by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Next mornin’ we grabbed the boat for the first lap of the trip and after changin’ into busses and back onto boats a few times we made the landin’ at Grinnon. We was met by the time keeper with a speeder and made the trip up over the steepest known loggin’ track in the country and that is sayin’ a heap.
We didn’t see where the nice level ground mentioned in the sacred contract was comin’ in but we sure enjoyed the scenery which is sure pleasant in this section.
Mountains and valleys with clear tumblin’ rivers and misty clouds hangin’ half way up can sure wipe out the memory of a lot of squalid misery found in more civilized sections. Somehow they make a fellow feel that life is big and not exactly centered about himself.
And this feelin’ is most necessary to get real action these days. Most of us like to stick our chests out about two inches further than is necessary for deep breathin’ and seem to forget that there are others in the world that might be just as wise as—the big center of things—me. There are a lot of us that have to learn to think and act according to the biggest benefit to the greatest number instead of in the way that our own ideas points.
We made the camp alright and found a bunk house fixed up for us that was pretty fair. The boss give us the icy eye as if he was only in on this Gypo proposition by compulsion but the manager was all smiles and explained to us over and over that he had only left his office work in town to come up and see that we got a good start.
Of course we was grateful. We even told him so. The grub was good too but the flunkies set it down before us with a bang and the cook looked cross-eyed at the whole bunch of us. Sure a guy must have to suffer a lot from just wantin’ to make a few lousy dollars via the Gypo route in some places. I even commenced to be scared somebody that knew me would write it up for the Worker and demand that I turn in my card. Such would have sure ruined me for life but then I been ruined more than once anyhow.
Well, we went out and looked over the ground. It was level, too. A fine bunch of trees in a level valley that just seemed to happened along by accident in the steep canyons. Then we organized ourselves. Snowball was elected to do the filing and the Bull buckin’ and the rest of us scattered out in the trees.
I started in with the fallin’ gang not knowing anything about this end of the loggin’ game and we dropped the first tree fine except that the blamed thing hooked up and it took us most of the day to get it down where we could look at it.
Then we done better. The manager came around and found all of us sweatin’ and puffin’ so he went off to town satisfied that he had solved the problem of bustin’ up these here pesky wobs by makin’ ’em take an interest in the work. Yeah, we done better. In the afternoon me and my pardner dropped three fine big trees, every one of ’em with high grade timber in ’em—number one flooring stock, but the blame sticks dropped on stumps and was busted all to hell. It was sure tough but I cheerfully took the blame as I didn’t know much about the fallin’ game anyway.
When I looked over the rest of the crew’s work I commenced to think that I had picked the biggest bunch of green horns that could be found in the whole organization. Not one of ’em seemed to know as much about fallin’ or buckin’ as I used to.
The newly elected bull bucker came around to me and he pulled his face into a sorrowful twist and explained that we wasn’t makin’ more than three or four dollars a day and was a dullin’ a lot of saws.
The Centralia Prisoners.
Labadie Collection photo files.
This of course was awful news as it meant that maybe we wouldn’t make that young fortune we was a lookin for here. I promised to speed up and we did manage by workin’ a little overtime to drop another fir, but it was punky.
The funny part of the whole thing was that we didn’t seem to improve as the days went by. Some of the gang got lazy and wouldn’t drop as many trees as they should and then they would blame Snowball for bein’ a bum sawfiler but I couldn’t see anything wrong with his filin’.
The boss dropped around and looked over the work we had done and I saw him goin’ away with his hat off and him a scratchin’ his head. He appeared to be plum puzzled by our progress. In the meantime I got friendly with the blacksmith’s helper and he told me that the boss once carried a card in the early days and that there was a good bunch of wobs that had been sent down the road to make room for us damn scabs.
You bet I got real friendly with that helper. He made it a point to see that he wasn’t handlin’ any hot irons when I happened around. Well, we stuck to this job for a month. Things went from bad to worse. I commenced to lose faith in the co-operative movement when it comes to gettin’ work done. We didn’t seem to have the right spirit for work no matter which way we tried to bring it out. Still I learned a lot about fallin’ trees but the fallin’ pardner didn’t seem to think so. He said that I couldn’t hit even the ground more than once out of three times without him. Well, I thought if he was so wise I would try my hand at buckin’. So we made the switch.
I went on with a big Finn that agreed to show me how to buck. But I soon wished that I hadn’t done it. Buckin’ is even harder work to my notion than fallin’, besides I was no good at it and didn’t seem able to learn much. About every time that I got a real good log about half bucked out, why, somethin’ was sure to happen to the wedges and the blame log would split. I must of spoiled a lot of ’em that way but I learned how to buck ’em off square at last but the bunch decided to let me buck on the split ones about this time so I didn’t get any real practice at that.
In other ways, however, things went fine. For instance the cook finally seemed to get over his grouch and was real friendly. He came out and looked over our job and even got jolly about it. Then we sort of decided to take it easy anyway. About this time, why, we got a good bunch of papers and magazines up and it got so it was harder and harder to tear ourselves away from the literary field. We enjoyed discussions on a lot of highbrow topics and sometimes when the job got irksome we took a hike up on some of the hills and looked around.
Maybe I am a little off on the subject but I sure admire the scenery in the Olympics. The more I saw of it the more I admired it. Finally it got so that it appealed to me more than even the buckin’ did though I admit that that was sure fascinatin’. It certainly was wonderful to get away up on the mountain side and look down on the riggin’ crew a sweatin’ and strainin’ like little ants down in the valley while the donkeys would shoot steam like these little peanut roasters on the pop corn stands in town.
Oh, it was a great life. I could see where there was all sorts of temptation to be a gypo. I commenced to think that I would like to do this regularly.
The good grub and the pleasant companionship sure didn’t make none of us feel bad either. Snowball said that he wore a full inch off of some of the saws just to keep himself busy about the shack while we was out on the job but I think he was exaggeratin’. I never did think that he always told the whole truth about some things especially about how hard he worked but I will say that he changed the looks of some of them saws alright.
All good things come to an end at last, however, and one day the scaler come up to scale up our cut and see where we was at. He come out on the job unexpected but as it happened three of us was workin’.
He started to work scalin’ the logs and seemed to grow real excited. He didn’t stop, however, to make any remark to us but kept on all day. Well, he stayed with the job and so did we. When he got finished he come over to tell us about it. He was so mad he was almost happy.
“Well, you birds have sure got away with some-thin’ this time,” he tells us in our bunk house the night he finished. “You have been here thirty days and have eat up four hundred dollars’ worth of grub. You have knocked down and mutilated a million feet of timber, whether from pure cussed-ness or because you are damned fools, I don’t know and no one can prove. But I sure have a bright suspicion because none of you look like plum idiots to me.”
“The foreman wrote into
town advisin’ the manager to abrogate the contract a couple of weeks ago but then the manager had an idea he was still opposed to the contract system. Now I know what he was opposed to, allright.”
We all asked him what was wrong. We wanted to know if he was goin’ to get us fired from our good job. In fact we made him feel that we sure enjoyed the stay up there but that didn’t seem to help him any. He went away madder than ever. I heard later that he had three shares of stock in the company.
The manager came up and told us that our contract was not worth a damn and that the quicker we got out of camp the better he would be pleased. He said that if we wanted to collect the money for the trees that we had put down we could bring suit and see what we got.
We pulled out and blew into Seattle but so far none of us has taken up the matter of our legal rights to pay for our work. And on the other hand I saw the boards down at Moore’s chalked up heavy for buckers and fallers workin’ by the day at Grinnon right away after we hit town.
Tactics, I claims, will get the goods where dealin’ out the sneers and peddlin’ the holy solidarity stuff only makes a man feel ashamed and unnatural but don’t stop him from wantin’ to obey that inner urge. In fact some of the looks I got up in Grinnon made me think that maybe I was a superior bein’ and not in the crude and unsophisticated circle of common workin’ stiffs.
Providin’ that I hadn’t already known better I feel sure that that idea would have got stuck in me somehow or other. It’s funny that way. Everybody is always ready to believe that he or she (especially she) is different from the rest of the people. You know the line of bunk I mean and how if you shoot it out just right, how it always gets results.
Well, Gypos don’t want to get no chance to think that they are different from you and me. Just use a few organized tactics and the humps on some of the loggers’ backs will look like a camel’s that has been through a famine worse than a term in the Spokane City jail in a free speech fight.
Suppose we just get together and put across a few tactical manoeuvers on these birds and see that they don’t obstruct the progress of the organization any more. That is my idea.
15
This unsigned article appeared in the Four L Bul-letin (October 122), the monthly publication of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. The organization was set up by the government with lumber company support during the World War I period to counteract the influence of the I.W.W. in the Northwest woods.
WHY I AM A MEMBER OF THE I.W.W.
A PERSONAL RECORD BY ONE OF THEM
What is it turns men to organizations like the I.W.W.?
We asked a logger, prominent in the councils of the local I.W.W., to tell our readers in his own words the reasons for his association with the organization; to review his own life with the idea of noting those things which led him to become an enemy of society as it is and an advocate of drastic change.
This I.W.W. is a sincere, earnest individual; his natural tastes are literary and studious. The point of view which he expresses here is important for all of us to study, for his convictions, based on that point of view, are those of thousands of other lumberjacks. Behind the point of view is a cause, or a series of them, which would seem to be far reaching. This author says the cause is essentially American—the result of rapid development of industry on a large scale.
EDITOR
I think my answer to this question will interest your readers, as I come from a part of Europe which furnishes a very large percentage of the loggers in the northwest.
As to my past I might say that life has offered me a very varied bill of fare. From my seventh to my fourteenth year I generally put in from seven to eight months a year at the “point of production.” We kids in the sugar beet fields of southern Sweden began our day at 6 A.M. and were kept busy until 8 P.M., with three rests a day, totaling altogether two hours, making a twelve-hour day. You can easily imagine how much time we had for play or study and how physically fit we were for either.
So my childhood was lost and I was an old man at 14, when I struck a job in a grocery store, and at the age of 23 I found myself manager for quite a large business enterprise in my native country—a co-operative association composed of several thousand members. The co-operative movement is to some extent related to socialism, its ideology is socialistic, and the reason I took such an interest in it was entirely due to my previous study and participation in the socialistic movement.
At the age of 25 I emigrated to the United States. To me it was not a question of journeying to some place where I hoped to gain fortune and fame. It was merely the satisfying of a desire for adventure and for knowledge of the world, a desire long suppressed for reasons of entirely personal nature. My first job in this country was in a packing plant at South St. Paul, Minn. There I received a splendid illustration of Upton Sinclair’s book, “The Jungle,” perhaps the most read book in Sweden at the time of my departure. It was a ten-hour day with lots of overtime at regular pay, 161/2 cents per hour. Never do I see a sign advertising a certain brand of ham and bacon without thinking of the terrible high premium in sweat and blood, in misery and starvation, in ignorance and degeneration, the workers in those establishments have to pay before these products reach your table.
I turned down offers to again enter the commercial field back in Minnesota in order to be able to study another class of men, the man of the “wild west,” as well as the wild west itself, and early in March, 1910, I headed for this coast.
I’ll never forget my first experience in camp. It was a railroad camp up in the Rockies. I was tired after the hike with my bundle on my back, and attempted to sit down on a bed, the only furniture I could see that would furnish me a rest. Before I could accomplish the deed I was told in a very sharp voice in my mother tongue not to do so. I moved a little and tried another bed, when another Swede gave a similar command. After a third experiment which ended in a similar way, I got kind of peeved and began to lecture my countrymen a little as to civilized manners, when one of the boys explained: “We only warn you so as not to get lousy.”
Suffice it to say that I made no more attempts to rest in that camp, but took a freight train that very evening and stayed two nights and one day in a box car before I, nearly froze to death, was dumped off at Hillyard, Wash., penniless, with no one I knew, and unable to speak a word in English.
Shortly after this incident I found myself in a logging camp in Idaho, across from the city of Coeur d’Alene. It was double beds two stories high, sleep on straw, work eleven to twelve hours per day, but the board was fairly good. I stayed there for several months, mostly because I wanted to stay away from my countrymen in order to learn the language. From there I went to British Columbia. Put in one year in a logging camp in the Frazer Valley and then one year and a half in a railroad camp on the Kettle Valley railroad. It was here I aligned myself with the I.W.W., and may I state that there was no delegate in that camp, and, to the best of my knowledge, not one member. I went over a hundred miles into Vancouver, B. C, to get that “little red card.”
The Reasons
Why did I do it?
The reasons were many. While young I had associated myself with the prohibitionists, joining the Independent Order of Good Templars. I soon came to the conclusion that the liquor traffic itself is but a natural outgrowth of our existing social system, and that I could not abolish it without a fundamental change in society itself.
When working on the Kettle Valley road I observed quite a few interesting facts in this connection. Of over three thousand workers employed for a couple of years I doubt if there were two dozen men who left that job with sufficient funds to carry them for two months. The general routine was to work for a month, draw your check, go down to a little town named Hope (the most hopeless city I’ve seen) composed of two very large saloons, a couple of dirty rooming houses, a couple of stores and half a dozen houses of prostitution, and to spend, in a day or two, your every nickel in either the saloons or the brothels, usually i
n both. I saw one Christmas how in one camp of about 150 men, they carried in over 450 bottles of whisky, and not one book or newspaper, and all had a “glorious time.”
The Workers’ Welcome
Have you ever thought of how we, the workers in the woods, mines, construction camps or agriculcultural fields, are really approached and “entertained” when we visit our present centers of “civilization” and “culture”? What is the first thing we meet? The cheap lodging house, the dark and dirty restaurant, the saloon or the blind pig, the prostitutes operating in all the hotels, the moving picture and cheap vaudeville shows with their still cheaper, sensational programs, the freaks of all descriptions who operate on the street corners, from the ones selling “corn removers” and shoestrings to the various religious fanatics and freaks. Did you ever see a sign in the working class district pointing the way to the public library? I have not. Did you ever meet a sign in any one of the rooming houses where we are forced to live, advertising a concert or a real play of any of our great writers, such as Ibsen, Shaw, Suderman, Gorky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare or others? Never.
I mention this because I, like all others, have certain desires I want to satisfy. We want a break in the monotony of camp life. That’s why we go to the cities. We want to see and partake in all those manifestations of civilized society, we want amusements, comfort, leisure. We also want a clean and healthy environment composed of both sexes, we want a home, family, children. We want to see ourselves and our ideals in life perpetuated in our own offspring. And may I say that I hold this to be a blessing for humanity. Whoever does not strive and fight for the good things of life is, in my opinion, dangerous to society. But due to our perverse social system we are prevented from satisfying our desires and the majority of our class accepts whatever is offered as substitute.