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CHAPTER 9 Timber Forever We don't want one big mill in one section cutting all the timber, then, when it is gone, to shut down-throwing many out of work. Ferdinand A. Silcox, Chief, U.S. Forest Service, Portland, Oregon, August 18, 19341 Frank Younker knew timber. He remembers the huge logs rafted down the South Slough on the ebb tide. As a boy, he delivered supplies to Camp Four, the old C. A. Smith logging camp, and for most of his life he hunted and fished, and on occasion, used the South Slough country as a base for his moonshine operations. Looking wistfully at an old photograph of the magnificent spruce, cedar, and fir that once grew along the slough, he told an interviewer in 1975: "You see, that's what trees looked like in the old days. We don't have trees like that no more, no more."2 To see an old-growth forest today, Younker would have to travel miles into the Coast Range where he might find isolated patches on Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property. Less kind and charitable old timers are more outspoken about the logs being hauled to the mills today. "Sticks," one of them grumbles. Others refer to the young trees presently being harvested as "peeker poles." Dow Beckham, who remembers the big timber stands on the Coquille and Coos drainages, says the companies are "logging brush these days." When he began working in the woods in the 1920s, loggers "would not take a tree that didn't have at least twenty inches in diameter on the small end." Today, he says in amazement, "that's a big log." Jack Johnson, a boisterous and friendly timber faller for Weyerhaeuser for nearly twenty-five years, says the company is cutting "dog hair these days."3 But despite their friendly disdain for the size of the trees being harvested, neither Beckham nor Johnson is overly critical of the rapid harvest of the old-growth timber stands. Frank J. Fish, a native of Myrtle Point, also remembers the days when there was "real timber" in the Coast Range. Fish, who worked as a timber locator in the early twentieth century, recalls falling a tree that was eight feet, nine inches in diameter on the stump. The tree took one hour and fifty-eight minutes to fall and scaled out at 32,000 board feet. When Stephen Spoerl moved to the Gold Beach area on 122 TIMBER FOREVER 123 the southern Oregon coast in 1908 because of its "wildness and remoteness," both the size and the extent of the old-growth forest impressed him. He told an interviewer that he thought loggers would never cut trees in the isolated Gold Beach area. There was "so much timber closer to the mills and easier to get out, you'd wonder why they would ever monkey with this stuff." But, viewing the cutover slopes of the south coast in 1975, he remarked: "it's a different ball game in this day."4 The depleted timber inventory in southwestern Oregon at this writing testifies to the truth of Spoerl's observation. Like other retired loggers, Frank Fish and Stephen Spoerl look at the past with a tinge of nostalgia and regret. They miss the big trees, but understand the social, economic, and technological forces that brought an end to the old-growth forest. Loggers who worked in the days of crosscut saws and steam donkeys had reason to think the resource was endless. "We didn't think we would ever run out of trees," Dow Beckham recalls. "We knew that it would last forever. They were in the way, and it was growing back so fast." Curt Beckham , who quit logging in 1946 at a time when the woods operations were becoming increasingly mechanized, agrees with his brother: "In my time trees were growing as fast as we were cutting. I believe that. I don't believe we would have ever seen denuded hills. Even the big camps, they couldn't cut the timber as fast as it was growing, because we could only get out so much timber per day, per year."s For most of the years the Beckhams worked in the woods, hand labor and steam power dominated the production system. It took a large work force to satisfy the volume of timber required in the mills. For several decades, therefore, the constraints of technology, manpower , and markets limited the output...

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