A Loggers Day in the Woods

(They were “real men,” they didn’t “eat quiche”!)

It wasn’t an easy life: up before dawn, dress in your heavy shirt, logger-pants with the rolled-up or frayed legs, so that they wouldn’t catch on a limb. Lace up your studded logger boots. Have a substantial breakfast, grab your lunch-pail, thermos, rain jacket, hat, a bottle of turpentine to clean the pitch off your “bucking” say, take some chewing tobacco or a small can of “Copenhagen” (known as “Scandinavian soul-food”), then ride in a “crummy” over rough, bumpy logging roads for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes or more to the logging site.

Once on site, all a logger had to do was dodge danger for the next eight or ten hours!

A special system of stature had evolved among loggers wherein the “high-climbers”, riggers and “timber-fallers” had the most prestigious standing and received a little extra respect. A “high-climber” was a fearless logger with great stamina who strapped climbing spikes to his boots, had a climbing belt holding him to a rope around the tree, then scampered up a tree selected for a spar-pole and limbed it as he climbed. At a height of about 100 to 120 ft., he topped the tree with his ax and short falling saw. He then rigged the tree with pulleys, cables, attached guy-wires, etc. for “high-lead” logging setup.

The “timber-fallers” were loggers skilled in balancing on the narrow 6”wide springboards while sawing a notch, then skillfully chopping out the underscore of a huge Douglas fir tree, one chopping left-handed and the other right-handed. They then re-adjusted their springboards to the back side of the tree where they sawed through the tree until it fell. To fell the tree where they wanted it and without breaking it across another downed tree, was an art learned only by experience.

After a tree was felled, the “bucker” took over to limb it and saw it into proper lengths. It was monotonous and strenuous work before chain-saws were invented. It has been said, in jest, that a “bucker” was nothing more than a former “faller” who has been hit on the head by a “widow-maker” (a falling limb) and had ended up talking to himself, .........and sometimes answering himself!

Some Logger’s Slang:

“Slush” - Coffee, also known as “Mud.”

“Cougar milk” - Prohibition-era “moonshine.”

“Crummy” - Whatever vehicle was used to transport workers to the woods.

“Swedish fiddle” - A bucking saw.

“Skyhook” and “Choker-stretcher” - Veteran loggers had fun with rookie loggers by sending them into camp for these non-existing tools.

“Whistle-Punk” - The worker sending signals between loggers in the woods and the distant “Donkey-puncher”.

There were many other examples.

Info and photo are from Hometown Sandy, Oregon by Phil Jonsrud, copyright by the Sandy Historical Society 2011, pp. 31-32.