with land, and Congress stage-managed the allotting of this land, the people’s land. It got rid of the land as fast as it could. In 1862, the Homestead Act made available millions of acres and signaled the distribution of the public domain, which was then held by the federal government, amounting to fully half the present area of the United States. The nation’s natural treasures were sacrificed to unparalleled exploitation, most notably by the railroads and the mining interests but also by the lumber barons. Timber was wanted in the mines, along the railroads, and in the new towns.
Congress sold the land, granted it, donated it, acquiesced to trespass, and then watched as it was stolen. The land was privatized on a massive scale. The wealthy were always favored, and the auctions invariably enriched the well-to-do. “Intrigue, fraud, bribery, corruption, legal chicanery, violence and murder were freely used by these ‘respectable’ and ‘patriotic’ gentlemen,’” wrote Rowan.4 The lumber barons looted the government land and Indian reservations of their timber.5 There were the settlers, of course, the farmers and ranchers who fueled the myth of the winning of the West. Some succeeded, many did not. The government would never develop a systematic way to evaluate claims under the Homestead Acts. The land offices relied on witnesses to show that a claimant had lived on the land for the required time and had made the required improvements. In practice, however, witnesses were often bribed, and collusion with land agents and speculators was virtually universal, with the pursuit of private gain prevailing. Mythology aside, speculation and monopolization were the norm, while the benefits mainly went to enriching the railroads.
In 1898, Congress set aside “Forest Reserves,” 150 million acres as National Forests, yet much of this too would fall into the hands of the lumbermen, the government selling to the highest bidders. It was estimated that Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies in the Pacific Northwest had acquired control of about four million acres of this prime timber. In 1914 the US Board of Corporations reported that “whereas three-quarters of the standing timber was publicly owned in 1870, now four-fifths were privately owned, primarily in the Pacific Northwest and California.” The government’s forest “guards,” that is, its Forest Service, would become the lumbermen’s handmaidens.
Anna Louise Strong became one of Seattle’s most powerful voices opposing the lumber barons and the financiers who stood behind them, calling them the “great titans, railway kings and lumber barons [who] seized the public’s wealth.”6 Strong was a mountaineer. She traveled from Seattle to the high glaciers of Mt. Rainier and was witness to the clearcuts, burned-over river valleys, and fishless streams that lay along the path. The IWW historian Walker Smith shared her concerns, writing, “The forest lands of the nation are being denuded,” and the result, he predicted, would be floods and droughts.7 “Where a logging company operates,” Smith wrote, the rule is that “it takes all the timber on the tract” then the brush and refuse is burned, leaving lunar landscapes and the horror of naturalists. Such destruction was not of concern, however, to Theodore Roosevelt, who claimed to be a naturalist, nor to Gifford Pinchot, his chief of the US Forest Service, himself a lumber tycoon’s heir. Both were crude utilitarians, through and through, something never lost on preservationists and aesthetes, who detected collusion with the lumbermen. Roosevelt survives in myth. Pinchot is memorialized in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southwest Washington. Yet Pinchot is also remembered for saying, “Wilderness is waste.”
The volume of timber taken from these forests and the sheer destructiveness of the loggers’ onslaught is astonishing. Why this seemingly unquenchable appetite? One reason was that in a new nation bursting at its seams the forests of the East, from Maine through the Great Lakes, were exhausted. No sense of sustainability seems to have existed, no thought given to renewal. The timber barons, like locusts moving westward, left behind ruined lands and a legacy of waste and devastation by fire. In 1900, there were 80 million acres of charred and decimated stump lands east of the Mississippi and a long history of logging. In 1871, the Peshtigo Fire killed 1,500 people and burned 1.28 million acres in northeastern Wisconsin. Ten years later, the eastern Michigan “thumb” was burned in a fire claiming 160 lives. Then, in 1885, nearly all of the Wisconsin Valley was swept by fire.
Vast areas of the Great Lakes region—some 50 million acres stretching from Lake Huron in the east to the Red River in the west in Minnesota—had been laid bare through the clearcutting techniques of the highly mechanized and efficient lumber industry. Efficient perhaps, wasteful certainly. Saws that made wide kerfs (slits left by saws), the cutting of trees to leave high stumps, and felling for roads and tracks all took their toll. Only the best trees would be taken; the rest were left to rot or burn. Sometimes the burning was intentional, sometimes a result of hot, dry summers. Fire was the curse of the forests; fire that fed on the slash, the mass of debris that piled feet-deep on the forest floor after the timber was taken out. Flames probably consumed about as much timber every year as reached the mill.8 Summertime smoke could suffocate western Washington. “The smoke from these fires,” wrote an English tourist in 1883, “for weeks and for months troubles the air and obscures the landscape.”9
The exploitation of land and people followed the “Interests” west. They reproduced the East’s squalor in the pristine Puget Sound coves and inlets and in the literally hundreds of logging camps. These were built along the shore, in the low hills of the southwest of the state, and sometimes in the high valleys that sat beneath Washington’s great line of volcanos—St. Helens, Adams, Rainier, Glacier, and Baker. This volcanic arc separated western Washington from the hot, dry “short log” pineland of the East. Everywhere the mills became sites of heavy industry, belching smoke and fire, while the great saws screamed. Then, too, came instant slums, the shacks and bunkhouses of the workers. A study conducted during the First World War found that half the logging camps in the Northwest lacked adequate bunks or showers and a third were without toilet facilities. It was a “sad travesty,” reported Rexford Tugwell, the economist who would later join Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust” after a tour of the region.10
Two Maine lumbermen, William Talbot and Andrew Pope, came to San Francisco in the aftermath of the Gold Rush seeking fortune in the western woods, before migrating north to Washington where they built a mill at Port Ludlow on the Olympic Peninsula. Soon there were mills at Seabec, Madison, Blakely, and Port Gamble (with its imitation New England village). These were all on the Sound, accessible to the new West Coast lumber schooners, ships designed with shallow drafts to cross coastal bars and navigate the tiny ports where these mills were found. The first mill towns were temporary habitations; these outposts lasted only as long as the trees did.
Seattle too had its mills, including the shingle mills of Ballard. But this would change. As the result of the development of its harbor, trade with Asia, the Alaska Gold Rush, and the opening of the Panama Canal, Seattle’s economy diversified. The mill towns, however, remained fiefdoms. The Wobblies called them “company towns.” Rowan wrote, in a description that might seem more like that of a West Virginia coal mine camp, “The entire life of the community resolved around the saw mill. The workers in the saw mills live in company-owned houses or boarded at the company boarding house. They trade at the company store; when they are sick, they go to the company hospital or are treated by the company doctor. When they are dead, they are buried in the company cemetery, and their souls are saved by the company preacher.”11 The larger towns—Tacoma, Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Chehalis, and Centralia—offered more “freedom,” but it was freedom in a savage environment occupied by guards, vigilantes, and small-town gangsters. “Everett on Port Gardner Bay took pride in the designation ‘City of Smokestacks,’” wrote the Wobbly Walker Smith, and it was from these mill towns and forests that “the lumber industry dominated the whole life of the Northwest.”12 James Hill brought his railroad first to Everett, where he promised that he and John D. Rockefeller would make the town into the Boston of the Pacific Coast. However, the Cascades produced little gold, and in 1893 the Great Northern passed Everett by to terminate in Seattle.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser was born in Germany; he came to Rock Island, Illinois, where he found work in a sawmill. In 1857 he bought the mill, then began
