On September 3rd, 1890, the Kings River Lumber Company finished a wooden flume that ran fifty-four miles from the mill town of Milwood, high in California’s Sierra Nevada, down to the railroad at Sanger. It crossed the Kings River on a suspension bridge 451 feet long, and the job cost more than $300,000. But four weeks after it opened, Congress created a national park next door to protect giant sequoias like the ones the company had come to cut. San Francisco, 1888.
Two businessmen named Hyram Smith and Austin Moore, who already ran sawmills in California and Washington, had spent most of the decade buying timberland on the south side of the Kings River Canyon in the mountains east of Fresno. Smith was the lumberman of the pair; Moore was the majority owner, a man with mines and ranches and a mansion in the city. By 1888, they held more than 30,000 acres of old sugar pine and giant sequoia, and they had spent over $100,000 getting it. How they got it explains the scale of everything that followed.
A federal law from 1878 called the Timber and Stone Act let any one person buy up to 160 acres of government timberland for $2. 50 an acre, as long as that person had looked the land over personally. Congress meant it for settlers. What happened in the Sierra, according to the company histories, is that stagecoach loads of men were driven up into the mountains to walk a claim, hurried back to the federal land office to file on it, and then paid somewhere between $100 and $600 to sign the deed over.
Do that close to two hundred times, and you have a private forest. The historian William Tweed, who has written a book on the sequoias, says plainly that there was fraud in it, and that it led to logging on a far bigger scale than the government ever intended. So Smith and Moore had the trees, and no way yet to sell a single board of them. The timber stood more than 4,000 feet above the valley floor.
The nearest railroad was the Southern Pacific line down in the San Joaquin Valley, where a new town called Sanger had gotten its depot in 1887 and its post office in 1888. Between the trees and the tracks lay the canyon of the Kings River, steep and rocky on both sides. A wagon road could carry people and supplies, and one eventually did, with a stagecoach that needed twelve hours to cover forty-seven miles. But lumber is a different kind of cargo.
A board foot, the unit the whole industry counts in, is a piece of wood one foot square and one inch thick. The partners would have to move something like twenty million of them a year to pay for their mills. Mule teams were never going to do that. The first idea was a railroad from Sanger up to the timber.
The canyon ended that plan because the grades were too steep and the walls too broken for track at any price the partners could afford. Smith’s answer was a flume. A lumber flume is a long wooden trough shaped like the letter V, set on a steady downhill slope and kept full of running water. You put sawn lumber in at the top, and gravity and the current carry it to the bottom.
Lumbermen in Nevada and California had already built flumes a few miles long. The V shape matters more than it looks. In a flat-bottomed trough, a board can wedge sideways and stop everything behind it, while in a V, the water rises behind a stuck piece, lifts it, and floats it free. Nobody in the Sierra had built one on anything like this scale: fifty-four miles long, with a drop of about 4,200 feet from one end to the other.
That drop is close to four-fifths of a mile, spread over a distance that takes about an hour to drive on a modern highway, and the trough had to hold a downhill grade the entire way, around every bend of a canyon, because water will not climb to get past a mistake. Sanger wanted the business badly. The town offered the company sixty-five acres beside the Southern Pacific tracks, and the partners built a planing mill there along with a factory that turned out boxes, doors, and window sash. So the bottom end was settled before the top end existed, and everything in between still had to be built by hand.
Milwood, late July of 1889. Construction started at the top. Before any trough could be laid, the flume needed a dependable supply of water, so Smith’s crews dammed Mill Flat Creek and made a reservoir they named Sequoia Lake about a mile above the mill site. Two sawmills went up.
The upper one sat above the winter snow line, and the lower one on Abbott Creek sat below it, which let the company keep a saw running when the high country was buried. Those mills cut the lumber for the flume itself before they ever cut a board for sale. According to a detailed history of the flume that Robert Zimmerman published in 1998 in the magazine Invention and Technology, the construction crew was made up mostly of Chinese immigrants. No roster or account survives of how many men there were or what they were paid.
The trough was built of clear, not free, redwood, which in that country meant sequoia, carried on trestles of pine and cedar. At the top, the V stood close to a yard high. Near the bottom, where the flume carried more water, it grew to about four feet. The trestles were built in sections ahead of time, then raised into place and tied together.
By the end of 1889, the crews had finished a little over eleven miles and reached the Kings River Canyon. That first stretch followed Mill Flat Creek down from Milwood, and it was the easy part. For roughly nineteen miles after that, the flume hung on the south wall of the canyon. There was no natural shelf to build on, so the trestles were anchored to the canyon wall itself, and Zimmerman’s history puts the trough anywhere from fifty to 125 feet above the river.
Other accounts give other heights, and one figure in circulation is more than twice that. A 125-foot trestle is a timber frame about as tall as a twelve-story building, raised without a crane, carrying a trough that has to slope at an even rate with no dips and no humps. Every upright frame of a trestle, which builders call a bent, had to be cut to its own height to keep that slope true. Then the flume ran out of south wall at Maxon’s Ranch near Trimmer Springs.
The route had to cross to the north bank, and the crews hung the trough from a suspension bridge of wood and steel that measured 451 feet from tower to tower. That is a football field and a half of open air, with a stream of lumber running through the middle of it. From there, the last twenty-four miles followed the river out of the foothills and across the flat country to Sanger. Add up the pieces: eleven miles down the creek, nineteen along the canyon wall, and twenty-four onto town.
The work was finished on September 3rd, 1890, about thirteen months after it started. The flume is sometimes listed at sixty-two miles, which likely reflects a later extension, because the detailed accounts agree on fifty-four for what opened that day. The bill came to more than $300,000, and that does not count the land. That works out to roughly $5,500 for every mile of trough, at a time when a man in the woods earned $1.
50 to $2. 50 a day. The flume also consumed a forest of its own. The estimate, usually repeated, is about nine million board feet of lumber for the trough and trestles, close to half of what the mills would ship in a good year.
Smith is quoted afterward as saying, “I never want to build another flume. ”
Four weeks to the day after the flume was finished, on October 1st, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the law that created General Grant National Park, a small reserve around the Grant Grove of sequoias right beside the company’s land. Sequoia National Park had been created six days earlier, on September 25th. So the country started protecting these trees and started hauling them to market inside the same four weeks, a few miles apart.
Neither side planned it that way. The partners now had their road to market, but a fifty-four-mile trough of moving water does not run itself. Sanger, the fall of 1890. Here is how a board got from the mountain to the valley.
At the mill, logs were sawn into rough planks and left to dry. The planks were then stacked into bundles about a foot square and anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight feet long, held together with clamps. Three to six bundles were tied end to end into what the men called a train. The trains went into the water one after another, and farther down the line, workers linked them into strings as long as a thousand feet.
Those workers were the flume herders. They were stationed at points along the route, and their job was to keep the lumber moving and catch a jam before it grew. A jam was the real threat to the structure. If one train hung up, the lumber behind it stacked against it, the water backed up and spilled over the sides, and the whole line stopped until somebody cleared it by hand.
The herders reported damage by telephone, which was still a new machine in 1890. Four feeder flumes joined the main line along the way to keep the trough full. A train that left the mill took about fifteen hours to reach Sanger. That is under four miles an hour on average, a walking pace.
The average hides a great deal, though. On the flat ground near the valley, the lumber drifted; in the steep pitches of the canyon it flew, and later accounts claim fifty miles an hour or more in the worst places, though no one actually measured it. On paper, the flume could deliver 250,000 board feet a day. In practice, it usually carried about 140,000.
And people rode it. The herders sometimes had to inspect the line by boat in a narrow box built to fit the trough, and the Sanger Depot Museum’s notes call that extremely dangerous. Company officials and newspaper reporters took the ride as well. In 1897, a writer for the Visalia Times described slipping into the water and then, in his words, going a mile every three or four minutes—fifteen to twenty miles an hour in an open box on a trestle.
One account tells of two men thrown clear of their boat while their luggage floated onto Sanger without them. A trip down took six to eight hours, and at least one rider called it one of the great pleasures in the world. Up top, Milwood turned into a real town during the logging season, which ran from April to November. More than 2,000 people lived there at its peak.
It had two hotels, a store, a post office, a blacksmith, a butcher, a summer school, bunkhouses for the crews, and a common cookhouse. A meal at the hotel cost two bits, twenty-five cents, and a bed cost the same. So the flume worked. By every physical measure, it did what Smith had promised.
But the account books told a different story, and that story is what pushed the company toward the big trees. In its first four months of operation, the company sent nearly twelve million board feet down the flume, much of it lumber that had piled up at the mills while the trough was being built. In 1891, the first full year, it shipped almost twenty million. That was a large output for a Sierra mill, and it still did not cover what the partners owed on the mills, the flume, and the land.
The payroll alone ran more than $20,000 a month for over 500 men, and the operation shut down every winter when snow closed the woods and the flume needed repair. So there were months of cost with nothing to sell. Smith and Moore did what companies in that spot usually do: spend more in order to cut more. In 1891, they bought a locomotive, a thirty-six-ton narrow-gauge Shay built by the Lima Locomotive Works and named Sequoia, and laid two miles of track from the lower mill to reach timber farther out.
A Shay is a geared engine made for steep, rough track, and this one was shipped to Sanger, taken apart, hauled up the mountain in pieces, and put back together. By the 1893 season, the line was seven miles long. The pine close to Milwood was thinning out by then. To the northeast, across a ridge, lay a bowl of land called Converse Basin, and in it stood what was then one of the largest groves of giant sequoias on Earth, spread over more than 4,600 acres.
Smith believed those trees could save the company, and what he did about it is the reason anyone remembers this flume today. Smith’s reasoning was simple arithmetic. He figured that a single giant sequoia held enough wood to build several dozen five-room houses, and the basin held thousands of them. As early as 1891, a company official had said the firm needed more volume to justify what it had sunk into the mills, the railroad, and the flume, and that the railroad would be moved to where the really big trees were.
The world outside California had trouble believing these trees existed, and that turned into a small business of its own before the main logging began. In 1891, in the cutover ground near Milwood that is now called Big Stump, a sequoia known as the Mark Twain tree was felled so that slices of it could go to museums. Collis Huntington, the president of the Southern Pacific, paid for it, and sections went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the British Museum in London. The tree was sixteen feet across and, by its rings, 1,341 years old.
Two lumbermen named Bill Mills and S. D. Fipps, with helpers named Barney and John Lukey, worked for thirteen days to bring it down. A year later came a bigger one.
For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a giant sequoia was wanted for the rotunda of the United States government building, and the Kings River Lumber Company supplied a Converse Basin tree named the General Noble, after John Noble, the Secretary of the Interior. It measured about ninety-five feet around at the ground, and some people at the time believed it was the biggest tree in the world. The crew cut it in 1892 and divided the display portion of the trunk into forty-six sections, some of them weighing more than four tons. Wagons pulled by teams of sixteen mules hauled the pieces out of the mountains, and eleven railroad cars carried them east.
The whole job, from cutting to setting up, cost a little under $10,500. At the fair, the reassembled trunk stood in the rotunda, and a good number of visitors decided it had to be a fake. They called it the California hoax. Afterward, part of it stood for more than forty years in Washington at the Department of Agriculture as a kind of treehouse, until it deteriorated and was removed.
The stump is still in Converse Basin, about twenty feet tall, and everyone calls it the Chicago Stump. So by 1893, the company knew how to drop a sequoia and move it in pieces. But cutting a whole grove for lumber needed a mill inside the basin, a way to lift the lumber back out, and a great deal of money. And 1893 was the year the money stopped.
The Panic of 1893 was a nationwide depression, with banks failing and construction slowing across the country, and the market for lumber fell with it. Smith and Moore could not pay their bills. In the summer of 1894, they reorganized, took on loans, traded stock to their creditors for the debts, and renamed the business the Sanger Lumber Company. By 1896, Moore had sold his San Francisco mansion and retired.
Smith stayed on, and the creditors let him push into the basin. Converse Basin, 1897. The basin sat on the far side of a ridge from the railroad and the flume, so finished lumber had to travel uphill before it could start down. The company’s fix was an incline hoist.
A cable pulled loaded railroad cars up out of the basin to the 6,700-foot summit of what is still called Hoist Ridge. At the top, the cable was moved to the other end of the train, and the cars were let down the far side to the railroad, which took them to Milwood and the head of the flume. With the creditors’ permission, a crew of about 100 men worked through a winter on the hoist and the incline to get them ready. The new mill started sawing on June 30th, 1897, with a crew of about 400 using machinery moved over from the Milwood and Abbott Creek mills.
Its main saw was a band saw, a continuous loop of toothed steel running over two large wheels. This loop measured about ninety feet around, and it was described as the longest band saw in the world. Now the felling. A giant sequoia flares out wide at the base, so the fallers built a platform up the trunk above the flare, as much as twenty-five feet off the ground by one account.
Standing on that platform, they chopped a deep notch into one side with double-bitted axes. That notch is the undercut, and it decides which way the tree will go. On the big trees, it took a two-man crew several days and ended up tall enough for the men to stand inside. Then they moved to the opposite side with a long crosscut saw and worked toward the notch, driving steel wedges into the cut behind the blade so the weight of the tree would not pinch the saw shut.
The trouble started when the tree landed. Sequoia wood is light and slow to rot, which made it attractive, and it is also brittle. A trunk that size coming down from that height tends to break across the grain when it hits. To prevent it, the crews cleared a landing strip and padded it with branches, which they called a felling bed, and when possible, they dropped the trees in winter into deep snow.
A great many trunks shattered anyway. Then there was the matter of size. A log more than about eight feet across was too big for the log chutes, for the steam winches called donkey engines, and for the flatcars. So the crews cut the trunk into sections, bored holes in them with hand augers, packed the holes with black powder, and blew the sections apart.
That produced pieces the equipment could move, and it destroyed a large share of the good wood. Here is what all of that added up to. Zimmerman’s history says only about twenty percent of the wood in the felled sequoias ever reached the mill. The Sanger Depot Museum gives twenty-three percent.
William Tweed cites estimates from the 1930s that half or more was still lying on the ground. For every sequoia log that went through the saw, at least one more, and possibly four, stayed behind in the basin. And the wood that did come down the flume was mostly not building houses, because it split easily and did not last in the ground. Much of it ended up as grape stakes and fence posts for the farms of the San Joaquin Valley.
Many of the trees it came from were more than 2,000 years old. By November of 1899, the mill had cut nineteen million board feet that season. Over roughly a decade, the count usually given is about 8,000 giant sequoias felled in Converse Basin. Somewhere between sixty and 100 large ones were left standing.
The men who did this worked eleven hours a day, six days a week, from April to November, for $1. 50 to $2. 50 a day with room and board taken out. California had no workers’ compensation law until 1913, so a man hurt in the woods before then was largely on his own.
No account of the men killed building the flume and logging the basin survives in any trusted source. The one death that can be cited by name came in October of 1914 under later owners, when a night watchman named Orlando Carter fell through an opening in a machine room. Falling timber, black powder, saws, and cables under strain were ordinary working conditions here, so it would be strange if his was the only one. The money never came either.
Smith had bet that the big trees would rescue him, and by 1897, the same year the Basin Mill opened, he was bankrupt. The chief creditor, the Canadian Bank of Commerce, took over and ran the company for about eight years, with a general manager named Frank Bool. The bank kept cutting for the reason creditors usually do, since mills, a railroad, a hoist, and a flume are worth very little standing idle. The sequoias did not save the company.
But the flume was still there, still the only practical way down the canyon. And in 1905, two investors from Michigan decided they could make it pay. Their names were Thomas Hume and Ira Bennett. They bought the Sanger Lumber Company’s property in 1905, including a little over 22,000 acres in the Converse Basin country, about three-quarters of it already logged.
That same year, a fire destroyed the Basin Mill. It was rebuilt and ran two more years, and then the new owners turned away from the sequoias toward the ordinary pine higher up the mountain at a place called Long Meadow. That meant a new mill, a new mill pond, and more flume. For the pond, they hired an engineer named John Eastwood, who had a design nobody had built yet.
A typical dam of that era was a solid mass that held water back by sheer weight. Eastwood proposed a row of thin concrete arches braced by buttresses, which did the same work with far less material. The dam he built at Hume Lake is 677 feet long and sixty-one feet high at its tallest point. It went up in 114 days, used 2,227 cubic yards of concrete, and cost around $35,000.
It was finished in late November of 1908, with Chinese American laborers hired for the work. It is recognized as the first multiple-arch dam ever built. The first fifty-four miles of flume cost more than $300,000; the dam that fed the extension cost a little more than a tenth of that. The flume was then extended seventeen miles up to the new mill, which made it the longest lumber flume ever built.
Sources give the full length as seventy-one or seventy-three miles, depending on who was counting, with a total drop of nearly a mile. Milwood emptied out. Its mill closed in 1909. The machinery went up to the new town of Hume, and none of Milwood’s buildings stand today.
In 1916, the company hired 1,500 men for the season and was running three locomotives, seventy railroad cars, and a dozen donkey engines. It still never reached steady profit. In 1917, a fire destroyed the mill at Hume, and operations ended for good in 1924. Two years after that, in 1926, a forest fire burned six or seven miles of flume in the most remote part of the canyon, and nobody rebuilt it.
On April 8th, 1935, George Hume, Thomas Hume’s son, sold what remained—about 20,000 acres and the dam—to the United States Forest Service. The public had sold that mountainside for $2. 50 an acre, and nearly half a century later it bought the stumps back. Converse Basin today is part of Giant Sequoia National Monument, set aside in 2000 and closed to commercial logging.
A half-mile loop trail leads to the Chicago Stump. Stump Meadow is what it sounds like: open ground scattered with sequoia stumps, where young trees have been slow to come back. In 1915, a writer named Henry C. Canby described the place as a vast and lonely cemetery.
Over in Kings Canyon National Park, which absorbed the old General Grant Park in 1940, the stump of the Mark Twain tree sits by the Big Stump Picnic Area. One giant is still standing in the basin. The Boole tree is about 269 feet tall and 113 feet around at the base, the sixth largest giant sequoia known by volume and the largest on any national forest. It carries the name of Frank Bool, the bank’s general manager, who was in charge while the grove came down around it.
The usual story is that Bool ordered it spared. The sources say only that he is thought to have done so; the order has never been found in writing. The name was in use by 1902. Years afterward, George Hume wrote of the sequoias, “I agree myself that these magnificent trees should be preserved.
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The flume itself is gone. The only place left to see it is a scale model at the Sanger Depot Museum. Hume Lake is still there behind Eastwood’s arches, with campgrounds around it. Two men assembled a forest 160 acres at a time, and then a mostly unnamed crew hung a river on the wall of a canyon to get that forest to a railroad.
As engineering, it did exactly what it was designed to do for about thirty-five years. As a business, it failed under every owner it had, and it took a grove that had been growing for 2,000 years down with it. Those four weeks in the fall of 1890, when the water first ran to Sanger and the first sequoia parks were signed into law a few miles away, keep coming back.
The parks are still there, and so is one tree named for the man who managed the cutting.
