566 Forestry Quarterly. 



license is obtained, the men build themselves a house, usually con- 

 structed of shakes or split clap-boards, and placed on a raft or 

 boom which can be towed from place to place. With this as 

 a center the operation begins, and day by day the boom grows, as 

 log is added to log and "swifter" to "swifter." The loggers most 

 often work in pairs, and theirs is a lonely life. Far removed from 

 all lines of communication, scores of miles from the nearest other 

 human habitation or post office, and hundreds of miles from the 

 nearest railroad, telegraph or telephone station, their isolation is 

 complete. Occasionally they may be visited by a launch belong- 

 ing to some prowling timberman or by a tug-boat in search of 

 logs, but outside of these rare visitors they are alone. 



The men who engage in this industry are usually the younger 

 and more ambitious "lumber jacks," tired of working in the log- 

 ging camps for a wage, and eager to strike out for themselves, — 

 to be their own "boss." Their chief ambition is to save up enough 

 money to purchase a steam "donkey" and go into "legitimate" 

 logging. Few of the men, however, reahze this ambition, for, 

 after the solitary life in the wilderness, often eight months at a 

 stretch, the saloon lights and the red lights of the city shine with 

 an irresistible brightness, and the earnings of the whole season 

 are spent in a few days. 



From an economic standpoint this system of logging is of con- 

 siderable importance. Like the small logging-contractor in the 

 East, the hand-logger, by dint of personal effort and personal at- 

 tention is able to deliver the logs at a minimum cost, and can thus 

 successfully compete with the larger camps employing hired men. 

 As has already been stated, they furnish a considerable per cent, 

 of the logs cut on the coast of British Columbia. 



From the timber owners' and the foresters' point of view the 

 hand-logger is an unmitigated nuisance. Like the shake-maker 

 in the California Sierras he selects the best and most accessible 

 trees in the forest, wastes enormous quantities of timber to get a 

 relatively small amount of merchantable logs, and by leaving 

 slash and debris on the ground greatly increases the danger from 

 forest fires. Hardly a "limit" in the immediate vicinity of the 

 coast but has been partly cut over by the hand-loggers, for they 

 do not always confine themselves strictly to the tract of Crown 

 timber specified in their Hcenses. Formerly, when timber was 

 considered practically of no value in this country the hand-logger 



