OTHER BRANCHES OF INDUSTRY. 307 
land in the state open to pre-emption, may be purchased. The 
lumbermen owning claims along the sloughs, drag their logs 
to the water and tumble them in. Those owning claims along 
the ravines, at the heads of the sloughs, have a wooden tram- 
way made by laying down long poles, about six inches in 
diameter and four feet apart. On this tramway runs a wagon 
with four wheels, each wheel of solid wood eight inches wide, 
and from two to three feet in diameter, made of a transverse 
section of a tree. On this wagon one or two logs are placed 
ata time, and two mules easily haul the load down hill to the 
slough, and then haul the empty wagon back again. The 
slope in these little ravines is very gradual, so there is no difti- 
culty cither in hauling the load down, or the wagon up. The 
thickness of the logs varies from sixteen inches (nothing 
smaller is sawn) to nine feet. The average thickness is four 
fect and a half; seven feet is a common thickness in redwood. 
Of pine and spruce logs the largest are five feet through ; the 
average thickness is three feet. The greater the thickness of 
a log, the shorter it is cut. The ordinary lengths of saw-logs 
are fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-four, and thirty- 
two feet. Redwood is rarely sawn more than twenty feet 
long; spruce and pine usually of that length or longer. A 
good lumberman will cut down a redwood tree three feet in 
diameter in an hour; a tree five feet in diameter in three 
hours and a half; a tree seven feet in diameter in six hours. 
Ordinarily two choppers work together, one on each side of 
the tree, and then, of course, they fell it in half the time that 
would be required for one man alone. They use the Ameri- 
can axe and American axe-handle; the handle being about a 
foot longer than is used in common chopping. After the tree 
is down, it is cut into saw-logs with a cross-cut saw, managed 
by one man. It has been found that one man can make a 
longer stroke than two, and the length of the stroke is a mat- 
ter of much importance to “clear the saw,” or throw out the 
saw-dust; so the handle at one end of the common cross-cut 
suw is knocked off, and it is then held like the ordinary hand- 
