In Order To
Reach This Height The Chopper Cuts A Notch About Two Inches Wide And
Three Or Four Deep And Drives A Board Into It, On Which He Stands
While At Work.
In case the first notch, cut as high as he can reach,
is not high enough, he stands on the board that has been driven into
the first notch and cuts another.
Thus the axeman may often be seen
at work standing eight or ten feet above the ground. If the tree is
so large that with his long-handled axe the chopper is unable to reach
to the farther side of it, then a second chopper is set to work, each
cutting halfway across. And when the tree is about to fall, warned by
the faint crackling of the strained fibers, they jump to the ground,
and stand back out of danger from flying limbs, while the noble giant
that had stood erect in glorious strength and beauty century after
century, bows low at last and with gasp and groan and booming throb
falls to earth.
Then with long saws the trees are cut into logs of the required
length, peeled, loaded upon wagons capable of carrying a weight of
eight or ten tons, hauled by a long string of oxen to the nearest
available stream or railroad, and floated or carried to the Sound.
There the logs are gathered into booms and towed by steamers to the
mills, where workmen with steel spikes in their boots leap lightly
with easy poise from one to another and by means of long pike poles
push them apart and, selecting such as are at the time required, push
them to the foot of a chute and drive dogs into the ends, when they
are speedily hauled in by the mill machinery alongside the saw
carriage and placed and fixed in position. Then with sounds of greedy
hissing and growling they are rushed back and forth like enormous
shuttles, and in an incredibly short time they are lumber and are
aboard the ships lying at the mill wharves.
Many of the long, slender boles so abundant in these woods are saved
for spars, and so excellent is their quality that they are in demand
in almost every shipyard of the world. Thus these trees, felled and
stripped of their leaves and branches, are raised again, transplanted
and set firmly erect, given roots of iron and a new foliage of
flapping canvas, and sent to sea. On they speed in glad, free motion,
cheerily waving over the blue, heaving water, responsive to the same
winds that rocked them when they stood at home in the woods. After
standing in one place all their lives they now, like sight-seeing
tourists, go round the world, meeting many a relative from the old
home forest, some like themselves, wandering free, clad in broad
canvas foliage, others planted head downward in mud, holding wharf
platforms aloft to receive the wares of all nations.
The mills of Puget sound and those of the redwood region of California
are said to be the largest and most effective lumber-makers in the
world. Tacoma alone claims to have eleven sawmills, and Seattle about
as many; while at many other points on the Sound, where the conditions
are particularly favorable, there are immense lumbering
establishments, as at Ports Blakely, Madison, Discovery, Gamble,
Ludlow, etc., with a capacity all together of over three million feet
a day. Nevertheless, the observer coming up the Sound sees not nor
hears anything of this fierce storm of steel that is devouring the
forests, save perhaps the shriek of some whistle or the columns of
smoke that mark the position of the mills. All else seems as serene
and unscathed as the silent watching mountains.
XIX
People and Towns of Puget Sound
As one strolls in the woods about the logging camps, most of the
lumbermen are found to be interesting people to meet, kind and
obliging and sincere, full of knowledge concerning the bark and
sapwood and heartwood of the trees they cut, and how to fell them
without unnecessary breakage, on ground where they may be most
advantageously sawed into logs and loaded for removal. The work is
hard, and all of the older men have a tired, somewhat haggard
appearance. Their faces are doubtful in color, neither sickly nor
quite healthy-looking, and seamed with deep wrinkles like the bark of
the spruces, but with no trace of anxiety. Their clothing is full of
rosin and never wears out. A little of everything in the woods is
stuck fast to these loggers, and their trousers grow constantly
thicker with age. In all their movements and gestures they are heavy
and deliberate like the trees above them, and they walk with a
swaying, rocking gait altogether free from quick, jerky fussiness, for
chopping and log rolling have quenched all that. They are also slow
of speech, as if partly out of breath, and when one tries to draw them
out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh, leafy, outreaching
branches of the mind seem to have been withered and killed with
fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dry lumber. Many a tree
have these old axemen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping, they
too are beginning to lean over. Many of their companions are already
beneath the moss, and among those that we see at work some are now
dead at the top (bald), leafless, so to speak, and tottering to their
fall.
A very different man, seen now and then at long intervals but usually
invisible, is the free roamer of the wilderness - hunter, prospector,
explorer, seeking he knows not what. Lithe and sinewy, he walks
erect, making his way with the skill of wild animals, all his senses
in action, watchful and alert, looking keenly at everything in sight,
his imagination well nourished in the wealth of the wilderness, coming
into contact with free nature in a thousand forms, drinking at the
fountains of things, responsive to wild influences, as trees to the
winds.
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