The volume of timber taken from these forests and the sheer destructiveness of the loggers’ onslaught is astonishing. Why this seemingly unquenchable appetite? One reason was that in a new nation bursting at its seams the forests of the East, from Maine through the Great Lakes, were exhausted. No sense of sustainability seems to have existed, no thought given to renewal. The timber barons, like locusts moving westward, left behind ruined lands and a legacy of waste and devastation by fire. In 1900, there were 80 million acres of charred and decimated stump lands east of the Mississippi and a long history of logging. In 1871, the Peshtigo Fire killed 1,500 people and burned 1.28 million acres in northeastern Wisconsin. Ten years later, the eastern Michigan “thumb” was burned in a fire claiming 160 lives. Then, in 1885, nearly all of the Wisconsin Valley was swept by fire.
Vast areas of the Great Lakes region—some 50 million acres stretching from Lake Huron in the east to the Red River in the west in Minnesota—had been laid bare through the clearcutting techniques of the highly mechanized and efficient lumber industry. Efficient perhaps, wasteful certainly. Saws that made wide kerfs (slits left by saws), the cutting of trees to leave high stumps, and felling for roads and tracks all took their toll. Only the best trees would be taken; the rest were left to rot or burn. Sometimes the burning was intentional, sometimes a result of hot, dry summers. Fire was the curse of the forests; fire that fed on the slash, the mass of debris that piled feet-deep on the forest floor after the timber was taken out. Flames probably consumed about as much timber every year as reached the mill.8 Summertime smoke could suffocate western Washington. “The smoke from these fires,” wrote an English tourist in 1883, “for weeks and for months troubles the air and obscures the landscape.”9
The exploitation of land and people followed the “Interests” west. They reproduced the East’s squalor in the pristine Puget Sound coves and inlets and in the literally hundreds of logging camps. These were built along the shore, in the low hills of the southwest of the state, and sometimes in the high valleys that sat beneath Washington’s great line of volcanos—St. Helens, Adams, Rainier, Glacier, and Baker. This volcanic arc separated western Washington from the hot, dry “short log” pineland of the East. Everywhere the mills became sites of heavy industry, belching smoke and fire, while the great saws screamed. Then, too, came instant slums, the shacks and bunkhouses of the workers. A study conducted during the First World War found that half the logging camps in the Northwest lacked adequate bunks or showers and a third were without toilet facilities. It was a “sad travesty,” reported Rexford Tugwell, the economist who would later join Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust” after a tour of the region.10
Two Maine lumbermen, William Talbot and Andrew Pope, came to San Francisco in the aftermath of the Gold Rush seeking fortune in the western woods, before migrating north to Washington where they built a mill at Port Ludlow on the Olympic Peninsula. Soon there were mills at Seabec, Madison, Blakely, and Port Gamble (with its imitation New England village). These were all on the Sound, accessible to the new West Coast lumber schooners, ships designed with shallow drafts to cross coastal bars and navigate the tiny ports where these mills were found. The first mill towns were temporary habitations; these outposts lasted only as long as the trees did.
Seattle too had its mills, including the shingle mills of Ballard. But this would change. As the result of the development of its harbor, trade with Asia, the Alaska Gold Rush, and the opening of the Panama Canal, Seattle’s economy diversified. The mill towns, however, remained fiefdoms. The Wobblies called them “company towns.” Rowan wrote, in a description that might seem more like that of a West Virginia coal mine camp, “The entire life of the community resolved around the saw mill. The workers in the saw mills live in company-owned houses or boarded at the company boarding house. They trade at the company store; when they are sick, they go to the company hospital or are treated by the company doctor. When they are dead, they are buried in the company cemetery, and their souls are saved by the company preacher.”11 The larger towns—Tacoma, Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Chehalis, and Centralia—offered more “freedom,” but it was freedom in a savage environment occupied by guards, vigilantes, and small-town gangsters. “Everett on Port Gardner Bay took pride in the designation ‘City of Smokestacks,’” wrote the Wobbly Walker Smith, and it was from these mill towns and forests that “the lumber industry dominated the whole life of the Northwest.”12 James Hill brought his railroad first to Everett, where he promised that he and John D. Rockefeller would make the town into the Boston of the Pacific Coast. However, the Cascades produced little gold, and in 1893 the Great Northern passed Everett by to terminate in Seattle.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser was born in Germany; he came to Rock Island, Illinois, where he found work in a sawmill. In 1857 he bought the mill, then began building a confederation of logging and milling operations in the Mississippi Valley. In 1872, he organized the Mississippi River Boom and Logging Company, handling all the logs milled on the Mississippi. He became the most powerful lumberman in the country even before he moved west. In 1891, Weyerhaeuser settled in St. Paul, Minnesota, next door to his future partner, James J. Hill. The two decided that their futures were in the Pacific Northwest. Weyerhaeuser founded the Sound Lumber Company in 1899. Then, in 1900, he negotiated one of the largest land transactions in American history: 900,000 acres of timber from the Northern Pacific Railroad’s land grants at six dollars an acre, “a price estimated then as about ten cents a thousand feet for the wood.”13 That was the beginning; Weyerhaeuser then organized the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and proceeded to build the new company’s first mill: Mill B in Everett. Then the largest in the world, it produced an amazing 70 million board feet in 1912.
The Weyerhaeuser Company was initially based in Tacoma, then in the suburb of Federal Way, now part of Seattle. The company is one of the largest owners of timberland in the world. It is an international conglomerate; its holdings include seven million acres of land in the United States, much of it in Washington where the “primeval” forests it once logged have been reduced to tree farms, the trees a “crop” on a thirty-year rotation. Weyerhaeuser manager George S. Long apparently coined the term “tree farm” in 1908 while proclaiming that “timber is a crop.”14 Weyerhaeuser also retains logging rights to 35 million acres of land in Canada. Now diversified, it leaves behind old mills and deforestation—in addition to deadly contaminants including heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), PCBs, phenols and dioxins.
From the start, booms and busts plagued the timber industry. The Northern Pacific’s arrival in Tacoma in 1893 did not deliver on its promises. The Midwestern markets were still too many miles away. Nevertheless, the railroads brought population growth, the development of new towns, and the expansion of cities. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and fire temporarily increased demand for timber, and 1912 to 1913 were “good” years but short-lived. The life span of the smallest timber firms was brief; few weathered the hard times. The larger companies grew at the expense of struggling rivals, and the result was an industry dominated by a handful of giant corporations, with Weyerhaeuser, “The Trust,” at the top of the heap.
THERE WERE TENS OF THOUSANDS of loggers and mill workers in the Pacific Northwest on the eve of war, the large majority working in the forests of western Washington. They worked ten-hour days, often more, in logging camps and mills. IWW writers insisted that in addition to working loggers “there were thousands of their fellow workers vainly seeking work,” successful only when “those employed happened to lose their jobs.” Hence unemployment plagued the industry, in good times and bad. Their overlords, the lumbermen, “were as ruthless and competitive” as any New York City garment manufacturer. They created their own sweatshops in dreary and brutal camps, isolated from the towns, that in any case offered little more than saloons and brothels. In the woods, labor was the chief production cost; competition pressed wages downward and working conditions with them.15
The timber industry initially relied on human muscle power, the ax, and the hand-held saw. There was, however, a slow and steady development of new