Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon

2/ An Empire Itself

CHAPTER 2 An Empire Itself Ii the largest sawmill in the northwest undertook to convert into merchantable lumber the standing timber in Coos county, it would have a 270 years' job on its hands.... The ninth generation of those who might undertake this gigantic task, would be in their graves before the work could be completed. Coos Bay Harbor] The frenzied speculation in Northwest timberland at the turn of the century took place in the midst of a sharp rise in lumber prices, suspicions of a pending timber "famine," and the establishment of the federal forest reserves. Lumber capitalists who had made fortunes elsewhere swarmed to the lower Columbia River country, to Puget Sound and the Grays Harbor district in Washington, to the forests of British Columbia, and to the Douglas fir slopes in western Oregon. Operating through federal and state land offices and the real estate departments of the great railroad companies, agents for Great Lakes lumbermen and other eastern investors blocked up huge acreages of virgin forestland. Rumors about timber locators and buyers-pockets reportedly flush with greenbacks-filled the pages of Northwest newspapers. The speculators and their friends in the public land offices played fast and loose with state and federal land laws to transfer thousands of square miles of timber to private ownership. Those were activities that made fortunes and created problems. Before the orgy had run its course, several elected officials-including a United States senator and congressman-and their counterparts in the private sector were found guilty of defrauding the public. Those events touched Oregon's south coast. The timber locators who prowled the estuaries and forested slopes of the Coos hinterland stirred the imaginations of local promoters. Railroad rumors abounded and local newspapers called for "more capital" and the building of additional manufacturing industries in the area. If those developments materialized, one editor predicted, Coos Bay would be "second to no city on the entire Pacific coast." Its vast timber resources and "natural short route to the Orient" pointed the "finger of destiny" to Coos Bay/ But southwestern Oregon was only a small part of speculative activity that was general throughout the region. . 26 AN EMPIRE ITSELF 27 The timber buyers who flocked to the coastal rain forests of British Columbia were of a kind with those south of the border. The race to gain access to timberland peaked in 1903 when the provincial government , in an effort to increase revenue, made Crown lands available to Canadian and foreign interests. The government sold timber licenses for twenty-one-year periods, with the licensees required to pay only the annual interest on the value of the timber when it was harvested. To whet the appetite of potential buyers, the license could be transferred after only two years. The result of the provincial government's decision was an inrush of rascals and land agents and rampant speculation until authorities discontinued the practice in 1907.3 One of the more colorful accounts of the speculation in British Columbia forests argues that it was easy to stake out a square mile of timberland at that time: There had arisen a fierce rush to stake timber. Hundreds and hundreds of menexperienced loggers, inexperienced youth from town-blossomed as "timber cruisers." The woods were furrowed with their trails. Men in rowboats and sail boats, and small, decrepit steamboats, and gasoline motorboats had pervaded the waters of every channel and fiord. According to a prominent lumber journal, many of the investors were "Great Lakes capitalists" who already had exhausted the pine forests of that region. One of them, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, was amassing even greater acreages in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.4 The most striking consequence of the speculative mania-and the one that has had the greatest impact on the Pacific Northwest-was the concentration of timberland into large ownerships. In that sense, the Weyerhaeuser interests led the way when they purchased 900,000 acres of magnificent timber from the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1900; that transaction, involving the original congressional land grant to the railroad, was one of the largest single land transfers in American history. While Frederick Weyerhaeuser was pioneering the way in acquiring thousands of square miles of Northwest timber, his firm also changed the emphasis for leaders in the industry from manufacturing to land holding. Ownership and control of timberland, not the operation of sawmills, was the wave of the future.s Those circumstances also lend credibility to the old loggers' saying that "only speculators make...