Taming a Wild Forest 



waters are important to agriculture and 

 industry in Oregon. 



The management of the national 

 forest is planned to safeguard the water 

 yields, through maintenance of an ade- 

 quate forest cover. Protection from fire, 

 regulation of timber harvesting, and 

 control of grazing help to maintain and 

 improve watershed conditions. 



THE SELLING of timber to private 

 logging operators and sawmills started 

 early in the history of the Willamette 

 National Forest. The first sale was one 

 for 14 million board feet to J. B. Hills 

 of Oakridge, in 1905. Between 1905 

 and 1940 the timber business increased 

 at a comparatively modest rate. Recre- 

 ation and fire protection were still the 

 main items of business. The average cut 

 on the entire forest for the 35 years was 

 about 33 million board feet a year, and 

 was mostly on the accessible Oakridge- 

 Westfir area on the southern end of the 

 forest and on the Detroit-North San- 

 tiam area at the northern end of the 

 forest. The first timber sales on three of 

 the six ranger districts on the forest 

 were not made until after 1940. 



In the Willamette Valley logging has 

 changed from a primitive form to a 

 highly mechanized operation within 

 the span of a single generation. Early- 

 day bull teams gave way to steam don- 

 key logging; steam donkeys, in turn, 

 were supplanted by trucks and tractors. 

 Old-timers now high in lumbering cir- 

 cles, like Faye Abrams of Springfield 

 and H. J. Cox of Eugene, can remem- 

 ber when they logged with bull teams 

 and horse teams and how they later 

 switched to steam donkey, chutes, and 

 skid roads. 



Early logging in the Douglas-fir re- 

 gion was primitive. Bull teams, made 

 famous by the legends of Paul Bun- 

 yan's Blue Ox, were the primary log- 

 ging machines until nearly 1900. The 

 early 1900's saw the coming of power 

 logging the emergence of the steam 

 donkey as the principal logging ma- 

 chine. Several years later, high-lead 

 logging was developed. In high-lead 

 logging, a lumberjack had to cut off 



329 



the top of a tall tree, called a spar 

 tree. Logs were hauled to the landing 

 by a long cable rigged to the top of 

 the spar tree. By hauling in the cable, 

 the donkey engine dragged the largest 

 logs to a common pile, sometimes 

 called a "cold deck," from which point 

 the logs were skidded by another ma- 

 chine along a chute or a skid road to 

 be loaded on the railroad or dumped 

 into the river. River driving was com- 

 mon on the Willamette and McKenzie 

 Rivers in the early 1900's. 



The method was destructive to trees 

 left standing. Any standing tree in the 

 path of a load of logs on its way to the 

 landing would promptly be knocked 

 flat, for steam donkeys were powerful 

 engines. 



Despite the use of cheaper river 

 driving close to rivers, the logging rail- 

 road reached its peak as a logging tool 

 at about the same time as the steam 

 donkey. The first large timber sales 

 made on the Willamette were logged 

 with donkey and railroad, a method so 

 expensive that much of the timbered 

 country was considered inoperable be- 

 cause of the rugged topography. 



Because of its rough terrain and be- 

 cause a huge volume of privately 

 owned timber was readily accessible to 

 water transportation in the Puget 

 Sound, Grays Harbor, and Columbia 

 River territories, only a moderate 

 amount of cutting of Willamette Na- 

 tional Forest timber was made for 

 nearly 40 years after the first timber 

 sale was made. 



The boom in truck and tractor log- 

 ging in the late 1930's and the greater 

 demand for lumber as war approached 

 gave impetus to the spurt in timber 

 sales that started in 1940 when 56 

 million board feet were cut and in- 

 creased to 207 million in 1948. 



Another advance came in 1933, 

 when an analysis of the resources of 

 the Douglas-fir region by the Pacific 

 Northwest Forest and Range Experi- 

 ment Station was finished. From it 

 came more definite information about 

 what was actually on the ground an 

 inventory of timber types and depend- 



