DEMAND FOR TIMBER

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4874, 23 July 1936, Page 3

DEMAND FOR TIMBER

Up and down the coast of British Columbia, past the Isles of the Blest, the lumberjacks are swarming into the woods, ten thousand of them, as a greater demand from the United Kingdom and the British • Empire presages a record output—fallers, buckers, chokers, hooktenders, donkeymen,, whistle punks and the highriggers, those tall, loose-limbed, nonchalant aristocrats of the forest (says a recent message from Vancouver).

Hard, wiry, lean fellows in- high boots and mackinaws, agile as cats, incredibly skilful, at home only within the sound of falling timber, and the pungent aroma of ceda, fir and hemlock, they are back in larger numbers than since 1929, the year of boom and burst. The world is calling for lumber, and more lumber. Before the season is out, the industry will have earned £ 15,000,000. Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Japan are the chief consumers of a product that is the most reliable barometer of economic conditions west of the Rockies.

Whereas the old-time lumberjack used to “blue” his cheque in oceans of strong drink, and veritably tear up the sidewalks of the cities, the modern logger has settled down, bought himself a house, a car, and a radio. Into such things this year’s wages, sharply increased, will go. They are in the woods earlier this year, before the spring is under way. Leading men are the fallers and buckers, advance guard of the logging army—squat fellows, their shoulders broadened and their arms lengthened from years spent over the saw —hutting down the big trees, sawing them into logs. . Further back, beside the spar trees and' the sky lines, the hook-tender and his choliermen are binding the logs with steel' lines, signalling the donkeymen to “give them the highball.” The logs stir, come to life, leap in the air, lurch along the sky line to the flat cars.

Log trains of 60 and 70 flat cars, half a mile from the locomotives to . the caboose, wind, snake-like, through the forest, to the "salthuck,” where they are bound into booms, to be hauled by panting, husky tugs to the mill on the way to the markets of the world.