people+place then

The trees were stupendous and intimidating — by far the biggest growing things even these seasoned loggers had ever seen. Harvesting their imperial bounty and bringing it to market would require new skill sets, prodigious planning and gobs of money.

They became meticulous assayers and mappers. Long-Bell had ample experience calculating board feet, yields and profit margins. But what they learned quickly in the new Northwest was the critical importance of topography — the lay of the land. Except it didn’t lay. It jumped and plunged and threw up devilish hazards at virtually every step of the logging process.

They took stock, surveyed and planned. Wesley Vandercook famously requested men and mules and two months and lit off into the woods, finally producing a topographic map, a full roomful in size, that remains a wonder of production in its own right. They reinvented their business.

They would use water in every conceivable way, to float, move and store timber. They would create a class of rolleo cowboys who bucked logs downstream and herded them in ponds. They built short railways into precipitous gorges — over 275 separate railroad operations built tracks and trestles and mini-lines of less than ten miles. And they refined the role of the logger, who would become an acrobat, a bull rider, and a pack horse all in one, in perhaps the world’s most dangerous profession.

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Then and Now from page 18