Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire A Video of Logging "Back in the Day" in the Pacific Northwest

I worked for some real old timers in the bush. At Christmas time when we received our bonus we also got photo's from their early days logging, right at the time when chainsaws were starting to be used as a regular tool in the bush, or the trucks they first used.

In the interior of BC, one of the things that makes a logger is the conditioning they get, working at a high altitude makes for superior conditioning.

My Grandad worked as a logger clearing virgin timber in Polk County in east Texas and around the Big Thicket about 1900.

Mostly he used Horse and Mule teams to skid logs to roads to load on wagons. Told me of often having to tie gunny sacks over their muzzles to keep the working animals from suffocating from the dense clouds of mosquitoes in swampy River bottoms.

He and his brothers often hunted wolves with hounds from horseback while running through the open understory of the open forests where the huge crowns kept the sun from feeding the growth of saplings and underbrush.

One day his brothers horse rolled and broke his leg with the break stabbing the ground. His name was Luther and he died of gangrene while refusing to let the drs in Livingston cut his leg off.

Grandads sister raised hell with the drs for not diagnosing gangrene from the gas smell and they sent to Beaumont, the top medical center in the area at the time, for antibiotics, but they didn't arrive in time to save Uncle Luther.