The Forest Industries 79 



in. As the logs come floating down the stream, 

 men armed with long "cant hooks" guide each 

 into the compartment in which it belongs. The 

 booms are usually maintained by corporations 

 formed for that purpose, which charge a toll for 

 the services rendered by them. 



Booms are not the only structures used on the 

 logging rivers to facilitate the " driving." On all the 

 smaller logging streams the loss by logs stranding 

 on account of insufficient depth would be so great 

 as to make the business unprofitable if dams were 

 not erected at intervals to produce an artificial 

 head of water. When a sufficient number of logs 

 are collected above the dam, the gates are opened, 

 and down they rush, pell-mell, the artificial freshet 

 being sufficient to carry them far down the stream. 



When the logs reach the mill, they are confined 

 in a boom similar to those used for sorting, and 

 out of this they are drawn up to the saws by an 

 endless-chain arrangement. A modern sawmill is 

 a very ingenious piece of mechanism, in which one 

 of the most remarkable things is the extent to 

 which the expensive handling of the material by 

 men is avoided through the use of endless chains, 

 inclined planes, and other appliances of automatic 

 carriage. Now that most sawmills are no longer 

 located in the cities, far away from the forest, their 

 site is often on one of the lakes, large and small, 

 that dot the pine country of the old Northwest, 

 and these lakes do away with the necessity of a 

 boom. Often a small lake is completely covered 



