"More Deadly than War": High-Lead Steam Logging Unit

As far as pullin' out logs . . . as far as I'm concerned, there'll never be no power like that steam. Working up in Morton on a big steam donkey, we'd take a couple of big logs and just sail out of the brush.

—Gene Frase, old-time donkey puncher, 1998.

First there were the oxen, dragging the logs out of the virgin woods of the Northwest on skid roads built of poles. Animal power was replaced in the 1880s by the latent energy in the wood itself, in the form of steam; steam-powered winches, or "donkeys," used wire ropes to drag the logs in, and defined the first mechanized, "ground-lead" logging operations. Next came "high-lead" logging, bringing the logs in overhead, suspended on wire rope threaded through various complicated pulley systems and strung between two or more trees. This was an industrial version of a tenement clothesline, except that the donkey sped several tons of logs through the air instead of the household laundry and grabbed the timber with "choker" cables and not clothespins. In the early 1900s trees were still cut down with hand saws and sweat ("Swedish steam"), but the key to making money was to remove the trees as quickly and cheaply as possible, and the high-lead steam donkey was just the ticket.

The typical donkey, or "yarder," grew through a steady diet of improvements to nearly 50 tons. To move it, the crew mounted the machine on two big logs, called "sleds," and fastened wire ropes to trees in the direction they wanted to take; then, like a catamaran sailing through the woods, the donkey dragged itself forward, over hills and across rivers. It made for some impressive pictures. As the timber nearest roads and rivers was logged off, temporary railroads were built to where the trees remained. The locomotives working these lines weighed upward of 100 tons. To negotiate the steep inclines and sharp curves, most employed a unique system of gear-driven wheels, a rare hybrid of the common rod engine.

Shortly after the turn of the century, high-lead steam logging evolved into its final, most technologically sophisticated form: the "unit." Mounted on the rails of a temporary logging road, this new machine was easier to move despite its great weight (200 to 300 tons), and it combined two tasks that had previously required separate donkeys: bringing the logs in overhead (yarding) and loading them on railcars. The former operator of the steam donkey, the "donkey puncher," was elevated to the position of "leverman" and ran the unit with its crew of eighteen to twenty-one men.

The photograph here almost certainly shows one of the first units on the Pacific Coast. Little is known about it except that it was used on the Blakey Railroad at Camp M, outside Shelton, Washington, in 1912. It was largely a homemade machine, built up from a 10-inch by 15-inch (bore and stroke) donkey with a single tong Lidgerwood loader. It was also unusual, but a sign of changes to come, in that it was fired with oil and not wood.

Bigger may be better, but it also means bigger problems. For this machine-on-steroids, the problem was weight. These 200- and 300-ton superheavyweights overtaxed tracks and trestles designed to carry 100-ton logging locomotives, and logging historian John T. Labbe writes that "more than one of them, finding a soft spot in the grade, toppled down into a canyon." American loggers were, and are, neither stupid nor lazy, and they always managed to get them back on the tracks with the equipment on hand.

The legendary figure of Paul Bunyan symbolizes the invincible nature of pioneers, but the dangers associated with early industrial mechanization were not at all mythical, and this was especially true in the woods. In 1920, the Safety Board of Washington State declared logging "more deadly than war." The...