Lumber

Being a lumberjack was a dangerous job (and still is). In those days, the trees around here were enormous. There was no way to cut these trees down using just one axe. Fellers (the men who were responsible for cutting down trees) had to stand on springboards, inserted into these giant trees above the massive undergrowth and use two-man crosscut saws.

Once the trees were felled, they had to be cut up into manageable pieces. That was the buckers' job. Even then, it was hard to move these mammoth pieces of wood. In some places, flumes were built to move the pieces of lumber in water. Like rides in amusements parks, these flumes allowed logs to ride the water down to where the mill was.

But, for really big logs, a different kind of transportation was needed. Many times, this transportation was by train, on tracks that could be moved once an area had been completely logged. Getting the giant logs onto the train cars demanded some serious heavy lifting. To do that, the loggers had to create a spar.

To make a spar, first the Hooktender (or foreman of the crew) picked a tall tree in the area where the logging was planned. Then he had to cut off the branches of the tree ("Limb" it), by having one lumberjack climb up the tree using his shoes with spikes ("caulks," pronounced "corks") and using a rope tied around him and the tree. The lumberjack slowly climbed up the tree, limbing the branches, one by one, and scooting the rope/belt up over the stumps of the limbs as he went. Once he got to the top, he had to cut off the top of the tree or "top" it. This took skills and concentration as the tree might split (squashing him as it did) if he picked the wrong place. And, after topping the tree, it would inevitably spring back from the falling top and sway back and forth in the air with him still on it.

Once the spar was created, they used the height of the spar, combined with thick cables andpulleys, run by an engine called a "donkey" to lift up heavy logs and put them on railroad cars.

Now the logs were ready to go to the sawmill.

Before Yesler's steam-powered sawmill came to Puget Sound, there were other, water-driven sawmills on the Sound. But, the steam-power of Yesler's Mill and its location on a particularly deep-water port made it (and Seattle) particularly successful.

Logs came to Yesler's mill in various ways. In the early years, the logs were skidded down what is today Yesler Way. That road would come to be called "Skid Road" and to give its name to the seedy, less respectable area of town where the mill workers and lumberjacks spent their off-hours. In later years, as the city grew and the trees came from further and further away, trees came to the mill in other ways. (See above.)

Once they arrived at the mill, they were left to float in the lagoon behind the mill. Eventually, though, the sawdust from Yesler's mill would fill in that lagoon and logs would have to wait in other places.

The logs came in to the sawmill in various states. The first thing to do was to get rid of the bark, particularly if the log had been "Skidded" since the bark would then be full of dirt that would ruin the saws of the mill. Today, machines "debark" the wood but in the 19th century, men often did that work by hand.

Inside, sawmills use round saws that turn like wheels or straight saws that go up and down, to cut the trees into long, straight pieces of lumber. Even big pieces of lumber can go through saws like these. A sawyer looks at the logs as they come in and decide how they will be cut up. In his mind, he might be seeing something like this when he looks at a log:

In the end, lots of different products come out of sawmills, including planks used to build houses, paper, and plywood.