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291 chapter twelve Into the Mountains On April 10, 1912, Norwegian immigrant Simon Benson gave $10,000 to the city of Portland for twenty bronze drinking fountains to be placed along streets near the waterfront—the so-called North End—where hosts of loggers gathered when in from the woods. Benson had arrived in the Pacific Northwest penniless in 1879 and parlayed hard work and an eye for the main chance into a sizable fortune. By the early twentieth century he was one of the area’s leading loggers, but he had received most of his public notice by erecting a sawmill in San Diego, California, and supplying it by rafting logs eleven hundred miles by sea from the lower Columbia River. In 1912 Benson was ready to embark on two decades of public service. His fountains were a quixotic first step.1 Benson explained the motivation for his gift: years before he had entered one of Portland’s many North End saloons on a hot summer day and asked for a glass of water. “Only beer sold here,” the bartender replied curtly, so Benson ordered a beer and a glass of water, drank the water, left the beer, and departed. I used to watch the workmen going into saloons with their buckets to buy beer. It seemed strange that in a city whose water is famous for its purity, workmen had no opportunity to quench their thirst except in saloons. . . . For a long time I had been getting more and more fed up with supporting the saloons, which produced nothing of value and were parasites on legitimate industry. I came to the conclusion that if a workman could get a drink of cold, pure water on a street corner, without any obligation, he probably wouldn’t go into a saloon so often. How successful the fountains were in achieving Benson’s purpose is questionable, for it was a massive undertaking: Erickson’s saloon was but one of many, and its bar ran 684 lineal feet. Still, Benson claimed some saloons saw business drop 40 percent after the fountains were in place. He considered them the best investment he ever made, for they “helped knock the profit out of the saloon business and were a factor in making Oregon dry.”2 Benson’s strange gift suggests a good bit about the temperance movement in Oregon in the early twentieth century (it went “dry” in 1916)—and about 292 The Lumberman’s Frontier Benson himself—but it suggests at least as much about Portland’s role as a lumber center as it moved toward becoming successor to Bangor, Saginaw, and their ilk.3 Until late in the nineteenth century, Portland had been but a secondary, regional lumber producer, over one hundred miles from the sea and reached via the sandbar-strewn lower Columbia River. Would-be operators of cargo mills saw greater potential elsewhere. Now things were different. Lumber moving inland by rail challenged the volume going out to sea, and loggers were using Dolbeer donkeys and other power equipment to tap interior stands to supply the trade. Portland was ideally situated to serve the lumberman’s frontier developing in its hinterlands. Benson’s fountains would have served no purpose had it not been for the host of thirstyloggersandmillworkerswhoflockedtoPortlandastheindustrygrew in and around it; forester C. M. Granger noted a few years later: “Portland’s business barometer is in large part the number of unemployed loggers on Burnside Street,” while logger Paul Repetto commented dryly: “Portland [was] at that time booming, or at least lively enough.”4 What was transpiring in Portland and the Pacific Northwest was not merely the transfer of established modes of operation to new forests, nor a shift in influence from centers in Maine, the Lake States, and the South. Practices from earlier frontiers were colliding with the realities of the Far West to create a new sort of industry rather than simply repeating earlier patterns. This new frontier saw a convergence of forces set in motion by the cumulative effect of earlier ones: a growing concern for a coming “timber famine,” high-ball logging as a result of new technologies (and associated increasesinfireandotherdevastation),andlarger-than-everlumberfirmsas a result of accumulated capital and experience. These, when applied on the stage provided by the Pacific Northwest, a stage with its own peculiarities, would create a lumber frontier distinct from those that had gone before. For a considerable time, the new and different were hard to discern; old practices were...

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