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CHAPTER 4 Logging the Coos Timber Most of the camps you lived in a bunkhouse with four people in it, and a barrel stove, that is, a stove made out of an oil barrel. And, of course, you came in wet and cold, and you took off your clothes and dried them off as much as you could during the night. And you lay there and breathed all that stinking, sweaty clothes, but you thought nothing of it. It's just the way you lived in those days. Dow Beckham1 When Paul Bunyan made the long trek from the Great Lakes pineries to the forests of the Pacific slope, he brought with him a rich tradition of folklore and ballad that loggers had passed along for generations, some of it dating to the heyday of river drives in the Maine woods. But on this last great timber stand there was a new twist to the stories that glorified the strenuous work and the danger involved in the logging and lumbering enterprise. In the Pacific Northwest, beginning in the 1930s, lumber trade organizations began hiring skilled writers like Stewart Holbrook and James Stevens to add a luster of authenticity to the old romantic tales. The fact that the Bunyanesque version dominates popular thinking about the industry suggests that the public relations effort ha,s succeeded. In the last two decades folklorists and writers of fiction have embellished that vision-of life in the lumber camps, the epic stories of the logging drives down western rivers, and the legendary accounts of free-wheeling hedonism when loggers entered the skidroad districts of far-western towns. In that view, the dawn-to-dusk work in the woods and the sweat and blood of the speedups in the mills are described as a composite of patriotism, apple pie, and duty to family and motherhood. Anything, that is, but the daily reckoning with death and crippling injury and the protracted periods of unemployment that have characterized the industry. Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion, especially the movie version, fits the former prescription . It portrays a logging family of heroic proportions-Hank Stamper, the family strongman, can work harder, swim farther, and fight better than any of the logging and mill-working fraternity on the Wakonda Auga River. In truth, those who have worked in the woods, often with a twinkle in their eye, helped to perpetuate some of the tales. Barre Toelken, a gifted folklorist, relates the story of an interviewer who once asked an 54 LOGGING THE COOS TIMBER 55 old logger if there was any substance to the rumor that men in the woods were superstitious about getting killed during their last day on the job: Did I ever hear of getting killed on the last day of work? Well, I guess if you got killed it would be your last day of work, wouldn't it? Anyhow, you know, no matter whether you're killed or injured, they leave you there by the cold deck and take you in with the last load of the day, so you won't lose out on a day's pay. And no matter what, a day's pay is a day's pay2 The man's response has elements both of polite teasing and recognition about the reality of work with an arbitrary employer. The daily experiences of loggers and mill workers from the Humboldt redwoods north to British Columbia differ from the romantic version, While popular lore depicts a tradition of larger-than-life hemen , Charlotte Todes and Vernon Jensen, two of the earliest historians to write realistically about the industry, argue that the story was also one of working people struggling to make a living in a difficult and demanding environment.3 The far-western timber industry and the frontier were one in the early twentieth century. To make matters worse for those who lived in the lumber towns and the logging camps, chaotic and unstable business conditions and uncompromising and individualistic operators were daily points of reckoning. Those circumstances influenced life in southwestern Oregon as they did elsewhere on the Pacific Coast. There were other features that made North America's last forest frontier unique. It was widely believed that logging and lumbering in the Douglas fir region would be permanent sources of employment. By contrast, in the South loggers normally were farmers as well. There were more people employed in the industry in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho by the 1920s...

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