Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 3

By Mark O. Watkins
(Retired 1955)

It was in June of 1912 that I had my first contact with the U.S. Forest Service. I was eighteen years old at the time. A friend of the same age, Jack Smith, joined me in a trip into the forest where timber damaged in the 1910 fire was being harvested before it became bug infested. We thought that work might be obtained at one of the logging camps so we left Spokane and went up into Idaho, at Squaw Bay (now Bay View). We crossed Lake Pend 'Oreille by steamer to Lakeview and then walked about twenty miles into the camps which were located along the Little North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River.

South out of Lakeview up Gold Creek the road was fair for the first six miles to the Webber Mine, then we crossed the summit to the Independence Creek drainage and followed a tote road that was used by the logging camps for hauling in supplies. This road was full of stumps cut off just so the wagon axles would clear. It followed down Independence Creek and forded the creek a dozen times or more before reaching the junction with the Little North Fork. We had to wade through the fords which were two or three feet deep in some places. It took us a day and a half to walk from Lakeview to the Little North Fork where we found the logging camps strung along the river at intervals of a mile or two apart. The first camp we hit was run by "Slick Jack" Cox and his brother. We hit them up for work and were hired, Jack Smith as a chute greaser and I as bull cook.

Most of the timber being harvested was located up on the mountains along the south side of the river and back in the side draws. The easiest and most economical way to get the logs down to the river was by building chutes down the mountainside in which to slide the logs by letting gravity do the work. These chutes were made by mounting two logs side by side on cross timbers and the proper slope was maintained by building cribbing under the low places; the inner side of the chute logs were hewed into a "V" shape with a broadaxe. To prevent the logs from jumping out of the chute on the curves the outer side of curves were built up two or three logs high. It was necessary to grease the sides of the chute, especially on the curves, to keep friction from slowing down the logs' speed, also the chute would last longer if it was greased. Jack Smith had to walk along the chute carrying a bucket of grease, which he applied to the sides of the chute with a wooden paddle. The job was not difficult but the greaser had to keep alert as the logs traveled at high speed and would sometimes jump the chute on the curves.

The title of "bull cook" was misleading, for the job consisted of being sort of a handy man around camp. As I recall, my duties were to keep plenty of firewood in the cookhouse and the bunkhouses, keep the bunkhouses and the stable clean, carry water from the river, and take the lunch by packhorse up the mountain to the woods crew. There was a gentle old packhorse and a sawbuck pack saddle with a wooden case on each side. These cases would hold three five-gallon kerosene cans on each side. The cook would have a hot lunch packed in the kerosene cans each day at about 10:30 and I would pack the lunch up to the woods crew and build a fire to keep it warm until noon, then load up the dirty dishes and return to camp after lunch.

Lumberjacks were a rough crew. They would spend most of the year in the woods doing hard work, some would work on the drive down the river in the spring, then they would go on a big spree until their money was gone and in a few weeks would be back in camp to repeat the cycle. Working conditions were different then. They worked a ten-hour day and traveled to and from work on their own time. The sawyers worked in two-man teams and kept their own tools sharp; they used 5-1/2 and 6-foot crosscut saws. The swampers were axemen and brushed out the trails on which the logs were dragged down to the chutes. As the ground was often quite steep the trails were made with curves in them so that several logs dogged together and pulled by a team of horses down the trail would not slide into the horses on the steep places. There were dog setters who would carry a heavy hammer and a bunch of dogs to fasten the logs together for skidding down the trails. The dogs were hooks with points about three or four inches long; two such hooks were fastened together by a short length of log chain. The dog-setter would drive one hook into the side of a log right near the end and the other hook into the next log. Several logs would be fastened together in this manner. The teamster driving a team of horses hitched to a skidding tong or maybe a length of logging chain would hook onto the downhill end and drag the logs to the chute. There were men with canthooks and peavies who would roll the logs onto the chute to begin their journey down to the river. At the river there were other men and teams to deck the logs in great piles along the edge of the river to await the drive down to Lake Coeur d'Alene the next spring when high water came. To help out in getting the decks of logs started downriver in the spring, the loggers had built a dam up Independence Creek to hold back a head of water; when the drive was ready to start this dam was blown out and the water released would get the drive under way.

The Forest Service had a scaler shack near the Cox Brothers camp. The Ranger for the District was Howard Drake with whom I became quite well acquainted in later years, and who lives only three blocks from my home in Coeur d'Alene at the present time.

Mr. Magee was living up the Little North Fork near the present location of Magee Ranger Station. Before the logging operations had started this was a remote and isolated area. This was probably the reason Magee was living there. The story about him was that he had come into this country to escape the law in Tennessee, where he had been mixed up in a feud and had killed a man. I do not know if this story is true or not.

Living conditions in the logging camps were rather primitive. Most of the buildings were constructed with log walls about four feet high and large wall tents mounted atop these walls. There was a combination cook and mess house and two bunkhouses built with tent tops. The office building and the stable were built entirely of logs with shake roofs. The stable was rather large for there were several skidding teams as well as a four-horse team for hauling supplies. There was a row of double-width and double-decked bunks along both sides of the bunkhouses. The bunks were made of small logs or poles flattened on the top side with a broadaxe and then covered with about six inches of straw, with side boards to keep the straw on the bunks. This was all the camp furnished in the way of a bed. Each man had to furnish his own bedding. There were long benches down the center between the bunks, also a table and a large drum stove at one end. Haywire had been strung from one side of the bunkhouse to the other above the stove as a place to hang clothing to dry. There were about twenty-five or thirty men in each bunkhouse and when those wires were filled with lumberjacks' sox and underwear the place needed ventilation.

A lumberjack will put up with most anything except poor food. In order to hold their crew the Cox Brothers furnished good food and plenty of it. The cook was an expert camp cook and not only set a good table of meat and vegetables but was a good baker as well. All the supplies came down Lake Pend 'Oreille from Sandpoint to Lakeview by steam and into camp over the tote road. This trip took three days and during the hot summer the meat was sometimes past its prime when it arrived at camp. This was the only drawback to the food situation and could not be helped.

The country along the river was beautiful and the fishing was the best I have ever seen. The fishing was so good that I have been told there were places along Independence Creek where the only way you could bait your hook was to get behind a tree so the fish could not see you or they would take the bait before you could get it on your hook. My friend Jack and I did not have much time to fish because of working ten or more hours each day and six days a week. Sunday was the time for washing clothes and bathing in the river as there was no bathhouse. Jack liked the life so well that he stayed on at camp and went down with the drive the next spring and followed this work for several years. I did not care to become a lumberjack so when it got too frosty in the fall, I headed for Spokane and home.

It was twenty-three years before I again came in contact with the Forest Service. During those years I had served in France during World War I, had worked at several different jobs, and had become a married man. In 1934 I saw a notice of a Civil Service examination for a storekeeper so applied and took the examination. I received an appointment on May 1, 1935, at the Forest Service Warehouse in Spokane.

In the fall of 1935 Howard Flint spent some time in Spokane conducting experiments in dropping supplies from airplanes, with the idea of supplying firefighters in this manner. This was the first attempt by the Forest Service to do any such thing. As part of my duties I helped pack the supplies that were being dropped in the experiment.

Most of the supplies were dropped by free fall without parachutes. We packed various kinds of canned goods by insulating each can with wood excelsior and then wrapping the whole package in several layers of kapok pads from condemned sleeping bags. This was then wrapped in manties and secured well with rope. Howard Flint would take these packs out to Felts Field where pilot Nick Mater would take him up to make the drops from various heights. The bundles would then be returned to the warehouse where we would unpack them and examine the contents for damage. It was surprising how well most of the canned goods would come through. Shovel and axe handles would often break. Crosscut saws were lashed to strips of plywood and would come through all right if they did not light on one end. We even packaged a Hammerlund Radio for dropping by making a heavy crate and suspending the radio in the center lashed to a kind of track in such a way that the radio could move only up and down the track and with this movement snubbed with rubber shock cord. In order to hold the crate upright we used a piece of burlap about six feet square attached to the top of the crate as a parachute. It also helped retard the speed of the drop. Water containers for drinking water were made rather like an aerial bomb of fairly heavy metal, and dropped. Some of the drops were quite successful and others were not. This experiment was a forerunner of the present practice of airlifting supplies to firefighters. As I recall, the free-fall method was not used much.

Shortly after the above experiments, in the next year or two, O.C. Bradeen of Procurement & Supply was able to get parachutes from the armed services that had been condemned as unfit for human use. Most of these parachutes were just overage and in perfect shape for our purpose. Thereafter rapid progress was made in dropping supplies from the air. As most of the drops were made in timbered country many of the parachutes were damaged by hanging up in trees and snags. Bradeen then developed a repair department at the Spokane Warehouse and as fast as parachutes were returned from fire drops they were repaired and repacked ready for use again.

After spending six years at the Spokane Warehouse I was transferred to Procurement & Supply in the Regional Office at Missoula. The next year I was sent to the Nezperce at Grangeville in the fiscal and accounting section. In 1949 I went to the Lewis & Clark at Great Falls, and in 1952 to the Coeur d'Alene where I retired in 1955.

Among the Forest Service personnel with whom my wife and I came in contact are many lasting friendships. Most of my work was enjoyable and memories of our years in the Forest Service are pleasant.

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