six hundred thousand acres in Washington and Oregon, killing thirty-five and destroying more than seven billion board feet of timber. One of the hardest hit was Weyerhaeuser, whose purchase of nine hundred thousand acres had overlapped with the affected region.

  Up until now, lumber barons had generally been unwilling to invest in forest fire protection, but their attitudes were beginning to change. The Pacific Northwest was the last sanctum of virgin forest on the continent. If the trees disappeared here, there would be no new frontier to chase. Furthermore, lumbermen better appreciated the inherent value of stumpage (land already containing mature timber); there was more money to be made through stumpage appreciation than through lumber manufacturing, and every acre lost through fire was money literally gone up in smoke. While the industry had a long way to go before embracing most of the tenets of professional forestry, it was ready to start tackling this central element of timber preservation.

  Leading the charge was George S. Long, the man Weyerhaeuser had personally selected to oversee his mushrooming Pacific Northwest holdings. He was among the first to appreciate the value that professional forestry techniques offered the lumber industry and, following the Yacolt Burn, began to discreetly lobby the state legislatures of Washington and Oregon concerning forest fire prevention. In 1903, Washington became the first state in the country to enact such a law. Two years later, Long helped arrange for the industry to get involved directly through formal patrol agreements. The first of these saw Weyerhaeuser’s company join with two others to monitor a heavily forested portion of Oregon. This patrol agreement system proved so popular that within a decade forty similar organizations had formed throughout the country. Of course, despite increased vigilance, fire remained a constant menace in the region, punctuated by the Big Burn of 1910, which destroyed more than five thousand square miles along the Idaho/Montana border (an area roughly equal to Connecticut in size), and by the Tillamook blowup of 1933, an Oregon fire that, in the public imagination, rivaled the Dust Bowl as a symbol of environmental degradation.

  The industry’s early fire-prevention activities eventually opened the door for it to embrace more extensive forestry practices. George Long again led the way, at one point writing, “I am a Pinchot man in every respect pertaining to forestry matters.” He directed a series of internal industry discussions that resulted in the formation of the Western Forestry and Conservation Association in 1910. This group augmented many of the activities that the Forest Service was undertaking simultaneously. The industry, while still guilty of widespread wasteful practices, had come a long way from the days of “cut out and get out” logging, when forestry was practically a four-letter word. Perhaps the change in attitude resulted from a generational shift: The old lumber barons were dying and in their place came men influenced by the writings of Muir and Pinchot.

  The greatest baron of all, Weyerhaeuser, passed away in May 1914. He had given more than fifty years to the industry, built from nothing a fortune once thought to “overshadow that of John D. Rockefeller,” and brought the techniques of modern capitalism to one of the country’s oldest and most important economic sectors. When he died, he sat upon an empire of trees that comprised more than 2 million acres in the Pacific Northwest, along with countless thousands more in the Lake States and the South. Certain estimates suggested that the full extent of his control—including all his partnership deals and minority stakes—reached 50 million acres in the Pacific Northwest alone (an area larger than the entire state of Wisconsin, where he’d first begun to purchase stumpage a few thousand acres at a time). Upon hearing of Weyerhaeuser’s passing, his friend James J. Hill declared, “The entire Northwest has no man whose death will be felt so keenly as that of Mr. Weyerhaeuser. His place can not be filled. He was a national force among men who have helped to build up the country, and his loss truly reaches far beyond the limits of his family and business associates.” Not everyone was so kind in their assessment. Pulitzer Prize–winning muckraker Charles Edward Russell wrote in 1912: “This great domain [in the Pacific Northwest] once belonged to the people; . . . it was filched from them by the railroads; and . . . the spoilers being despoiled, it is now a part of the empire that is dominated by Frederick Weyerhaeuser.”

  The lumber baron’s death did not mark the end of his empire. Shortly after making his legendary nine-hundred-thousand-acre purchase, he had incorporated the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, an entity that lives on into the present as the Weyerhaeuser Company, one of the world’s foremost producers of lumber and other forest products.

  The same year that Weyerhaeuser died, the United States completed the Panama Canal, one of the largest governmental initiatives of the twentieth century. Practically overnight the canal revolutionized transcontinental shipping by making it cost effective to send goods, including lumber, to eastern markets using ocean transport. This development marked the beginning of a new era for the Pacific Northwest logging industry. Up to this point, much of the focus had been on acquiring stumpage, but now production started to move toward its eventual position of national dominance. The first few years of this transition were rocky, as the industry dealt with complications brought on by World War I as well as the brief economic contraction that followed. But when the boom of the twenties arrived, the region’s lumber mills were prepared to meet the demand. Pacific Northwest production soon accounted for 30 percent of the national total, nearly equaling that of the Deep South. And by the end of the 1920s, the region finally emerged as the new king of American logging, displacing the Deep South, which had held the title for much of the early twentieth century. In 1929 alone, the mills of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California manufactured a remarkable 14.1 billion board feet, equivalent to the national total as late as 1870.

  Here, among the great forests of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, the logging industry finally settled. The combination of incredible timber resources and improved practices offered a degree of sustainability. Moreover, the huge stumps that remained after logging made cut-over lands difficult to convert into fields for agriculture, meaning that forests tended to regrow if protected from fire. As Holbrook once noted, “I’ve heard professional foresters say that four out of five acres of forest land in western Oregon and Washington are fit to grow trees and nothing else. . . . You could hardly turn your back on a newly cleared field” without “the firs, hemlocks, and cedars” reappearing. The region has accounted for 50 percent or more of the nation’s timber for over fifty years. And, consequently, the economy of the Pacific Northwest owed more to trees than almost anywhere else in twentieth-century America. Holbrook wrote in 1952: “The forest . . . is still the most important single fact in the Northwest. Our statisticians publish figures every little while to say that sixty-five cents of every dollar in our region derives from the forest.”

  The Forest Products Laboratory

  FOR ALL THE advances that industrial
capitalism had brought to lumbering, in several key respects the profession remained fairly primitive at the beginning of the twentieth century. While lumber barons knew plenty about how to get timber from the forest to the market, they understood surprisingly little about what their product was in any scientific or technical sense. Most knowledge about trees was simply the accretion of tradition and experience, with little hard evidence for support. Loggers, with few exceptions, lacked real information about the structure, strength, quality, or durability of their products. To cite one example: The widespread prejudice against longleaf pine as a structural timber stemmed in part from the belief that these trees were weakened through the process of turpentine harvesting, which often preceded the timber haul; but no one had ever bothered to investigate the truth of this claim.

  Related to the issue of insufficient technical information was the industry’s failure to use trees efficiently during the manufacturing process. While twentieth-century lumberers were less profligate than their predecessors, they still discarded the majority of their raw material, as very few processes had been developed to use a timber tree’s by-products. Nearly everything that was not serviceable as finished timber ended up in the waste pile. Emanuel Philipp, the governor of Wisconsin in the late 1910s, once quipped: “[N]ature would have been a great conservator of forest products if she had permitted trees to grow square rather than round.” An early Forest Service report attached numbers to this trenchant observation. It estimated that of the total volume of trees cut for lumber in the United States, 25 percent was wasted in slabs, trimmings, edgings, and other unusable pieces; 10.5 percent ended up as sawdust; and 9.8 percent was bark; in total, more than 45 percent of the original material (and that wasn’t counting the stumps).