In the spring of 1902, a logging camp in northern California sent four men into the forest with three tools. They were paid five dollars a day each, and the forest they entered held coast redwoods averaging fourteen feet across at the base and 270 feet tall. The men had no engines, no machinery, and no mechanical assistance of any kind. With three tools, in three days, they cut down and hauled out a single tree weighing 400 tons.
Then they walked to the next tree and started again. Between 1875 and the start of the Second World War, every old-growth Douglas fir, coast redwood, and Sitka spruce that entered the American timber trade was cut and moved with some version of those three tools. They formed the entire toolkit of pre-industrial American logging, and they built the country. Nearly nobody outside the trade can name them today.
The chainsaw is a recent invention. The bulldozer is recent. The logging truck is recent. None of them existed during the era when the largest forests on the continent were taken down.
What existed instead was a system of three specialized tools, used by three different kinds of specialists, paid three different wages, that worked for fifty years and then vanished within a single generation. In 1900, the forests of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California contained trees no living American has ever seen the equal of. Coast redwoods topped out at 350 feet, Douglas firs at 300 feet, and Sitka spruce at similar heights. A single working old-growth coast redwood could weigh 400 tons.
To get one of those trees from where it stood to a mill, a crew had to do three separate things. They had to cut the tree down. They had to cut it above the swollen butt section, where the trunk became clean wood instead of root flare. And they had to move the log out of the forest, across ground that was often soft, swampy, or steep enough that no wagon could cross.
Each of those three problems required a separate tool, and the men who used each tool were specialists who did not do each other’s jobs. The first tool was a saw, but not any ordinary saw. It was a flat steel blade twelve to sixteen feet long with raker teeth and cutter teeth alternating along its length, with a wooden handle shaped like the letter D bolted to each end. The blade was thin enough to flex like a fishing rod when held horizontal, sharp enough to draw blood with the wrong touch, and it weighed about eleven pounds for a twelve-foot model.
The loggers called it the misery whip. The misery whip was a two-man saw, one man on each handle. They stood on opposite sides of the trunk and drew the blade back and forth between them. One man pulled, the teeth biting a small chip out of the wood on every stroke, and the other followed the pull, then pulled the saw back the other way.
Then again, for hours. A man pulling a crosscut saw at full pace burned the same calories per hour as a man rowing a competitive eight-oared boat, and the work continued for ten or twelve hours a day. A two-man crew with a sharp saw could cut through a six-foot Douglas fir in two to four hours. A four-man crew working in shifts on a fifteen-foot coast redwood needed two to three days.
The men who did this work were the highest-paid loggers in any Pacific Northwest camp. They were called fallers. A regular logger made two dollars a day in 1905. A faller made five or six.
Most of the misery whips used in American logging were made by a single company, Henry Disston and Sons of Philadelphia. Henry Disston had founded the saw works in 1840 as an immigrant from Tewkesbury, England, with eight dollars and a single anvil. By the 1890s, his factory was the largest saw manufacturer in the world. A good Disston could be re-sharpened a hundred times before it lost enough steel to retire, and the best ones were passed from a retiring faller to a young man entering the work, sometimes carrying the names of three or four previous owners scratched into the wooden handle.
The second tool solved a problem the saw could not solve on its own. The base of a coast redwood is not the cleanest place to cut the tree down. The bottom eight or ten feet of the trunk is swollen with root flare, riddled with irregularities the tree built up over centuries of growth, and that section of wood is useless for lumber because it is full of stress fractures and ingrown bark. So loggers did not cut the tree at the ground.
They cut it ten or twelve feet up, which meant they had to stand ten or twelve feet up. The tool that let them do this was called a springboard. A springboard was a flat plank about five feet long and six inches wide with an iron tip on one end shaped like a wedge. A faller would chop a horizontal slot into the trunk with his axe about eight feet off the ground, drive the iron tip into the slot, and the board would stick out from the trunk at right angles, supported by the wedge of iron biting into the wood.
The faller would climb onto the board and stand on it, with a second board on the opposite side for his partner, so the two could saw across the trunk above the swollen base. Every photograph of a two-man crosscut crew taking down a giant redwood, the ones where the men stand on wooden planks six feet up the side of the trunk, shows a working springboard. The board flexed under the men’s weight. The iron tip could slip out of the slot.
The men were not roped to the tree. If they fell, they fell onto whatever was below them, usually rocks, fallen branches, or the saw they had just been using. The board had no safety features at all. The springboard had no single inventor.
It appeared in Pacific Northwest logging photographs by the mid-1880s, apparently a folk innovation spread from camp to camp by fallers who learned the trick in redwood country and carried it north into Douglas fir territory. By 1900, every working faller had two or three personal springboards in his toolkit, carefully selected, often with names carved into the side, and some men used the same boards for fifteen or twenty years. The third tool came out of Manistee, Michigan, in 1875. It was the most distinctive piece of equipment ever built for the logging trade, and it looked, on first sight, like something out of a fever dream.
It was a pair of wooden wheels ten feet tall joined by a long iron axle. The inventor was Silas Carpenter Overpack, born in 1843 in Ohio, the son of a wagon maker, who apprenticed in his father’s shop and learned the trade of wheelwrighting before he was twenty. He moved to Manistee in the early 1870s to take over a small wagon repair business in the middle of Michigan logging country. The problem he was hired to solve was that summer logging in Michigan was impossible.
The ground in the pine forests turned to soft sand or mud during warm months, and a loaded log wagon would sink to its axles within fifty feet. Ox teams that hauled logs in winter sat idle from April to November, and the mills sat idle waiting for the spring drive. Overpack worked on the problem for two years, and the solution he arrived at was that you should not put the log on the wagon at all. You should put the wagon on top of the log.
He built a single pair of wheels ten feet tall joined by an iron axle. You backed the wheels over a felled log so that the log lay directly beneath the axle, chained the log to the axle, and lifted one end clear of the ground. A horse team hitched to the front pulled the whole assembly forward. The lifted end of the log skidded along on the wheels.
The trailing end dragged in the dirt, but the lift was enough that the log did not bog down. Suddenly a horse team could move a log across summer ground that would have stranded an ox team in five minutes. Overpack patented the wheel in 1875 and sold them out of his Manistee shop for $275 a pair. The largest custom versions, built for the Pacific Northwest redwood country, stood fourteen feet tall and could carry logs up to 40,000 pounds.
By 1890, the Overpack wheel was working every major logging operation east of the Mississippi. By 1910, more than 10,000 pairs were in service in American forests. The wheels did not look right. Visitors to logging country in the 1880s and 1890s wrote letters home describing them as surreal, and the English novelist Rudyard Kipling, who toured American logging operations in 1889, called the Michigan wheel the strangest mechanical device he had ever seen in motion.
Silas Overpack ran his shop in Manistee until his death in 1928. He never raised the price above $275 in fifty-three years of production. His nephews kept the business running until 1935, when the bulldozer and the logging truck made the Overpack wheel obsolete almost overnight. The shop was torn down in 1940, and a handful of original wheels survive in museums in Michigan and California.
Each of these three tools came with a death. The misery whip itself was not a killer, but the trees it cut were. Falling tree accidents, the barber chairs, the widow makers, and the kickbacks killed somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 American loggers between 1900 and 1930. The springboard killed by falls, when the board slipped, the iron tip pulled free, or the trunk shifted under the weight of the cut.
The Michigan wheel killed by crushing. In the Manistee County, Michigan, coroner’s docket from 1893, cross-referenced against a Cobbs and Mitchell Lumber Company payroll book that survived until the company dissolved in 1942, there is the case of Hjalmar Engwall. He was 29 years old, born in Småland, Sweden, came to Michigan in 1888, and worked as a teamster on a Cobbs and Mitchell logging crew operating an Overpack wheel team in the summer pine cut. His pay was three dollars a day, high-end teamster wages because he was good with horses.
On June 19, 1893, Engwall was hauling a pine log of about three tons on a single pair of Overpack wheels behind a team of two horses through a section of cutover country east of Manistee. Halfway through the haul, the right wheel struck a buried stump that had been missed in the grading. The wheel lifted, the wheels twisted, and the chain holding the log to the axle slipped sideways. The log released, and the lifted end dropped to the ground.
The wheels, suddenly relieved of the log’s weight, accelerated forward as the horses pulled, and the right wheel passed over Engwall’s body before he could step clear. He was killed instantly. The cause of death listed in the coroner’s report was crushing chest trauma and severance of the spine. The company paid his last wages, eighteen dollars, to his older brother in Manistee, who arranged the burial in a small Lutheran cemetery on the outskirts of town.
The brother wrote a letter home to their mother in Småland, preserved at the Manistee County Historical Society. The handwriting is steady, and the letter does not name the wheel. Wheel deaths were common enough through the 1890s and early 1900s that some logging companies posted a foreman to walk alongside every wheel haul through cutover country. Other companies did not.
The records of wheel-related deaths in Michigan alone between 1875 and 1920 run into the several hundreds, with Wisconsin and Minnesota seeing similar numbers. The Pacific Northwest had fewer wheel deaths because the wheels there were larger and slower, but saw deaths and springboard deaths compensated for it. All three of these tools sit in museums now. The Disston misery whips hang on the walls of small-town logging museums in Forks, Washington, Scotia, California, and Manistee, Michigan.
The springboards lie alongside them, looking like ordinary planks of weathered wood until you notice the iron-shod tips. The Overpack wheels stand outside in the rain at half a dozen Michigan state parks, their wood gray and cracked, their iron axles rusted but intact. Most visitors walk past all three without recognizing what they are looking at. The misery whip looks like an old saw.
The springboard looks like a piece of scrap lumber. The Michigan wheel looks like a sculpture made by a confused artist. None of them look like tools that built a country. But for fifty years, between 1875 and the Second World War, those three objects were the entire reason America had lumber to build with.
Every wooden American structure built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stood on timber that was cut by a misery whip, sectioned with a faller standing on a springboard, and hauled out of the woods on a pair of Overpack wheels. The houses, the railroad ties, the mine timbers, the warehouses, the ship hulls, the wharves, the trestles, and the bridges all traced back to those three tools, and to the men who knew how to use them.
