The bunkhouse logger
green paint salesman who visited the camps made a
bundle. These clustered buildings on a beach shore, or in the forest,
or built on log floats, were always nearby to the cookhouse. Here in
this high spot of any camp were the long tables, long benches, and brief
stopping place of the logger. The law of the cookhouse was to eat quick,
eat quiet, and get back to the bunkhouse.
....Food was generally good, but on occasion
some gut robber calling himself a cook, would take over and the result
was always trouble. The trouble did not last long, for the boys in camp
had a way of dealing with poor cooks.
....As the decades of the twenties, thirties
and forties rolled by, the bunkhouse logger, when not out oin the woods,
sat on his bunk, played cribbage, thought of far-away towns, went to
bed early— got up early — bragged, listened and dozed. He
was not in the army — he could quit when he wanted to —
but he otherwise led a barrack’s life.
....He was generally cut off from the normal
life of his city or town cousin such as the bright lights, the variety
of places to go and the privacy of a home or even a hotel room. The
normalcy of parties, girl friends, or maybe a wife were cut off for
him and as a result the bunkhouse logger found life to be lonely.
....The odd few men could thrive on it,
but to the majority no matter how much better became the style of bunkhouses
or the better the facilities offered him, the life was lonely. His lifestyle
was deeply affected. Many became bitter because of being cut-off. Many
became self conscious
....In
the forest around us in British Columbia there are machines and people,
working at the jobs of bringing the trees of that forest to market. By
far the most interesting are the people. And amongst those people have
been and still exist a very special type of person — seldom recognized
in the sense I will speak of — the bunkhouse logger.
....To a public that finds difficulty in
sometimes understanding so vast and interwoven an industry as the forest
industry, the word “logger” conjures up a host of various
images. He is thought of as a “tree-topper,” or a “river-driver”—
or a man of iron who tears the town apart on a Saturday night. He has
been glorified in the movies as a man who blows up the log-jam with a
single stick of dynamite and thereby wins the hand of the boss’s
beautiful daughter. Or a man of a family of rough-house bro-hers who fights
off the greedy mortgage holder to save the family’s back forty from
falling into the hands of the unsc-rupulous gang of eastern land grabbers.
....Well, if this is not a logger, then what
is? If the truth were known we might find in the history of this very
interesting industry that there have been “tree-toppers” known
as high-riggers — the men that climbed tall trees, cut off the limbs
and the top and thereby made a spar-tree for the early style of high-lead
logging.
....Or he may have been a “river-driver”—
a man who literally worked his way across a continent of trees, keeping
the floating logs from hanging up on the banks of some river and thus
getting them to their destination, the mill. Or he may have been a man
of steel that broke up the town on Saturday night after a few months in
the logging camp. But then I have known a few lawyers and bricklayers
who have tried the same thing over a bottle of demon rum.
....As for the log-jams and dynamite and
the family’s back forty being
safe-guarded — they make good movie stories and I don’t
think Hollywood ever claimed it had a priority on facts, just fiction.
A logger has been and still is a man engaged in the forest industry
for the purpose of bringing the trees to the market place, generally
a mill. He may be called a faller, a rigging man such as a chokerman,
a chaser or a hooktender. He may be a log truck driver or a boomman
or a grapple operator. All these are terms of the trade signifying a
job and they make up, along with a dozen or so other names, the men
of the logging industry. It is an industry that has seen vast changes
in the techniques of bringing the logs out of the woods and will no
doubt see many more in the years ahead. Balloon logging, helicopter
logging and partial processing at the site are all in their infancy
and will come as sure as the trees will grow another ring larger each
year.
....Yet while the techniques of logging
have changed, the logger must still go into the forest wherever that
forest may be. In the early days of this industry, the logging camp
was instituted to house the loggers. Because transpor-tation was poor
and populations were slim and the trees were everywhere. The logging
camp, small or large, became the center of logging life. In these logging
camps lie the philosophy and make-up of the logger. To understand the
logger is to understand his background. Logging camps of the twenties,
thirties and forties were not exactly what Mr. Hilton had in mind when
he created his places for people to live. They took on a variety of
forms, but most were a cluster of wooden buildings not too well protected
from the winds and the cold, containing single bunks and a wood heater.
Men lived in generally large groups and privacy was found in sleep —
if you could out snore the snores and snorts of your fellow logger.
Some buildings were painted dark green and the saying goes that the
dark