The Douglas Fir

by DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

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WHEN the immortal frigate Constitution first put to sea in the year 1798, she carried as masts three lofty White Pines felled in Maine. Put when in 1925 these had to be removed, there was left no White Pine in all the eastern states tall enough to replace those glorious sticks. From the Northwest came, instead, three towering shafts of Douglas Fir, and these “Old Ironsides” bears in her decks today where she rides in honor at the dock of Boston Navy Yard.

Thus has White Pine fallen from first place among the timber trees of the continent; thus has Douglas Fir (which no American had ever seen or heard of when the keel of the Constitution was being laid) risen to the position of premier industrial tree of the world. For it was to this great western conifer that the lumber industry turned when, at the close of the last century, the end of virgin eastern White Pine was in sight. Luckily for them and us the noble species which took its fallen sister’s place is quite as versatile in fulfilling a hundred vital uses and manyfold as abundant.

And it is mightier in stature. Towering up to heights as great as 220 feet, with sometimes 100 feet of trunk clean of branches, arrow-straight, and with almost no taper below the crown discernible to the naked eye, an ancient Douglastree may be 17 feet in diameter. This tree is thus the tallest and most ponderous in North America, save only the two Sequoias. And except in their presence it is almost everywhere in its immense range the most majestic species, as it is commercially the most important.

One fourth of all the standing saw timber in the United States is Douglas Fir! In volume cut it surpasses any other one species. It occurs in every western state and in parts of Canada and Mexico. Its somber shape, its serrated crowns and sharp lance-point tips and long swaying boughs, become printed like a lasting eidolon on all our memories of the Pacific Northwest. And even deep in the desert states of the Southwest we meet it again, on high peaks, with gratitude for its dim, cool groves after the glare and heat of the rocky wastes below.

The veriest beginner will have no difficulty in distinguishing a Douglastree in the field by its cones, for between their soft, broad scales are thrust out ribbon-shaped bracts that look like three-forked tongues. With experience one comes to recognize Douglastree in the field from almost as far as it can be seen, by subtle points and traits. The dense, compact crowns, the lusterless, dark blue-green of the foliage (relieved only for a few weeks by bright new growth), the darkly, deeply furrowed old boles, the mastlike stems, and the grand downsweeping of the boughs, all go to make up the character of this species. But one feature there is which is peculiarly distinctive, and that is the way that numberless long slender twigs, clothed in a spiral of needles, hang vertically from the branches.

To see a growth of virgin Douglastree in all its venerable grandeur — for these trees may live 500 to 1000 years — perhaps the most impressive of easily accessible spots is on Grouse Mountain, which rises behind the fine seaport city of Vancouver in British Columbia. A highway takes you up in hawklike, soaring swoops, and from the excellent hostel at the road’s end a footpath leads you directly up into the undisturbed and solemn stand where Douglastrees of towering height mingle with Hemlocks and Cedars only a little less tall.

It is very dim and cool under the close canopy; seldom does a sunbeam reach to the forest floor, where the mosses seem not to have been trodden since the Ice Age. And everywhere you look the great shafts of the Fir close up the aisles with their dark, deeply furrowed bark. From time to time the mountain wind goes seething through the high canopy above you, as if the whole forest were breathing as one ancient organism. And, if you are still, you will hear a spirit voice. It seems to begin far away at the auditory horizon and to bound toward you — a “bump . . . bump . . . bumpadump” — as if some creature were knocking on the great Fir trunks. This is the call of the blue grouse, for which the mountain is named, and as each bird utters it the next one takes up the proclamation. So the sound approaches, passes right by you — for the nearest bird is probably right over your head in some grand Fir, close to the trunk — and goes bounding into the distance. Somehow the stentorian bird seems the very voice of this profound and aboriginal wilderness; and its cry, once heard, will be linked forever with your memory of Douglastrees.

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ONCE, presumably, the entire Northwest was more or less covered with wilderness like this. It marched right down to the shores in the days of 1792 when Archibald Menzies, a naturalist of the famous Vancouver expedition that explored the Puget Sound region, saw, first of European scientists, the “impenetrable stretches of Pinery,” among them the Douglastree that then bore no name. Menzies, who was also the first to collect specimens of the Coast Redwood and so many other great western trees, brought back herbarium specimens of the Douglastree, and on their basis Lambert, the leading English authority on conifers, published the new species — as a sort of Pine!

Then, when David Douglas reached the mouth of the Columbia in 1825, he saw from the deck of the ship “a species which may prove to be P. taxijolia” — the tree that was to be named for him and carry that name, in a hundred useful products, to the ends of the earth. Proceeding inland, Douglas began to measure some of the gigantic trunks of the tree he knew as Pinus taxifolia. The largest specimen he could find was 227 feet tall and 48 feet in circumference. He wished to collect seeds, but found trouble in procuring them from such lofty trees; his buckshot would not reach the cones so high overhead and his hatchet could not cut down such lusty giants. When he finally procured seeds, he set out on a race for the coast, knowing that the ship Dryad was soon to sail. Only a day was left him to pack his collections of a year, which included 125 pounds of seeds, but he got his cargo aboard in time, and from those seeds grew the first European trees of this forest monarch. Soon Douglas’s life would be cut short by a cruel death on the Hawaiian Islands, where he fell into a trap pit set for wild animals and was trampled to death by a bullock.

Douglas’s host, Dr. John McLoughlin, the celebrated Hudson’s Bay Company agent, in 1828 erected the first sawmill on our northwest coast and began the cutting of Fir. But it was not until the lumbering of eastern White Pine had laid waste the virgin growth of that species that the great days of northwest logging really began, toward the close of the last century. Some firms came as a unit, bringing their lumberjacks with them; one old Maine firm transported its mills in sections around the Horn. Many bought up great blocks of forest from the railroads which had received them from the government as grants to compensate them for building transcontinental lines into country almost uninhabited. Other companies bought up large tracts from homesteaders, and in Oregon there was even a thriving business done by one government clerk in making false homestead entries which then went to lumber companies for a song; eventually he and some much bigger fish went to prison.

Indeed, lumbering in the Northwest in the early days was often a two-fisted business, in which one would say that neither the lumber barons (who came to be known as tyees) nor the lumberjacks had learned a thing from the wastage, the fires, the boom-and-bust days, and stump counties of eastern history. Nothing, that is, except greatly increased efficiency at whirlwind exploitation. But that was in a cruder age, in the days when labor troubles went to the shooting stage, when pirates on Puget Sound stole whole rafts of timber and secretly sawed up the logs after obliterating the brands (each legitimate company had its own, like cattle ranchers), when fires burned over forests the size of many a European principality, when the Forest Service was jeered at and obstructed, when saloon bars in the coast towns were a mile long and brothels were big as hotels. Those days are gone. Progressive companies now hire their own trained foresters and follow practical conservation. Well-located lumber towns have become permanent cities, with fine schools, churches, hospitals, parks. Employees are usually married, own their homes, eat the best of food, sleep in clean beds. Fire is fought like the Devil.

The geographical setting of the Douglas Fir industry shows why the Northwest was destined to become the lumber capital of the world. For that region is the tidewater country around Puget Sound, Georgia and Juan de Fuca Straits, and the lower Columbia and its big tributary the Willamette, occupying an extensive area in British Columbia, Vancouver Island, Washington State, and Oregon. The coming of transcontinental railroads and the Panama Canal made it possible to sell Fir to the eastern United States and even Europe.

More important still has been the lay of the land, much of it being level or nearly so, thus making transport from timber to mill inexpensive. The intricacies of Puget Sound, and the waters between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, have made possible the movement of great log rafts, some of which have gone to sea as far as San Diego. The great harbors permit oceangoing vessels to dock right at the mill yards. The small harbors have proved ideal for the location of a host of small mills (and at one time for sheltering the log pirates).

But most important of all has been the climate, with rainfall up to 100 inches a year and over, and a mild winter, permitting a long growing season. In very wet mild climates all trees grow swiftly and very densely, grow tall and mighty in bole, and tend to live long. But the inherent greatness of the Douglastree made it king in the northwest tidewater. Add to this one lucky fact: this king in size is also, by the physical properties of its wood, a timber tree of the very highest grade, with potentialities for multiple use in our complex civilization undreamed of by the first tyees who saw it.

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FROM the beginning, the task of getting those giants out of the big woods has called upon all the skills, courage, and inventive genius gained by the fallers and buckers in a hundred years of experience with eastern Pine. Undercut notches as much as 5 feet deep are first chopped by these living Paul Banyans. Then on the opposite side of the tree the long falling saws are started on Herculean work, with steel wedges driven in to keep the tons and tons of living wood from settling on the saws, until at last only a thin pivot between the undercut and the saw supports the fatally swaying monarch.

“ ‘imber! Timber!’ the fallers loudly warn everyone of danger,” writes Frank F. Lamb, a veteran of northwest logging, in Sagas of the Evergreens, “and with a few final blows on wedges they withdraw their tools and place themselves on each side of the severed stump. With increasing velocity the top describes an are, the trunk hinging on the uncut wood of the undercut and saw cut. Faster and faster, with mounting crescendo of sound through nearly five hundred feet of an arc, the top sweeps to the ground, shattering the smaller trees in its way and finding its resting place with a thud, roar and rush of wind that shakes the earth for hundreds of feet and sets all the other trees to swaying as though an earthquake had shaken the forest.”

The next task is to get the big sticks out of the woods and here ingenuity and invention have made their greatest progress. First came the old skid roads, with logs laid on the ground to act as rollers, stretching from deep timber to the nearest splash dam or logging railhead, or even to the mill, with long strings of oxen dragging the giant sticks till the rollers smoked with the heat of friction and the air was blue with the oaths of the bullwhackers. But the arrival of the donkey engine to drag the logs by a steel cable wound on a great drum so speeded up the delivery of timber that it came too fast for the mills.

Then the mills grew so vast that a speed-up (workmen call it high-balling) in log delivery was called for. This was met by the “high-lead,” where logs shot along on cables slung high over the tops of the forest. This operation demanded a great spar on which to rig the pulleys and cables, and brought into existence the high-rigger, the most spectacular kind of logger ever known, a steeplejack of the big sticks who at some point 100 to 200 feet up the trunk saws off the top of a giant tree that is to act as a spar. Then a block weighing up to 1½ tons is fixed near the top of the spar; through this will puss the cable. Rigging slingers then hook the steel chokers to the logs to be dragged to the foot of the spar tree. Chasers hook them to the main line; the flagman waves to the whistle punk who blows signals for starting, stopping, and backingup by the donkey punchers at the engine’s levers — and off sails a giant on its giddy course.

Today the donkey engine has grown into a giant powered by diesel, steam, or electricity. In its grip logs weighing 50 tons are moved like jackstraws; ropes of braided steel fly at a thousand feet a minute through the forest; in eight hours a single crew has been known to handle 10 million pounds of Fir.

The need of cutting areas where the merchantable timber is scattered has summoned from the farm and battlefield the track-laying tractor which tows the great logs from stump to dam or truck. Yet this 150-horsepower slave is under the control of one man, the cat-skinner, who can take his monster up steep grades, through deep mud, and among big rocks, pushing down trees 6 to 8 inches thick which obstruct his path, till he finds his way to the spot where the fallers are bringing down the giants.

Arrived at the mill, the logs are dumped by crane into a storage pond, then pulled by an endless chain to the head saw, a band of thin steel running over two large pulleys at the rate of 25 miles per hour. The approaching log is handled by a nigger which flips it over from one face to another to receive the shearing cut of the saw. Then the big cuts or cants of lumber have next to be cut into the desired precise dimensions. So they are raced over rollers and run onto a platform where they are slid sideways past a battery of circular saws. These can be raised or lowered by a man in a cage who plays upon a bank of keys like a skilled pianist. Finally the lumber, cut and dressed to order, green or seasoned, marked for grades by experts, is lifted by an automotive spider that runs out over the wood, straddles the piles with its wheeled legs, raises the lumber under its throbbing body, and bears it off like a predatory creature, to drop it right into waiting railroad car, or storage pile, or on a wharf or in the hold of a ship.

Out of this complex called a modern sawmill still come Fir timbers measuring up to 24 by 24 inches wide and thick and 100 feet long. And dimension timbers remain today of outsize importance in the Fir business, just as they were when the Mormons, tradition says, cut trunks of huge Fir in the mountains and brought them down to Salt Lake City to arch over the roof of their great fane, the Tabernacle. Enormous Fir timbers and masses of solid wood are more than ever called for in structural beams and trusses for big buildings, docks, trestles, bridges, and spans, and for planks in the floors and ceilings of factories. Also, in the construction of reinforced concrete buildings there is a demand for wooden forms into which to pour the concrete. For this purpose Douglas Fir’s superiority is recognized at home and in distant lands.

Taking the place of eastern White Pine, Douglas Fir is now a favorite with carpenters and architects for sills and posts, beams, floor and ceiling joists, roof rafters, floor boards, and studding, since the wood does not warp or pull its nails. Kiln-dried Fir makes a beautifully figured, easily finished interior woodwork, both in vertical and flat grain.

Thousands and thousands of miles of railroad track in the West are laid on Douglas Fir ties which can be cut from second-growth trees, since large dimensions are not needed. Beside the tracks march telegraph and telephone poles of whole Douglastrees. Fir makes, too, a hot firewood, inflammable even when green; the mills commonly sell off their slabs and waste for this purpose in the Northwest. The bark, once considered a total loss, is now ground up and variously treated to serve as a soil conditioner, an absorbent filler in plaster acoustical products, a substitute for the expensive and sometimes unobtainable natural cork, as soles for shoes, in radio recording for electrical transcriptions, and in patented inventions which have already passed 500 in number.

The most revolutionary thing that has happened in the field of structural wood is the rise of the plywood industry. The extremely thin wood is cut from the log by a rotary veneer knife which unrolls from the log a continuous sheet of wood, as one unrolls paper toweling. This is the veneer, which is then sliced by guillotine knives into the sizes desired. When the veneer is to be used structurally, is in the case of Douglas Fir, it is built up in layers (commonly 3-ply), each layer or ply lying with its grain at right angles to the pieces above and below. This gives a resistance to splitting such that nails and screws can be put in the very edge of plywood without any possibility that they can tear loose under strain, or that the wood will split.

Of course a bonding agent is required to unite the plies. This glue is even stronger than the wood, and new glues with special properties are appearing on the market. Glue and ply together form a structural system that can be extended to any length, bent into any shape. As a result, synthetic structural timbers are now made of ply which even so titanic a tree as Douglas Fir could never produce in the forest. Great hangars and arches for enormous warehouses and halls are made of glue and wood almost as thin as paper which yet surpass steel in strength, lightness, and cheapness. Plywood has proved ideal, too, for the Navy’s lifeboats, saving a ton of steel on each boat, and permitting it to float 7 inches higher out of water than its steel counterpart. Plywood also goes into coastal patrol and torpedo boats, into PT and assault and landing boats.

In the field of prefabricated housing, which has revolutionized the building business, plywood is the magic name, and Douglas Fir is in the lead for a dozen reasons. One of the least important of them economically, but esthetically pleasing, is the beauty of the grain; this is not destroyed by the veneer knives or lost in the bonding, but stands out, as vivid and handsome as that of Yellow Pine, in plywood paneling in your room.

Can even the great stands of a Douglas Fir withstand the demands made by the greatest of all lumber industries? It is said that in some thirty years one half of all the virgin Fir in Washington and Oregon has been lumbered, and in the neighborhood of railroads and highways it is all gone. Lands cut over by wasteful methods in early days have too often reverted for delinquent taxes to the counties— but as desolate stump lands from which even the hardiest lumberjack or tyee averts his eyes. True that plywood may eventually take away some of the drain upon virgin timber, since trees of great dimensions are not needed for it, but that will happen when the profitable virgin growth is still scarcer, and will merely mean that second growth will be cut as fast as, or even before, it wholly matures.

On the bright side — and it is brighter than for almost any other important tree now being cut— there is the tremendous regenerative power of Douglastrees. They are fertile; they are vigorous; they are very fast-growing. These inherent qualities are favored by the abundant rainfall and the mild climate. We can count even now upon 4.7 billion board feet a year of renewed growth on cutovers in this country, if they are well managed. The lumbermen promise themselves an eventual increment of 7.4 billion feet annually. That will still be short, of the present cut and loss, however, and there is no reason to think the present cut will not increase as our population and industrial civilization increase. But losses to fire could be reduced, and the most progressive lumber companies are now carefully managing their cutover lands and planting where planting is needed. They believe that they are already started on a cycle of balanced cut and regrowth which will keep them in business on their own present acreage forever.