When the lumberman looks at these beautiful forests, he sees only many
logs containing many thousand feet of lumber, which he must get out
the easiest and cheapest way. He only chooses the finest and largest
trunks, and there is great waste in cutting these. The men begin
to saw the tree some eight or ten feet from the ground, and soon it
trembles and falls with a mighty crash, often snapping off other trees
in its way to the ground. After all the selected trees have fallen,
fires are started to burn off the branches and underbrush so that the
men can work easier. This fire only chars the outside bark of the big,
green logs, but it kills all the young saplings, and leaves the once
beautiful forest a waste of blackened logs and gray ashes. When the
fire burns itself out, the logs are usually sawed with a cross-cut saw
into sixteen-foot lengths, since in that form they are easy to handle.
Then oxen or horses haul them out; or sometimes a wire cable is
fastened to them by iron "dogs," or stakes, and a little stationary
engine pulls them away to the siding at the railroad track. Here they
are rolled on flat-cars, fastened with a big iron chain around the
four or six logs on the car, and taken on the logging train to the
mill-pond. They lie soaking in the water until drawn up to the keen
saws of the sawmill that cut and slice the wood like cheese. The bark
and outside is carved off as you would cut the crust off bread, and
then sharp, circular saws cut boards and planks till the log is used
up, and the log-carriage lifts another to its place. As the shining
steel bites into the wood the noise almost deafens you and the mill
shakes with the thunder of log-carriage and feeders. Useless ends,
slabs, and refuse are burnt in the sawdust pit, where the fires never
go out. Very much of the tree is wasted and all the limbs. The redwood
tree has so much life and strength, however, that it sends up bright
green sprouts around the burnt stump, and standing trees charred
outside to the tops will have new branches the next season. In the
older forests tall young trees are often seen growing in a ring round
an empty spot, the long-dead stump having rotted away.
[Illustration: BIG TREES AT FELTON, SANTA CRUZ CO.]
Near Santa Cruz is a grove of large and beautiful redwoods, many
of the trees being over three hundred feet high and from forty
to sixty-five feet around the base of the trunk. The Giant is the
largest, and three other immense ones are named for Generals Grant,
Sherman, and Fremont. In 1846 General Fremont found this grove, and
camped, on a rainy winter night, in the hollow trunk of the tree
bearing his name. Here is also seen a group of eleven very tall trees
growing in a circle around an old stump.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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