Logging history

[wvhorsedoc]

Just wondering how big the teams were when snaking these trees to a collection site

[Kevin Cunningham]

Well here is a picture from my area. It is in a museum in Fortuna, the closest town to our farm. I count seven teams of oxen. The log is smaller but I am sure there were more teams around. By the way I have seen mostly oxen in photos of logging the big’uns.

[Ethan Tapper]

There are a couple good books about logging history from the mast-pine days on up that talk about ridiculous hitches: Holy old mackinaw by Stewart Holbrook and Tall Trees Tough Men by Richard Pike are my favorites. They talk about hitches of up to 200 oxen for the old growth stuff, tree-length, even of stationing “spare” oxen all along the skid road to replace teams that got trampled. Might be the tradition of loggers embellishing the truth, but it sounded credible to me, if you can imagine that.

I’m not sure if those pictures up above are from the west coast, but by the time loggers got out there in earnest (late 1800s-1900) they had some other stuff going on, like steam donkeys (a steam powered winch that would pull a hitch along a cable running on pulleys hung high up in trees). It looks like that fourth picture could be something like that going on. If you guys like logging history and lore, check out those books. They are full of amazing little tidbits like that.

[Baystatetom]

I have a book called “Red Wood Classic” by Ralph Andrews. It has a ton of really cool pictures. Looks like anywhere from 5 to 7 teams pulling a couple of 8′ diameter logs at a time on corduroy roads. One pic even has 5 teams of horses in front of a teamof oxen on the same load. Never noticed that before.
I think a lot of times they split the big ones into smaller pieces before moving them long distances.
~Tom

[Carl Russell]

Here’s another from Calif. circa 1897

[Scott G]

Kind of interesting how all of the near horses are greys. Makes me wonder if the boss teamster had a preference for that.

[Ethan Tapper]

There is I book “Horses at Work” that talks about horse-use history in the U.S. and talks about Percherons (and English Breeds) being the preferred horse of most teamsters throughout American history (hence the greys, maybe).. .Though I know there were a lot of crosses too.

Looks like these teamsters are using the method of hooking multiple logs together on a steep downhill discussed in the “Logging Sustained Steep Ground” thread…I wonder how many logs they got on that hitch with that many teams…

[Baystatetom]

Only somebody who supervises logging would think this, but my first thought when I saw Carl’s pic was “O man imagine the erosion that skid trail caused”
~Tom

[Ed Thayer]

@Ethan Tapper 31728 wrote:

There are a couple good books about logging history from the mast-pine days on up that talk about ridiculous hitches: Holy old mackinaw by Stewart Holbrook and Tall Trees Tough Men by Richard Pike are my favorites. They talk about hitches of up to 200 oxen for the old growth stuff, tree-length, even of stationing “spare” oxen all along the skid road to replace teams that got trampled. Might be the tradition of loggers embellishing the truth, but it sounded credible to me, if you can imagine that.

I’m not sure if those pictures up above are from the west coast, but by the time loggers got out there in earnest (late 1800s-1900) they had some other stuff going on, like steam donkeys (a steam powered winch that would pull a hitch along a cable running on pulleys hung high up in trees). It looks like that fourth picture could be something like that going on. If you guys like logging history and lore, check out those books. They are full of amazing little tidbits like that.

I have read the “Tall Tree’s Tough Men”, by Richard Pike. Great book and some really good photos too.

[near horse]

Logs 8ft in diameter must have been a challenge all the way ’round. Imagine handling them at the mill (or wherever you process 8 ft diameter stuff). A wayward roll of a log can bust up your leg, normally. That thing would squash you flat into a wet spot on the trail. That must be the “Tough Men” part!

[Ethan Tapper]

Everything those guys did was tough. Back in the mast-pine days in New England they were felling 6-8 ft diameter pines with no saws. For the ones that weren’t going to be masts they had to hand hew them too. There’s a story of a man who decided to fashion a whole ship out of about 1 million board feet of these hand-hewn timbers and then sail it to England, where it would be disassembled and sold. He called the ship “The Experiment”, and as soon as he could find a crew crazy enough to sail it, off they went. They hit weather off the coast of Maine and the crew bailed right away, left “The Experiment” to crash on the rocks.

One of my favorite stories is out in the Doug Fir in the Northwest. The loggers would go and cut into the heart of these huge doug firs and so much pitch would pour out that they would have to leave it for a day before they could fell it. But they figured out that if they got high enough up the trunk, the pitch wouldn’t flow so much. So they would cut a shallow notch as high as they could, stick a sturdy board (called a spring board) in it. Then, apparently, they would jump on that board and bounce as high as they could and fell those trees one swing at a time. How’d you like to do that all day?

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