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Reviews
| A Logger's Lexicon: An Illustrated Reference of Logging Terms and Technology. By John T. Labbe and Lynwood Carranco. Hillsboro, Ore.: Timber Times, 2001. x+229 pp., illus., diags., map, bibl. $48.95 hb (ISBN 0-9650213-6-X).
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A Logger's Lexicon is perhaps a slight misnomer. Loggers probably do not need a dictionary since they presumably know their language and do not write that much in any event. Spelling does not seem too critical either, since many terms have alternate alliterations. This book actually falls somewhere between what we normally think of as a dictionary and an encyclopedia. Many of the entries are fairly lengthy and well illustrated. There are several other similar volumes out there, Walter F. McCulloch's Wood's Words (Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1958) and L. G. Sorder and Jacque Vallier's Lumberjack Lingo (Madison, Wisc.: North Word, 1986), to name two. A number of the definitions in the latter volume were used in A Logger's Lexicon by permission.
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The language of North American logging has changed through time, and regional variations exist. The proliferation of terms in logging is due more to the different technologies used to turn forests into boards, pulp, and other products than to regional cultural differences. The technological differences have a lot to do with the size of the trees. I grew up in Connecticut, next to a small sawmill that was touted as the oldest operating saw mill in North America until it was destroyed by the 1955 flood. Single trees in California are larger than that mill building and yield more board feet of lumber than that mill could produce in a year. Each new technology spawned its own set of terms and modified the meaning of existing words.
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A Logger's Lexicon is a more complete compilation than its predecessors if only because it includes words that previous publishers would not print. It is also better illustrated, with hundreds of photographs, drawings, and catalog cuts. Most of the definitions make sense by themselves, but many require that even the fairly knowledgeable reader look up some of the terms used in the entries. Words that are defined in the book are in bold print in the figure captions.
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One could learn a lot about the North American lumbering business by simply reading A Logger's Lexicon from cover to cover, but it would be painful and clearly not what the authors intended. I got to the H's before switching to looking only at the illustrations and looking up those words that I needed to understand the illustrations.
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The photographs are clear and in almost every case provide a wealth of information in addition to illustrating the word at point. While most of the photographs are from the first half of the 20th century, it would have been helpful if the authors had provided approximate dates for them. The authors are much better at providing location information and the source of the original photo or illustration.
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Logging includes all those activities and devices that convert a standing tree to logs and deliver them to a saw or pulp mill. For the purposes of this book, logging also includes infrastructure, such as logging camps and railroads. John T. Labbe and Lynwood Carranco, the authors, were born and raised on the West Coast, and their choice of terms is weighted toward the Pacific Northwest. The illustrations are also drawn from sources that deal mainly with West Coast logging. This has the unfortunate effect of slighting logging practice prior to 1900. It also means that the book concentrates on large-scale industrial practice and the harvesting of really big trees that get made into lumber rather than small trees that become pulp.
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Logging starts with the selection of trees to harvest, which is still done in much the same way as it was in the 19th century. One or more individuals actually walk the area being considered and estimate the amount of wood that can be harvested. This practice is generally called cruising. The cruiser generally marks the trees that are to be cut; modern foresters also mark the ones that are to be left standing. The next step is to devise a plan to collect the fallen trees at a place where they can be loaded on railroad cars or trucks to be transported to the mill. During the 19th century this generally meant dragging the logs with horses or oxen, although in some areas slides could be constructed where gravity would do most of the work. In the Eastern forests, tractors and eventually wheeled skidders replaced horses. In the West the size of the trees and sometimes the steepness of the terrain led to the development of cable skidding systems. In their simplest form these systems used a "donkey," which consisted of a pair of winches powered by a steam engine. The larger of the two winches pulled the log from where it was felled to the collecting point. The smaller winch would pull the hook and the larger line back out for the next log. In more elaborate systems an aerial tramway or skyline was constructed, and the logs were brought to the landing overhead. A substantial part of the book is devoted to the various types and component parts of these cable-based systems.
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Once the logs had been gathered for shipment to the mill, they had to be loaded onto wagons, rail cars, or trucks. In the early years, gravity was often used to load the wagons and occasionally train cars. This meant that the wagon had to be lower than the logs that were being loaded, but not much lower or the falling log would destroy the wagon. Gin poles and block-and-tackle were used to lift the logs onto the wagons and train cars where simple gravity could not be employed. The Barnhart loader introduced in the early-20th century was a crane-like machine that rode on rails mounted on the beds of log cars and could load logs that had been marshaled along the railroad tracks. Steam-powered log loaders were popular in areas where the logs were smaller. Large logs needed ground-mounted cranes to lift them onto the rail cars, and the largest logs were transported on a pair of independent rail trucks. The book contains photographs of all of the logging locomotives and truck-like log haulers that I know of.
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| While A Logger's Lexicon is hardly a good "read," it is packed with good information and a lot of great pictures that illustrate the ingenuity of the loggers in the period before 1950. It deserves a place in every would-be wood hick's library. |
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