In the winter of 1906, on a slope above the Wynoochee River in Grays Harbor County, Washington, a choker setter named August Brennan started his morning the way he had for three years. He pulled on his caulked boots, wrapped a canvas jacket against the coastal cold, and walked into a mountainside that no longer looked like a mountainside. It looked like a battlefield. The slope above him was sixty feet of near-vertical slash, broken branches, uprooted stumps, and torn earth.
From somewhere near the top, a steel cable as thick as a man’s wrist ran down through the debris and disappeared over the ridge back to the steam donkey waiting at the landing. At the top of that ridge, held by an iron block the size of a wagon wheel mounted two hundred feet above the ground on a stripped Douglas fir rigged with five tons of steel cable, was the machine that would move a three-hundred-foot log down this mountain today. The machine was a tree. A tree that had stopped growing three weeks earlier when a crew of riggers climbed to its crown with axes and cut off everything above the two-hundred-foot mark.
What they left behind was the most powerful lifting device in the Pacific Northwest, and it was about to kill August Brennan. The records of the Polson Logging Company and the Grays Harbor County Coroner’s ledgers from 1895 to 1915 tell this story in carbon-copy books that smell of mildew and linseed oil. The payroll books list men by first initial and last name, the date they started, the date they left, and the reason. Most entries say transferred.
Some say quit. A specific number say accident. The coroner’s ledgers pick up where the payroll books stop. Together they describe an engineering solution so improbable that it deserves to be heard the way it actually happened.
The problem began in the 1870s. The logging industry in the Pacific Northwest had stripped nearly everything it could reach from the water. The coastal strip, the forests close enough to tidewater or river that logs could be floated from stump to mill, was going thin. The timber that remained, the timber that would feed American cities for the next half-century, was back in the mountains, on slopes so steep a man could not walk them without grabbing branches, in valleys that had no roads and no rivers running in the right direction.
Timber that a bull team could not touch. The first loggers in Washington Territory did not haul logs through mountains. They walked to the nearest massive Douglas fir within a few hundred yards of Puget Sound, cut it down, and the log rolled into the water by gravity. The mill was right there.
When Henry Yesler built the first steam-powered sawmill on Puget Sound in 1852, he positioned it at the foot of a steep hillside above what would become Seattle. He built a road made of logs, smaller logs peeled smooth and laid crossways in the mud at regular intervals, running straight from the forest above down to his mill at the water. He greased those cross logs with pig lard, tallow, and soap suds, turning the surface into something close to ice. Then he sent teams of oxen, six pairs in a string, twelve animals, up that road to haul the cut timber down.
The drivers were called bull punchers, usually of Scottish descent, rangy and loud, carrying goad sticks they used with precision developed over years. Ahead of them ran grease monkeys, sometimes boys as young as thirteen or fourteen, carrying pails of lard to keep the skids wet. The term skid road entered the American language through those greased log highways, and when the industry moved on and loggers came into Seattle looking for work or drink, they settled at the bottom of Yesler’s old road. That is where the term skid row comes from.
But the bull team had a limit. It could work only on relatively flat ground, only within a mile or two of water, and only in forests already partly opened. In the real mountains, the Cascades, the Coast Range, the Olympic Peninsula, the animal team became useless. A three-hundred-foot Douglas fir bucked into sections and yarded even half a mile uphill would have required more animals than a logging company could afford to feed.
In August 1881, in Humboldt County, California, a man named John Dolbeer solved the first part of that problem. Dolbeer had come to the California timber country by way of the gold fields, arrived broke, and found steadier income in the sawmill business. By 1864 he was a partner in the Dolbeer and Carson Lumber Company in Eureka, cutting redwood in the coastal hills, trees that rivaled the Douglas firs of the Pacific Northwest and presented the same problem. They were enormous.
They were heavy. They were on slopes. And oxen were slow. What Dolbeer built in August 1881 was a single-cylinder steam engine mounted on log skids, connected to a horizontal spool he called a gypsy head.
He wrapped one hundred fifty feet of four-and-a-half-inch manila rope several times around that spool, attached the far end to a log, and fired the boiler. The gypsy head spun, the rope wrapped tighter, and a log that would have required twelve oxen and two hours of cursing moved in thirty seconds. The patent, number 256,553, was issued April 18, 1882. The machine was called the steam donkey, a name that came from loggers who said the machine was too puny to be rated in horsepower.
They gave it a smaller animal. They were wrong about the power. Within a decade the steam donkey spread from the California redwood country north through Oregon and into Washington Territory. By the early 1890s it had replaced the bull team across most of the Pacific Northwest.
In ground lead logging, the steam donkey sat at a landing, a cleared flat area at the edge of the cutting zone. A steel cable ran out from its drum across the ground and into the fallen timber. At the far end, men called choker setters moved through the slash and debris, wrapping shorter lengths of cable, chokers, around individual logs. Each choker was clipped to the main line, the signal was given, the drum turned, and the donkey pulled the entire turn of logs across the ground to the landing, dragging them over stumps, through mud, around bends in the cable line.
It worked, but it worked the way brute force always works. It worked until it did not. Dragging a three-hundred-foot Douglas fir across a steep mountain slope meant the mountain kept getting in the way. The log would snag on a stump, the cable would go taut, and one of two things would happen.
Either the log broke free suddenly, jumping sideways with enough force to snap a man’s legs, or the cable gave way. A steel cable under a hundred thousand pounds of tension, when it breaks, does not go slack. It goes backward at a speed a man cannot outrun. The ground itself was the enemy.
In 1904, a logger named Oscar Wirkola figured out how to use a tree to solve that problem. The idea was called high-lead logging, and it began with a single act of improbable audacity. A crew would select the largest, straightest Douglas fir they could find, a living tree still rooted, two hundred feet tall or taller. They would not cut it down.
They would climb it. The man who went up was called the high climber. He wore steel spurs strapped to his boots and a leather safety belt with a rope looped around the trunk above him as he went. He carried an axe and a handsaw.
Getting to the top of a two-hundred-foot Douglas fir took most of a morning. The climber went slowly, kicking his spurs into the bark, moving the rope up a few feet at a time, stopping every thirty or forty feet to cut off branches in his way. At the crown, he began topping the tree, cutting through the trunk twenty or thirty feet below the crown, leaving a clean post standing two hundred feet above the ground. When the top came free, the spar tree, relieved suddenly of thirty or forty feet of crown, would whip.
The two-hundred-foot trunk would sway as much as twenty feet in either direction before it settled. More than one high climber was thrown from his perch in that moment. Those who survived held onto the belt and rode the tree like a pendulum until it stopped moving. Once topped, the spar was rigged.
Iron workers climbed the bare trunk and mounted an iron block, a pulley the size of a wagon wheel, at the crown. The main yarding cable from the steam donkey ran up through that block and back down to the cutting zone a thousand feet out into the timber. A lighter cable called the haulback ran out to a pulley at the far end and back, so the rigging could be returned after each turn. The choker setters wrapped their cables around the logs.
The signal came. The donkey engine turned, and the logs lifted. Not all the way. The high lead raised the front end of the log off the ground while the back dragged, but even that partial lift meant the log came across stumps and debris instead of through them.
Ground lead had moved logs. High lead moved them the way a fishing line moves a catch, fast, through the air, swinging wide and coming in hard to the landing. A name pulled from a Grays Harbor County Coroner’s docket from August 1907 is cross-referenced in a Polson Logging Company employment ledger from the same year. The entry records a man named E.
Carlson, job given as choker setter. The coroner’s entry gives the cause of death as cable injury. Carlson was working in a high lead show, in the cutting zone on the slope below the spar tree, his job being to get close to the logs and wrap the choker cables around them so the donkey engine could yard them in. It was the most dangerous position in the most dangerous industry in the Pacific Northwest.
When a log moves on a cable coming fast, lifted at the front, the back end dragging and jumping over stumps, the men around it have to know exactly where it is going and have to be somewhere else. Most of the time the training held. Most of the time a choker setter learned in his first weeks to read the cable, to hear the sound of a log snagging, to know when to run and which direction. Most of the time.
The ledger says August 14th. The distance from the Polson camp to the nearest town with a physician was eleven miles of skid road, and it took the better part of a day to cover it. The physician’s note attached to the coroner’s entry is three lines long. It ends: Could not have survived.
What is difficult about counting the dead in Pacific Northwest logging between 1890 and 1920 is that counting required the cooperation of the companies, and the companies had no legal obligation to cooperate fully. The coroner’s records cover only cases that came to a coroner’s attention, which required the death to occur close enough to town that someone could be notified. Men who died in remote camps were sometimes buried in the woods and never recorded anywhere. What the partial record suggests is that logging was, by the first decade of the twentieth century, the single most dangerous occupation in the American West.
The high lead system made the work more deadly at the exact moment it made it more productive. The logs moved faster. The cables were under more tension. The choker setters were closer to more moving mass than they had ever been.
The actual number of men killed was certainly higher than anything in the written record. By the 1930s, the spar tree was beginning to lose ground to the steel tower yarder, a portable steel frame that could move from one cutting area to the next on its own tracks, doing everything the spar tree had done without requiring a crew to climb two hundred feet in the air. The high climbers did not disappear overnight. Some worked into the 1950s because the steel towers could not reach certain slopes the way a well-positioned spar tree could, and because there were still old-growth Douglas firs out there that made better spars than anything a steel mill could fabricate.
But the era was ending. The last major spar tree operations on the Olympic Peninsula and the Coast Range were winding down by the time the Korean War ended. What finished the job was roads. Logging companies began building all-weather roads into the high country, blasting them through granite, grading them with diesel bulldozers.
A truck could drive to the log. The log could be loaded with a steel crane, a real crane, a machine made for the job, and driven to the mill in an afternoon. The fundamental problem that Dolbeer and Wirkola had spent their careers solving simply went away. The spar tree had been a response to impossibility, and once the impossibility was removed, the spar tree became a memory.
In the old high lead shows in the Hoh River Valley on the Olympic Peninsula and the hill country above the Chehalis River, the landscape still carries the shape of what happened there. The old growth stumps stand eight and ten feet across, their tops fifteen feet off the ground where the springboard notches were cut. Sometimes the spar tree itself remains, a single massive trunk, bare of bark, standing alone in a second growth forest grown up around it since the cutting stopped. The top is gone, cut off by the high climber a century ago, and a rusted bolt or two near the crown marks where the rigging was attached.
It looks like nothing now. A dead tree in a young forest. What it was was a two-hundred-foot crane built from a living Douglas fir, rigged by men who had spent years learning to climb at heights that should have been impossible, to move logs that weighed as much as a locomotive down mountains that had no roads.
It moved millions of board feet of timber out of the Pacific Northwest mountains for thirty years, and the men who ran the cables and set the chokers and read the tension in a steel line by sound and feel are the reason the cities they never lived in got built.
