Western Washington’s forests were, and are still, dominated by Douglas firs. Commercially they are the most valuable. These massive trees could reach a height of 380 feet and a girth of sixteen feet. They were just one of a dozen giant conifers in the lush, ancient forests of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, western red cedar, and yews that might contain thousand-year-old trees. Thirteen species surpassed heights of two hundred feet. Cool summers, the dense canopy of the forest, and limited undergrowth created gardens of ferns and flowers. There was an abundance of wildlife—deer, Roosevelt elk, black bear, wolves, plus countless smaller creatures and dozens of species of birds. This ecosystem was sustained in part by the massive salmon runs. Salmon fed the animals, fertilized the land, and was the lifeblood of the indigenous peoples.
The people—Makah, Suquamish, Puyallup—coexisted with the forest. They did not live in it; it was too dense to encourage everyday travel. Instead they lived in permanent villages along the shore, often where rivers met the Sound or the sea. They carved cedar logs into canoes and totem poles. They split cedar for the planks of their longhouses. Women pounded cedar bark into rope, mats, baskets, and garments. These people led rich lives; there were few places where life was as easy, encouraging extensive arts and crafts, and allowing for ceremonies and celebrations. The rivers teemed with fish, and the tidelands were a cornucopia of sustenance. The people did, however, collect berries and herbs in the forests. They hunted there and sometimes sought solitude for reflection and prayer. There might be clearings, but it was limited. They were not farmers.
When the white settlers came there to farm, they encountered obstacles. Clearing, the first necessity, was a challenge. The great trees had to be felled, which was difficult enough and left behind massive stumps, nearly impossible to remove. The soil itself was thin; what there was was sandy, gravelly, and acidic. Cultivators made instead for the Willamette Valley in Oregon or sought out river bottoms, though these were relatively few, and the limited flatland in the region often lay beneath steep mountain slopes in narrow valleys always subject to seasonal flooding.
In the 1880s, the new railroads brought many thousands to the Washington Territory, but the majority were not seeking farms. Rather they sought work, finding it for better or worse in the burgeoning extractive industries. They became miners, fieldhands, and above all, loggers—the men who would strip first the shores of the Sound, then the river valleys, and finally the foothills of the great mountain ranges—the Cascades and the Olympics—of their ancient forests. The West was transformed by settlers: the farmers and the pre-proletariats. They were, however, just the hired hands of others, the eastern, often European financiers who orchestrated the invasion of telegraph lines and railroads, tools of choice in the scramble for the riches of the West. They tied this new economy to an expanding global market, thereby linking it also to crises, competition, and global booms and busts, and making it dependent on the government.
Timber was at the center of this economy, but it was years before the railroads became the prime shippers of timber. Rough timber first left on coastal schooners, often those leaving from Seattle’s deepwater, sheltered Elliott Bay. The railroads revolutionized transportation. They also cleared a path for speculators, land agents, bankers—men seeking wealth, by fair means or foul. They came from the banks and offices in New York, Boston, and St. Paul, and included the point men for the greatest “Interests” of the era: the railroad men, James J. Hill and Edward Harriman; the banker J. P. Morgan; the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller; and the lumber baron George Weyerhaeuser. In 1900, two out of three workers in Washington State toiled in its woods, in the lands of the Lumber Trust. The Trust, according to IWW organizer James Rowan, was “the ruling power, [which controls] not only the industry, but the local, and sometimes the State machinery of government, with its powerful and corrupt influences.” It was “industrial feudalism … in its worst form.”2
The Seattle settler Henry Yesler built the city’s first lumber mill in 1853. It was steam-powered and sat just above Elliott Bay, cementing Seattle’s relationship to its waterfront. But the transformation of a local, near subsistence economy based on milling into a massive industry was driven not by the early settlers. Rather, it was the work of that new class of men, the robber barons, individuals of great wealth, ambitious in extreme, and utterly ruthless when they needed to be. Rockefeller personally underwrote the industry that would transform these forests forever, turning this last frontier into an industrial colony. These men sensed their chances instantly, and each in his way rushed to seize the resources and the key positions of the industrial society being hastily assembled. They established themselves as “lords of ‘empires’ in iron, railroads and oil, to be held naturally for private gain, and once held, defended them to the last breath of financial life against all comers.”3
The party of Lincoln initiated the massive transfer of power to the new captains of industry in an emerging large-scale capitalism. By the 1850s timber was already an essential component in the development of large-scale industry. Timber too had its “conquistadores,” every bit as avaricious as California’s. By the end of the century, half a dozen men owned the Northwest’s forests. “Great central lumber companies like the Weyerhaeusers’,” wrote the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “moved to the Pacific Northwest, where they secured imperial forests.” Power in the West came with land, and Congress stage-managed the allotting of this land, the people’s land. It got rid of the land as fast as it could. In 1862, the Homestead Act made available millions of acres and signaled the distribution of the public domain, which was then held by the federal government, amounting to fully half the present area of the United States. The nation’s natural treasures were sacrificed to unparalleled exploitation, most notably by the railroads and the mining interests but also by the lumber barons. Timber was wanted in the mines, along the railroads, and in the new towns.
Congress sold the land, granted it, donated it, acquiesced to trespass, and then watched as it was stolen. The land was privatized on a massive scale. The wealthy were always favored, and the auctions invariably enriched the well-to-do. “Intrigue, fraud, bribery, corruption, legal chicanery, violence and murder were freely used by these ‘respectable’ and ‘patriotic’ gentlemen,’” wrote Rowan.4 The lumber barons looted the government land and Indian reservations of their timber.5 There were the settlers, of course, the farmers and ranchers who fueled the myth of the winning of the West. Some succeeded, many did not. The government would never develop a systematic way to evaluate claims under the Homestead Acts. The land offices relied on witnesses to show that a claimant had lived on the land for the required time and had made the required improvements. In practice, however, witnesses were often bribed, and collusion with land agents and speculators was virtually universal, with the pursuit of private gain prevailing. Mythology aside, speculation and monopolization were the norm, while the benefits mainly went to enriching the railroads.
In 1898, Congress set aside “Forest Reserves,” 150 million acres as National Forests, yet much of this too would fall into the hands of the lumbermen, the government selling to the highest bidders. It was estimated that Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies in the Pacific Northwest had acquired control of about four million acres of this prime timber. In 1914 the US Board of Corporations reported that “whereas three-quarters of the standing timber was publicly owned in 1870, now four-fifths were privately owned, primarily in the Pacific Northwest and California.” The government’s forest “guards,” that is, its Forest Service, would become the lumbermen’s handmaidens.
Anna Louise Strong became one of Seattle’s most powerful voices opposing the lumber barons and the financiers who stood behind them, calling them the “great titans, railway kings and lumber barons [who] seized the public’s wealth.”6 Strong was a mountaineer. She traveled from Seattle to the high glaciers of Mt. Rainier and was witness to the clearcuts, burned-over river valleys, and fishless streams that lay along the path. The IWW historian Walker Smith shared her concerns, writing, “The forest lands of the nation are being denuded,” and the result, he predicted, would be floods and droughts.7 “Where a logging company operates,” Smith wrote, the rule is that “it takes all the timber on the tract” then the brush and refuse is burned, leaving lunar landscapes and the horror of naturalists. Such destruction was not of concern, however, to