LABOR: Loggers’ End

The nervous rattle and whine that cut through the smoky air was sad music to Oregon lumberjacks. It meant that the long, clear cry of “Timberrrr!” would soon ring out no more in the stillness of the forest—it would be drowned by the din of a mechanical buzz saw. The old hell-roaring, ripsnorting days of Jigger Jones (the Maine woodsman who could kick the knots off a spruce log with his bare feet), of loggers who slept with their axes and gouged out each other’s eyes, would soon be gone forever. The Gargantuan legend of Paul Bunyan was more legendary than ever.

For years the machine has been slowly taming the hellion lumber industry. The bullwhacker gave way to the steam engine, the log drive to the railroad; then the steam engine gave way to the tractor, the railroad to the truck. But the trees still had to be cut down by hand. The faller (who chops and saws the tree), the bucker (who saws the timber into logs) were indispensable reminders of the lusty, whiskered logger of old. They may not be much longer. Like the black cotton pickers of the South,* they are on their way to limbo.

Three years ago, in Portland, squat, square-jawed Theodore Patrick Flynn, senior equipment engineer for the U.S. Forest Service, started working on a power-driven saw. Several logging-equipment companies in the Northwest began to manufacture the saws experimentally, but they caught on slowly with lumbermen.

The power saw has a steel blade five to seven feet long, with a deep groove in both edges. In the groove run the saw’s teeth, fastened together on an endless chain that whirls about the blade at a rate of 1,500 feet a minute. The power comes from a converted outboard motor or from a generator mounted on a tractor. It takes two lumberjacks to drive a power saw. They can learn how in a couple of hours.

On Tumble Creek, along the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon’s Willamette (rhymes with damn it) National Forest, Engineer Flynn’s power saws last week stood a conclusive test. Called in to fight a forest fire, the Forest Service took along two power saws, 90 fallers armed with axes and ordinary crosscut saws, pitted them against each other.

The power saws went to work like machine guns on the hot-topped snags (dead trees grown hard from standing) in the path of the fire, knocked them over like tenpins, one every eight minutes. (Average thickness: 44 in.) Regular fallers, working in crews of two, averaged one snag every two hours. After 14 hours of fire fighting, the score stood: 90 men with crosscut saws, 320 snags; six men with power saws, 220 snags.

One big advantage of the power saw is that it leaves no tall, unsightly stumps after logging. The lumberjacks, tough as they are, will not cut through the thick base of a Douglas fir when by notching the tree a few feet higher they can save a foot or two in diameter. But with the power saw (which weighs about 130 Ib.) it is easier to cut at the base than higher up. The lumber saved will amount to millions of board feet a year. The power saw not only brings the tree down, it also does the bucker’s work, slicing up timber like so much sausage. Only human timber cutters needed for mechanized logging are toppers (who knock the tops off the trees) and limbers (who slash the limbs away).

Said Engineer Flynn, when he saw how his saws worked last week: “The day of hand falling will be practically gone in two years.” Said a lumberjack who worked on the fire at Tumble Creek: “I’ve pulled a crosscut for the last time.”

— The Brothers Rust, John and Mack, who claim they have perfected their mechanical cotton picker to pick clean, are introducing it gradually, so as to soften its impact on labor in the South.