Logging is a very old business. Throughout eastern North America, most
rural, farming households engaged their strong men and draft animals in
logging every winter. Typically, men kept mental inventories of saleable
trees while hunting. The great obstacle to taking many specimens, though,
was a tree’s location. A big, straight white oak, say, towering over a deep
creek or beside a road would be ideal—that is, easy to strip and float or
drag to market. Trees in boggy swamps, in steep ravines, or in other diffi-
cult and distant spots were problematic, and they would not be harvested
for a very long time. A good stripped log might be chained to a harnessed
ox, horse, or mule and dragged out of the forest, but only a fool would risk
an animal essential to farming, much less himself, to log in the most dan-
gerous places.
After the war this changed, as timber entrepreneurs applied technology
that could subdue any forest, no matter how wet or high and rugged. Most
important was the light, portable Shays steam railroad engine. Men laid
down track atop mats in wetlands and used dynamite to blast rail beds
along mountain ridges. Then locomotives pulled up with flat-bed cars wait-
ing for the logs to come. In swamps, piedmonts, and mountains alike, the
new timber men also employed long cables (as much as a thousand yards),
strung out from giant spools with winches atop rail cars, to grapple dis-
tant logs and haul them to the railroad for loading. In very steep places,
they built portable water transport for logs: wooden flumes filled with fast-
moving water diverted from a spring or creek. Frederick Weyerhaeuser,
among a few others, built a lucrative empire using such technology, com-
bined with aggressive purchase or leasing of woodlands. These entrepre-
neurs began in the upper Midwest, cutting off the tops, as it were, of Michi-
gan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and shipping millions of board feet down
to Chicago, then west onto the virtually treeless high plains, where farms,
towns, and cities were under construction everywhere new transcontinen-
tal railway lines were built.
By about the s, the upper Great Lakes states were bald, yet the grow-
ing nation, especially the West, demanded more lumber, more telegraph
and telephone poles, and more railroad ties. Now Weyerhaeuser and other
midwestern operators turned to the South, where lumber production in
was a mere . billion board feet. This had been accomplished the old-
fashioned way, without railroads or steam-powered tools, by such men as
Anderson ‘‘Devil Anse’’ Hatfield of Logan County, West Virginia, soon to be
a world-famous feudist. Patriarch of a clan who farmed little, Hatfield and
crews of male relations devoted winters to the labor-intensive task of get-